0:04 - Understanding UPB
3:56 - The Framework of UPB
8:35 - Ethics and Implementation
12:51 - Ambiguous Moral Situations
18:30 - The Concept of Rights
21:56 - Responsibilities Towards Babies
24:23 - The Coma Test
28:20 - Privacy and Photography
32:13 - Examining the Ten Commandments
47:04 - Theological Language and Universal Rules
52:49 - The Complexity of Adultery
1:00:54 - Material Damage and Infidelity
1:12:40 - Understanding Emotional Damage
1:19:49 - The Complexity of Fraud
1:29:51 - Examining Deceptive Relationships
1:41:43 - Moral Theories and Their Impact
1:48:10 - The Contradiction of Rejecting UPB
1:57:21 - Measuring the Success of UPB
In this episode, I engage in a deep conversation about Universally Preferable Behavior (UPB) with a caller who aims to refine their understanding of ethics and morality. We explore foundational concepts and tackle challenging ethical dilemmas, providing listeners with insight into constructing a coherent moral framework. Our discussion begins with an overview of UPB, defining it as a systematic way to evaluate moral rules, placing them within a seven-category framework, which we then simplify in later discussions.
The caller expresses the need for clarity when discussing moral arguments, particularly when they face skepticism from others. We dissect scenarios where UPB could be put to the test, such as determining the morality of assault under various contexts. I emphasize that UPB serves as both a philosophical framework and a method to reveal inconsistencies in moral reasoning. We navigate through examples, like hypothetical situations involving threats, to illustrate how UPB can guide moral assessments.
Further into our conversation, we delve into more complex issues such as the nature of fraud, adultery, and the moral implications of rights to education and healthcare. I highlight the importance of considering the consequences of moral choices and how they affect personal and societal well-being. We discuss the distinction between personal responsibility in ethical decisions and the broader implications of these decisions on others, further reinforcing the interconnectedness of our actions and their moral evaluations.
Throughout our dialogue, we address objections to UPB and dissect the paradox of arguing against it, reinforcing its validity by demonstrating that denying UPB inevitably involves deploying its principles. This leads to a realization that truth must be universally preferable, transcending personal opinions. The conversation culminates in a reflection on the evolution of moral theories and the impact of UPB on reducing violence in society, particularly within the context of parenting. I propose that the rippling effects of applying UPB principles lead to significant decreases in interpersonal violence and contribute to healthier societal norms.
Listeners are encouraged to engage with the ideas presented, reflect on their own moral positions, and appreciate the complex interplay between ethics and everyday life. Through this intricate discussion, I aim to distill the essence of UPB and its practical implications, fostering deeper understanding and critical thought regarding moral behavior in our lives.
[0:00] So the topic I'm calling in about is UPB.
[0:05] And it's because I would like to improve my understanding. It's not like I disagree with UPB. And obviously, I think many other people would find value in this conversation. So I hope to provide value to listeners. And I also hope that it will be enjoyable for you.
[0:26] Yeah, I always love talking UPB, so I'm all ears.
[0:31] And my motivation behind this is that I get into discussions about ethics with people and about morality. And I sometimes reach a point where they bring up a point and I don't know what to say. So I started gathering the points where I bump into a wall and then I don't know what to say next. And I usually tell them that, hey, good question. I will have to come back to you on that one. And this is for whoever will be listening to the call. The sources that I used to research UPB were, of course, the book about UPB from 2007. And that's on freedomain.com slash books. Then Essential Philosophy, that's from 2018. obviously the fdrpodcast.com as a whole if you just search upb there's a lot of stuff there then in the premium section there is something um well it's it's called new upb category referring to ups or universally preferable standards that's from 2022 i also used ai.freedomain.com and this awesome series that you did called History of Philosophers. So, anything to add so far?
[1:56] I know, go for it.
[1:58] So, if I were to explain UPB to somebody who's totally new, I would say it's a system to evaluate moral rules. If somebody comes with a moral rule, UPB gives you the resources to evaluate whether that rule can be valid. So that, if if we have like if you imagine a diagram like a circle that would be all human behavior would be a big circle and then subset of that behavior would be upb and even and a smaller circle within that would be upb that's enforceable uh that's my understanding and um okay i'm getting a little bit lost here so in in the book it separates or divides uh behavior into seven categories from good aesthetically positive personally positive neutral personally negative aesthetically negative and evil so and if somebody comes up with a moral rule um the job of upb would be to place it place that rule into one of the seven categories and then uh yeah that's pretty much it would you would you agree with that uh.
[3:24] That's yeah i would say that upb is both a framework and a conclusion in that science is both the discipline of science the scientific method and valid scientific conclusions so upb is a framework but it also does uh produce the, bans on rape, theft, assault, and murder that conform to UPB. So go ahead.
[3:47] That would be like the same term in two different contexts. Maybe the second one could be called like UPB compliant rules.
[3:54] Yeah, something like that. Yeah.
[3:56] Okay. So first of all, I agree with all the conclusions, right? That's not difficult to agree with. It's like don't murder, don't steal, don't rape, don't assault. But if I were to let's say if I didn't have your book and if I was supposed to prove to somebody that this is the only valid system of ethics I wouldn't be able to do it because there are a lot of points that I simply, I don't get it, but well that's fine.
[4:35] So why don't you play a UPB skeptic and I will at least let's talk about the right point.
[4:41] I have some notes from people, like I mentioned in the beginning. You'd be skeptic um okay i don't i don't know how actually for rape how i would do that but okay i can give you an example that's different but it's some somewhere where i get stuck so let's say i was explaining to somebody that not assaulting could be universal value like i was i was basically saying yeah we can give us not yeah yeah yeah non-aggression principle this is so great because it's just it's so clear it's so simple right there are no caveats and all that and the guy told me but how about pulling a guy on uh pulling a gun on somebody like let's say you have bob and doug in a room bob pulls a gun on doug uh to like threaten him and so and because we were with the guy i was discussing this we were talking about governments if a government is required or not and his point was that well um he didn't actually in in this example no assault happened so how would this system of ethics prevent that because with the government you can create a rule that says hey don't pull a gun on somebody and don't threaten them with a gun and that's kind of it it feels very natural that doing this is a like pulling a gun on somebody is not.
[6:05] Nice like very naturally but i didn't know where to go with that so let's let's say i'm the guy So, Stef, what if there's a situation with a crazy guy that's pulling a gun on people on the street? He's not shooting, so he's not killing anyone. He's not actually firing the gun. He's just being a douchebag. So, with the government, I can prevent that because they can arrest him. So, how do you prevent this with UPP?
[6:31] Well, that's like asking how do you prevent mysticism with science? Science is a theory. It is not a force of nature, right? It's not like gravity, it doesn't enforce itself. So obviously, UPB is not a magical superhero that runs around the world making everything better for everyone. So I would just need that person to clarify what they mean by how does UPB prevent a crazy guy from pulling a gun.
[7:00] Okay. Okay. Right. And this happens a lot with people when discussing ethics that they want an explanation of how it would be implemented. That would be implemented, right?
[7:17] So, for instance, I would give the example of the singer and musician Prince. Prince injured his hips, I think, after a lifetime of crazy dancing, and he needed a hip replacement. And medicine, the science of medicine, the discipline of medicine, would tell Prince, well, you've got to go into anesthetic. We've got to open up your hip. We've got to replace your hip. So you back up, you know, whatever happens, right? Now, that's what the science of medicine would say. this is the way to deal with the fact that you're in constant pain because of your hip. But Prince was a Jehovah's Witness, and as far as I understand it, was not willing to have a blood transfusion. And so, if you're going to say, well, how would medicine get Prince, to accept a blood transfusion and get a hip replacement? Well, it can't. I mean, it's just best practices right i mean if if you are willing to go through the operation we can probably fix your hip if you're not willing to go through the operation uh then we can't right so uh again it's like how upb again it's not a force of nature it's not physics it's not uh gravity uh and so on, so i'm not sure how a moral system is supposed to prevent people from doing immoral things.
[8:35] One point are we recording.
[8:37] Uh yes okay.
[8:39] Great great because on my screen it says record i wasn't sure if it's actually doing it okay um okay uh continuing with the same example the guy was i think also asking me do you think pulling a gun on someone in that manner is, immoral like okay so one question was how would you implement this another one what do you think And is this a violation of the non-aggression principle, just pulling a gun? And I didn't know what to say to that because I started thinking and I had nothing. So, okay, am I explaining this?
[9:19] Yeah, yeah, no, I'm never sure when you finish your sentences, so I don't want to interrupt.
[9:24] Sorry, please go ahead.
[9:26] Okay so is the question is just pulling a gun on someone a violation of upb.
[9:36] So now we've gone from theory to practice, which is like going from physics to engineering. So if a physicist says gases expand when heated, and then someone says, what is the optimum amount of heat to get a hot air balloon off the ground? The physicist would say, well, no, my principle is that gases expand when heated. You're looking for maybe an engineer or something to tell you how a particular instance is, created or is optimum right i mean a physicist will tell you about gravity and resistance and so on but a physicist would probably not be the guy you'd go to to build a cheap and efficient bridge, because that would be the job of an engineer. So with UPB, it is the evaluation of the moral theories that counts. Now, the moral theory is that assault is a violation of UPB. Now, we're of course all aware that an assault that is very clear, a guy who just jumps out of the bushes and punches you in the head, that's clearly assault, right? We can agree on that. And I think the person would say yes, right?
[10:56] Yep.
[10:58] And then there are more ambiguous situations. So it could be that a guy reaches into his pocket, pulls out a gun and shoots but misses you, but it turns out that there was a tiger creeping up behind you, right? I mean, to take sort of a silly example, right? So there are situations where...
[11:24] You don't know for sure how to apply the rule. You know that assault is wrong, or assault is not UPP compliant. But then people come up with situations where assault is ambiguous. So the guy's pulled the gun out. Well, who knows what that means? I don't know what pulled the gun out means, because if he's pulling the gun out in a dark alley, that's probably not so good. But if you're at a gun show and he's pulling out the gun to show you, then that's clearly not assault, right? Or very unlikely to be.
[11:58] Assault, right? So when we say that assault is not UPB compliant, we don't also have a magic wand that allows us to deal with all potentially ambiguous situations. Right so self-defense is valid under upb but the legal definition of self-defense in every individual instance would be left to the court system to determine right there would be a trial there would be evidence that be witnesses state of mind examinations and and all of the rules of evidence and interrogation that characterize a rational court system. So, when people say, what about this specific ambiguous situation? How does UPB handle that?
[12:51] Well, it's not designed to.
[12:56] Because it is there to evaluate moral theories, not be an omniscient judge in every particular instance where it's possible that a UPB rule was violated or not. So, UPB says self-defense is valid. With ambiguous situations, I suppose it would be up to a court to determine whether self-defense was occurring or not. Yeah, so what happens is people go from the evaluation of a moral theory to an ambiguous moral situation. And then they say UPB is invalid if it cannot adjudicate ambiguous or complex moral situations. But that's an invalid use of UPB. UPB does not replace the court system. It does not replace evidence or witnesses or the clarification of how a legal standard is.
[14:03] Applied, if that makes sense. Because then you're asking for an active God, you know, who's going to tell you what is and isn't self-defense in some complex situation. And generally, the purpose of people who argue against UPB, and this is sort of an emotional thing, but it's important, is they don't like the fact that UPB has clarified moral positions. And so what they do is they throw more and more inappropriate questions at UPB until it can answer and then they say aha the theory is then limited so if we look at something like murder I mean this is why I hate using the term rape I hate using that as a moral category but it is the one, unambiguous you know moral crime so I would like where there's really no defense so with regards to something like murder, if you kill someone because you think that they're going to harm you, but it turns out they're not going to harm you, is that murder? Well, UPP can't tell you that. All it can tell you is that murder is wrong. It can give you a definition of murder, but it can't tell in every complicated instance what murder is in these circumstances and in that circumstance and so on, right? Because that's why we have courts of law to adjudicate and figure out these things, if that makes sense.
[15:31] It does make sense. And I think it gives people this sense of security that they have a government with a bunch of laws, like endless laws, and definitions of, let's say they can have a thing where, oh, pulling a gun on someone is wrong. And even though the entire system is not consistent it gives people some sense of security maybe that's why.
[15:57] Well it's just what people are used to yeah it's just what people are used to and the other thing is that most people kind of want to get along with other people and so if you start developing very unusual perspectives arguments or opinions it puts you on a little bit of a collision course with others and a lot of people don't appreciate that or and for reasons i can fully understand And they don't like that. They don't appreciate that. You know, if you're in the South, in like, say, the late 18th century, and you become an abolitionist, and slavery is immoral, which of course it is, then, you know, that puts you on a bit of a collision course with the people in your family if they happen to own slaves or something like that. So people have a very strong incentive to try and disprove moral theories or arguments that are outside the mainstream because it makes dinner parties a little uncomfortable.
[16:52] Totally yeah yeah and another example would be um when talking to someone about, moral rights as in positive rights for example a person i was talking to recently said, people have a right to an education and i said well are you claiming that you have a right to someone's labor like you can basically enslave them to to educate someone and i'm saying hey this actually uh legalizes or how to put it uh supports slavery if you say this and the person of course was like no it doesn't what are you talking about no i am saying people have a right to an education, not that slavery is okay and i said okay so can you force someone to educate then no because Because that right stops at someone else's, well, you cannot violate someone else's free will. And then I kind of have a hard time getting through this because I see a contradiction there. To me, it's obvious. But people, many times, they're like, what are you talking about? I don't know where you're coming from with this talk about slavery.
[18:11] I would take a slightly different approach to that. I mean, yours is completely valid and all that, but I prefer to start more with the personal. So, if somebody says to me, people have a right to an education, I would say, well, there are tons of uneducated people in the world. Why are you talking to me rather than educating them?
[18:29] That's a great point. Yeah.
[18:31] And then, well, I'm trying to educate you. And it's like, but you have a job, right? So, if people have a right to an education, it's like when people say, people have a right to healthcare, I'm like, well, you should become a doctor and give your services away for free. But, you know, generally people don't do that. They don't want to do that. So I think most times when people are talking about rights, they're talking about things I like. I like people getting educated. So I think that should be a right, but they don't really think things through. They don't think that rights are enforceable and so on. So, and yeah, of course, you're right i mean they would be forcing teachers to teach and that would be obviously immoral so but yeah they're just saying i like education education is a good thing so i'm gonna just say that people have a right to it because it sounds like i really care but i mean they haven't really thought it through at all right and of course who enforces that right and and if people have a right to an education i'd like to know what is an education is an education you know propagandizing children into all sorts of nonsense that is easily disprovable? Or is it government education? What is an education? That's always, I mean, that's a big sort of foundational question.
[19:52] Yeah and then i usually get into the discussion in general about positive moral rights and i say hey this is not just about education but any claim where you um are trying to like force someone to do something like it there's this entire category and then usually the person thinks a little bit and then they come up with something like how about kids how about babies they they are born and are you saying that nobody should take like we're not obligated to take care of babies so how would you respond to that.
[20:25] Are we obligated to take care of babies well no nobody is obligated to take care of a baby but you when you keep a baby in your house then there is a presumed standard of care if you don't want to take care of your baby then you need to drop the baby off with someone an authority or someone like that, you need to drop your baby off so that someone can take care of the baby.
[20:52] But if you have a baby in your house, if you don't take care of the baby, the baby dies. And in that way, you would be responsible for the death of the baby. In the same way that if I lock some guy in my basement and don't give him food or water, he dies. And I would be then responsible for his death. I would be a murderer because babies are in the house. And when babies are in the house, everybody assumes that the people in the house are taking care of the babies. And therefore, the baby's taken care of. If people are not taking care of the baby, then they are causing the death of the baby because everybody knows that babies need care taking in order to survive. So it would be the same as kidnapping someone and depriving them of food and water. You'd be responsible for killing that person and you'd be responsible for killing the baby. And if you don't want to take care of your baby, then you need to drop the baby off at some, you know, these days you can drop your baby off or your children really at fire stations and police stations and various places where they'll be taken in and taken care of.
[21:56] Right i totally understand i'm just gonna be the devil's advocate a little bit let's say a woman gives birth and it's not in her like she's not keeping the baby in her house but it's in some i don't know empty house somewhere and she leaves um that it's not even her house it's i don't know she broke in somewhere into an empty house um would that so so she's not keeping the baby in her house and neither is she taking care i don't.
[22:29] Understand why the location of the baby is important if the woman.
[22:33] Is taking care of it's not like a kidnapping um it's not the same i mean.
[22:39] Look let's let's say that i take some guy and i i i chain him to a tree in the middle of nowhere and he starves to death have i killed him.
[22:46] Yes yeah.
[22:49] So that's the same if the baby is taken into some remote location and the woman abandons the baby there and doesn't tell anyone that the baby's there, the baby's going to die, so she's caused the baby's death. Right. It doesn't have to be in the house, right?
[23:02] Yeah, maybe if I had that conversation, now I would add that she, brought the baby into existence by getting pregnant with somebody, so that's kind of like, well, it's not the same as kidnapping, but the the person is dependent and she caused the existence of that baby that new person so in that way it's it's kind of similar.
[23:30] Yeah, I mean, everybody who gets killed was brought into existence by someone. So, yes, life is the prerequisite for being killed. I fully accept that. So a woman who creates life and then kills the life is responsible for the death of the baby.
[23:47] Right.
[23:48] And she's also, I assume, if she gave birth in a hospital or something like that, if she had said, I have no intention of taking care of this baby, then they would not let her leave but the baby, right? So I assume that she also got out of the, wherever she gave birth, a hospital or whatever, she got out of there by not being honest about her intentions with the baby. So there's a kind of fraud element involved in that as well.
[24:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And related to positive versus negative rights, there is this thing called coma test in the book.
[24:19] Oh, coma, yeah, coma test.
[24:22] Coma, am I pronouncing it correctly?
[24:23] I think you said coma, which is a little different, but I think people get the idea, yeah.
[24:27] Yep. So I was thinking, I get the comatist, I'm just thinking, why is it relevant to ethics? For example, so a guy in a coma doesn't have consciousness, just like, I don't know, a rock doesn't have consciousness.
[24:51] Well, not just like that, because a rock cannot return to consciousness, but someone in a coma can.
[24:57] Oh okay so that's the difference that.
[24:59] Well no it's just a difference i mean it's not essential to the argument but it's not the same as a rock i mean a rock doesn't need to be kept alive right but somebody in a coma does.
[25:11] Yeah that's true i was yeah i was thinking but how is it how is someone who is at that moment does not have consciousness how is that relevant to ethics in any way let's what does it prove or disprove i i don't get that um.
[25:25] Sorry i'm still not sure if you finished your sentence yeah you go um sorry that's fine sorry yes so yeah so the coma test is a good test for positive ethics so if people say uh we must help the poor right then we would say is a guy in a coma immoral can he be immoral well no because he's just kind of passive right he's not doing anything. So he's not helping the poor and that he's not immoral. So if you have a positive obligation, then a guy in a coma is immoral for not fulfilling your positive obligation.
[26:10] What if they would say yeah he's immoral.
[26:13] Okay then i would like to have more understanding about how um a guy in a coma is doing evil because he's not really doing anything so evil is inactivity so when you go to sleep you're immoral if you take a nap you're immoral if you just sit on the couch you're immoral uh so so and not non-activity is immoral and i would just like to hear the general justification of that.
[26:37] Yeah because then the person would have to say every time they are not following the rule like sleeping so even though they're not in a coma but they're sleeping.
[26:46] So the other thing too is that if you're going to say that a person who is unconscious is immoral.
[26:55] Then you'd also have to say why doing something moral requires that you be immoral first so let's say that helping the poor is moral. Well, nobody can help the poor 24 hours a day because you need rest, right? You need to sleep. So then you're moral when you're helping the poor, but then when you rest and sleep, you're evil and you can't be moral in any sustained fashion because you keep having to interrupt. Let's say you help the poor 16 hours a day, but then you need to sleep for eight hours. So then you can't maintain your morality because helping the poor, I guess, 16 hours a day, you're moral. But then, you see, you go to sleep. And when you go to sleep, you're immoral, you're evil. But evil is required because you have to sleep in order to help the poor for 16 hours the next day or whatever, right? So, or let's say you, I don't know, you fall down the stairs, you break your leg, you can't help the poor for a while, then you go, you become evil. So it seems to me that you can't have to be evil in order to do good. That wouldn't make much, much sense at all. And so given that everybody needs to sleep, you know, hopefully eight hours a day, then that would be a moral definition that you have to be evil for eight hours a day in order to do good for 16 hours a day. and that would seem a little contradictory. Like how could it be necessary that you be evil in order to do good?
[28:21] Makes sense. Yeah, great answer. I have another example of something that I couldn't answer, which was taking a photo of someone without their permission. And this was referring to a situation like a creepy guy hidden somewhere in a female bathroom, taking pictures, taking photos. And i was like okay i have nothing because i thought well it's not assault it's not murder it's not rape but still like in this society that we have probably this i assume this is illegal and again it might be similar to the situation we discussed earlier with pulling a gun but still i didn't know how to handle that how would you handle it.
[29:05] Sure it's a good question so my first sort of parsed it would be that you own yourself and therefore you own representations of yourself to some degree right so if if I'm a supermodel then people can't use my image to promote their makeup brand without my permission because I own myself and therefore the people who are taking pictures of me.
[29:34] Are doing so without my permission they are taking that which i have grown built and maintained which is sort of my body my face or whatever they are taking images of that without my permission so they are in a sense stealing the images of that which i have uh created so uh however if they're not taking a picture of me in particular right let's just say i'm in the back they're at the beach and they're taking a picture of their wife and i just happen to be walking past in the background. I mean, given the ubiquity of photos these days, everybody exists scattered in everybody else's photo album, but they don't particularly care, right? And so they're not taking a picture of you. You just happen to be in a picture that they're taking of someone else. And so if I'm walking around and somebody takes a picture of a building and I happen to be walking in front of the building, they're taking a picture of the building and I don't have that reasonable expectation of privacy and never having anybody take any photo of me if I'm out there in public and everyone's got their cell phones and so on. However, if you are in a toilet, then you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
[30:47] And that's why they have doors and locks and so on, right? So if somebody takes a picture of you in the toilet, then they are violating your privacy, which is uh assumed by common convention and also assumed by the fact that you're in a uh well a private store with the door closed and locked and you're in a situation of undress and so on right.
[31:10] Yeah you yeah the point that you made at the beginning was crucial i believe the that you own yourself and then that extends beyond your physical body to products of your body and a photo could be in some situations one of them yeah.
[31:28] Well and yeah so if if there's some you know biff rock solid ab guy who's worked for you know five years to get perfect abs and then what happens is somebody takes a picture of his abs and then says my five-day miracle potion will give you these abs uh obviously it's kind of a fraud and you're you're taking somebody else's labor which is the apps which they've worked hard to produce and using it without their their permission if that makes sense.
[31:57] It does yeah, I have another sort of an exercise that, I don't know if it's relevant, but it's 10 commandments and running them through UPB. Would you like to do that?
[32:13] Could be of value. I did already an examination of 10 commandments with Dr. Duke Pesta many years ago, but we could certainly have a look at these for sure.
[32:22] Okay. I'm going to go not in the general usual order. I'm going to do the easy ones first. so thou shall not steal it's i think the easiest because it's the same pretty much upb compliant i would say a big so can everyone at uh in all places in all times not steal from each other yes and then if well and the act of stealing like.
[32:51] If you say theft is upb then you destroy the concept it's a self-contradictory self-destroying argument it because theft is the unwanted taking of property so if you say everybody should want to steal and be stolen from but if you want to be stolen from and you want people to take your property it's not theft so the category completely vanishes when it's universalized and that's how you know it's invalid.
[33:11] Exactly yeah so that's the easiest one i think and it's upb compliant then thou shall not kill is not that clear because because of how it's written if it was thou shall not murder it would be equally clear but kill could mean in self-defense but i how it's generally understood i believe in our society is that it's thou shall not murder on wikipedia at least i found it as thou shall not kill so but if you if we assume it's it means murder then it's the same yeah yeah and then everything else is more complicated um so thou shall not commit adultery, I was thinking how that relates to UPB, because you could say it's a violation of a contract, in a sense. There is no force involved, but it's inadultery.
[34:13] No, but there's fraud. Yeah.
[34:17] Right. Fraud.
[34:18] Right. Because you say, I'm not going to commit adultery, and that's the basis of the marriage. You know, like if you ship me $500, and I'm supposed to ship you an iPad, but I don't ship you the iPad, I haven't held a gun to you, but I've defrauded you, right?
[34:31] Yeah.
[34:33] So, adultery would be aesthetically negative behavior, and it would be in the category of fraud.
[34:42] Okay okay does that mean that the rule um thou shall not commit adultery would not be um like it would be in the it would not be sorry um.
[34:55] So there's fraud that would have material, aspects to it right some some guy defrauds you out of a million dollars right so that's that's a form of theft through deception right yeah now the problem of course with adultery is because it's generally based on lust it doesn't have the same monetary attachment to it, because it is not done for purposes of stealing money it is done for purposes of satisfying carnal lust right, yeah so it doesn't have sort of specific monetary damages and it is not done with the intent of stripping people of their property and resources.
[35:39] Could would it be moral to use force to prevent adultery.
[35:49] No you.
[35:51] Can prevent someone from committing murder by for like using force because you're not the one initiating, like a third person stopping a murder. But adultery probably not.
[36:06] Yeah, I mean, I think everyone's instinct is that you can't use force to prevent adultery.
[36:13] Right uh this yeah this one is much more difficult than the previous two at least in my mind it's very confusing um where to where to place it.
[36:27] Yeah yeah no i uh i agree with that um, so i would say that you know can can i use uh let's say you send me 500 i'm supposed to send you an ipad and i don't send you the ipad can someone use force to get me to send the ipad, well kind of in a way they can because you know if you take me to the cops or you sue me or whatever then i may have to kick up or cough up that money if that makes sense or cough up yeah i need to return your money or or um give the ipad or something like.
[37:03] Theft in that in that case.
[37:05] Right um it's.
[37:09] Like a complicated case of theft.
[37:12] Yeah so with the adultery the two people who are choosing to commit the adultery are obviously doing so of their own free will the person though who's the most harmed let's say it's bob alice and sally bob has an affair with alice sally is his wife the problem is that he is unilaterally rewriting the marital contract without telling his wife. He is now because he married her on the assuming that they married on the grounds of fidelity, right, of monogamy and now he is rewriting that and he is.
[37:49] Saying, I am now opening up the marriage without telling you.
[37:56] And that would nullify the contract that he has with his wife, because now he's fraudulently acting, which is why if she wants to leave him, she can take a bunch of his stuff, because he has violated the contract. So the force would be not to prevent Bob from sleeping with Alice when Sally is his wife I think the force would be if his wife Sally decides to leave him and you know take half the house or whatever it is right then you could use force to ensure that happened the other thing too is that if you're using if you're if you're in the presence let's say you're Bob's friend and Bob is going to go sleep with Alice and you know for some reason you know he's going to go and sleep with Alice and you're standing there trying to stop him from going in, right? I don't think you'd need to use force because what you would do is not say to Bob I'm going to beat you up if you go in and sleep with Alice. You would say I know you're going to go and sleep with alice if you go in there i'm calling your wife i am revealing your breaking of the contract with your wife i'm going to reveal that to her directly and right away if that makes sense.
[39:23] It does yeah okay, okay let's uh try the next one thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor is the full.
[39:42] Yeah that generally refers to lying in a matter of legal importance or you know significant moral importance and yeah of course i think that you should try and you should you should work to tell the truth and particularly when you're under oath right if you've sworn to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth then you are obligated to to do that.
[40:00] Right in that sense if you're under oath in some legal proceeding that would again be in the category if you break it you're breaking the contract, um so again.
[40:15] Well if you want to tell the truth then you have to tell the truth, i mean because otherwise yeah because fraud is based upon lying right i mean if you're going to send me the 500 bucks and i say i'm going to send you the ipad if you knew i was lying then you wouldn't send me the 500 bucks right.
[40:33] Yeah yeah true true.
[40:36] So that makes so yeah i mean if you obtain other people's property through fraud then you are in unjust possession of their property.
[40:51] Makes sense yeah uh then there are two i would say easy ones thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife and thou shall not covet thy neighbor's house and other stuff um so that's coveting is, is something internal that's not an action that's a like emotion or how to put it desire so it's uh upb does not deal with that upb deals with um actions would that be.
[41:20] Yeah i mean this is good advice so um affairs like sort of to use the previous example affairs don't just kind of pop out of nowhere affairs are the result of a whole series of steps usually right like you're attracted to someone you linger around their desk you make jokes you laugh you touch their shoulder you know It's a whole series of things that step-by-step will lead you into that place where you end up sleeping with someone, right? You go on a business trip, you have dinner, she wants to show you something in the hotel room. So it's step-by-step that leads you to that kind of sin. And I think that the purpose of thou shalt not covet is the prevention of sin. And, I mean, that's good, right? But prevention of sin is, you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? So the prevention of a sin is more valuable than somehow overcoming a sin, right? So if you take alcohol for the first time and you're like, oh my gosh, this is like the greatest thing ever, right? Then it's probably wise for you to never touch alcohol again because it's a lot easier to quit after your first drink than after your 10 000th drink so this is around the prevention of sin and i think it's very very good advice.
[42:46] Definitely then honor sorry honor thy father and thy mother, so i don't know what they actually meant by that but it could mean something internal like an emotion that you it's an attitude or, if it means obey thy mother and thy father that would be invalid through UPB because it's a positive obligation, but if it's just some kind of your internal in your mind attitude then same as the previous two examples it's outside of UPB because UPB deals with actions yeah it's an internal state, then remember the sabbath day to keep it holy aka don't don't work on sunday would be a simplified way of putting it so i was thinking okay so not working on sunday could be like it's universal, um but now it's not in not in time well like you can't say.
[43:57] It's universal except for.
[43:58] This part where it's not universal. So in terms of space, it's universal, but not in terms of time. So it doesn't make sense from that perspective. If the rule were to be universal, it would have to be don't work, not just on Sunday.
[44:12] Right? Well, and don't work, which means don't do labor, would be self-defeating because whoever wrote down don't work would have worked to write down don't work. So it would be a self-defeating argument.
[44:27] Uh-huh. yeah agreed then the remaining two are actually the first two so thou shall not take the name of the lord thy god in vain so that's has to do with saying stuff which again you there can be a guy on an empty island saying stuff and it doesn't impact um other people that's okay but i don't know if that's.
[44:54] Well in a theological context this would be somewhat akin to i mean we have free speech except for the direct incitement to violence right like if if there's a crowd that's following your every word and you whip the crowd up into a frenzy and then you say to the crowd you know go kill that guy and and they go kill that guy then you know the people who murdered have murdered but you've also incited violence so there are limitations on free speech the example that's often cited is you know shouting fire in a crowded theater right so, um that that of course has never actually happened but nonetheless that is uh, something that um that works right so, I would say this falls into the category, of harm so if in the theological context taking the Lord's name in vain right if taking the Lord's name in vain, is destructive to your soul or if you do it in public is harmful to other people's souls because they might.
[46:16] Harm themselves or harm you would harm yourself and you might harm others through spreading that so if you look at taking the knowledge name in vain puts you in an eternity of hell if that makes sense.
[46:30] Okay.
[46:32] And so if taking the Lord's name in vain puts you in an eternity of hell, and if you spread that habit, other people go to an eternity of hell, then, you know, an eternity of hell is worse than any mortal crime, right?
[46:46] Right.
[46:47] So in the theological context, I would put it along those lines, if that makes sense.
[46:51] Yeah, but purely through UPB, which category would it be put in outside of theology?
[47:04] Oh, free speech.
[47:10] Right because if you had a rule that said thou shalt not take the name of the lord thy god in vain, you're saying that you can prevent somebody from saying that you could enforce let's say somebody is saying something that would, pass that would fit into this category and that you can use force to stop that person right the kind of like uh it would legalize assault in a sense okay am i am i making any sense right now can.
[47:46] You just try that again.
[47:47] Okay so let's say i'm the guy that proposes this rule i say thou shall not take the name of the lord thy god in vain which is a restriction on what people can say so you cannot say x is what i'm doing um you cannot say x okay so is it universal yeah like all places um all time that's true um and then is it about behavior yes so, I'm having a hard time.
[48:23] No, no, these shouldn't be simple things to solve. So I understand that and I appreciate the difficulty. I really, I mean, I love watching people think about philosophy, so I don't want to interrupt you. So feel free to reason away.
[48:37] I think I have it. So because then I'm putting myself in a category where I can restrict someone else's behavior, but the other person could do the same to me with saying something else it's almost like as if i'm creating a second class citizen of the other person right and i'm putting myself into the first class citizen category and i'm restricting his behavior because then he can do that same to me or he can say you are not able to say anything like you have to shut up 100 of the time because he will say thou shall not say anything right and that's also universal and it's about behavior but it um cancels each other out that way yeah okay.
[49:28] So i i would take a slightly different approach and the way that you're working is is great to me but uh i would take a slightly different approach because one of the challenges with theological language is that it seems vivid because i mean I was raised a Christian, and so it seems vivid, and a sort of Ten Commandments thing seems vivid. So what I would do is I would abstract this and try and take it, sort of make it less personal and less historical. And so I would say something like this. I would say, okay, so the statement is, thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain, right? And then I would say...
[50:06] Sorry, can you repeat that? Because the connection dropped for like two seconds.
[50:09] So the statement is, thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain, right? That's the commandment. Okay, so then I would say, I would take a two-prong approach, which may work or may not. We'll just follow the path and see how it goes. So the first thing that I would say is, how many lords are there in the world? How many gods do human beings believe in?
[50:38] And the answer to that, of course, would be, I mean, give or take, there's about 10,000 gods that people believe in. Do they all have a name? Yes, they all have a name. So why would one person's god be automatically superior and valid relative to everyone else's gods if that makes sense right and this is a standard argument of of atheist skepticism but from a upb standpoint it's it's important so then we would say well no but my god is is real and true right and then we would say as philosophers we would say okay uh lovely uh boy if you can prove God, that would make, I mean, the idea that I could live forever and spend in eternity with my wife and child when they die, when I die, it's pretty, pretty nice, right?
[51:24] So, I would say, they say, well, my God is the one true God. And I would say, okay, great, then let's prove that, right? And then they would, basically, we don't have to go through all, they would look at writings, but, you know, all religions have writings. They say, well, but there were these miracles well there's lots of gods that proclaim miracles like so so then you would go through the process and eventually it would come down to things people should obey that which i cannot prove right that would be a at least you can't prove it scientifically and objectively right yeah and so if the principle is things should obey that which i cannot prove can that be is that principle you you be compliant because.
[52:16] There's the i in that statement it's not universal.
[52:20] Right yeah so so if the statement is everybody has to obey that which i cannot prove it cannot be universalized because everyone has that right so if you say well you have to obey x that i cannot prove then somebody would say well i you have to obey the opposite of x that i cannot prove it all just cancels each other out and therefore it cannot be a universal rule because it cannot be achieved by everyone all the time.
[52:50] Right right yeah this one is difficult and i i remember now i encountered one situation where i totally failed to argue my way out of it um it was somebody studying law and and they had an equivalent of this and i i came up with nothing in that situation now i remember it yeah no and listen.
[53:13] Just please understand, it happens to everyone. I'm only about 80% satisfied with the answer about adultery, because we have an instinct, which, you know, is an important place to start from. Like we have an instinct that murder is wrong, and that's an important place to start from. We have an instinct that you should not use violence to prevent adultery.
[53:34] And I think we all have a strong instinct about that, that you can't shoot a guy who's going to go and sleep with a mistress right and uh but and so i'm only and i think a lot of that is because, you don't know the circumstances right so if some guy's going to go and sleep with his mistress, maybe his wife is divorcing him uh maybe she has agreed to this you know like there's lots of the sort of typical french situation i think mitteron had this old french premiere where he had his wife and then he had his mistress and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So, you don't know the circumstances. Because you don't know the circumstances, somebody's just going in to sleep with someone, which clearly is not a violation of the non-aggression principle, assuming, of course, both parties are voluntarily willing to do this, right? So, a guy is going in to sleep with a woman. That's not a violation of UPB. Now, it could be a violation of his marriage of hours and so on but in that moment right you don't need violence because and sorry i just wanted to revisit this i think we got 80 of the way there because this is hard to puzzle right at least for me maybe it's easier for other people but so bob's going into sleep with alice he's married to.
[54:53] Um susan right so you're standing there saying to bob don't go in and sleep with alice you're married to susan and he says no no she's left me it's all over she's divorcing me and i've been dying to sleep with Alice and she wants to sleep with me in which case it's all voluntary right it may be unsavory but it's all voluntary right it's like a strip club yes it's unsavory but assuming that there's no force or whatever it is then so now if if you get on the phone let's say you say I don't believe you I think that Susan is like your wife is not leaving you I think you're just telling me that to get me out of the way and then you say I'm going to call Susan right now If he's like, no, no, no, you can't call Susan, right, then he's probably lying and so on. So.
[55:39] I have an idea about how to handle this.
[55:41] Well, no, sorry. If you do call Susan, he's not going to go in and sleep with Alice anyway, because his whole life just got blown up. It's probably going to be a bit of a boner killer, right? So, so there's ways to handle it so that if it is fraud, it doesn't occur, but you don't have enough information when you just see Bob going in and you think he's going to go sleep with Alice. You don't know. I mean, I don't know. What is he grabbing? Is he holding a bag of Viagra pills? And I don't know. Like you just, you don't have enough information to initiate the use of force to prevent bob from sleeping with alice and if you do try and get all of the information and bob knows about it sleeping with alice isn't going to happen because he's going to you know his whole affair is going to be revealed and and if susan doesn't know she's going to hit the roof and and you know so he's going to have to go deal with that so so there's ways just by telling the truth there's ways to deal with the whole sleeping with others if that makes sense.
[56:33] It does but i have uh another approach uh maybe how to answer this question that just popped into my mind so um let's say so this fits into a bigger category do not commit fraud we could replace it adulterer with fraud because it's breaking some contract yeah and my answer now would be upb says do not commit fraud but it doesn't answer the question of how to deal with the consequences of fraud that has to be included in the contract right so let's say the the marriage contract could include hey if you commit adultery uh you lose like the entire property that's within that marriage you lose access to it oh people even have contracts.
[57:20] Like if you gain more than 20 pounds.
[57:24] The marriage is over right so from upb perspective you could then say the the results of that contract like the contract is enforceable um but uh it doesn't like upb itself does not answer the question of uh the consequences of fraud it would just say whatever is so you would have to have a clause in that contract that answers. So let's say UPB does not answer that.
[57:54] Yeah, but if the contract specifies it, Like, let's say that you have a contract that says, if a friend of mine knows that I'm going to go and sleep with someone outside the marriage, they're empowered to tackle me to the ground and tie me up. Well, okay, that's in the contract that you're not initiating force. And there is, of course, I mean, it's a very interesting spectrum. It's more around theory of law than moral philosophy, but there's a whole spectrum around like, what is fraud and so on, right? Like if a woman pretends to be younger than she is through makeup, is she defrauding a man who dates her for her fertility? If a man pretends to be wealthier than he is through a variety of mechanisms, is he, there's a whole lot of sort of soft, quote, fraud, manipulation, misdirection, all of this kind of stuff. Like when you're in a job interview and they say, well, why did you leave your last job, right? And let's say you minimize whatever might have happened. Maybe you did something wrong or whatever. Say, well, you know, we just did. Is that fraud?
[59:01] It's really an interesting and complicated situation. UBB says, of course, that fraud is not good. Fraud can't be good because everyone can't be lying to and wanting to be lied to. because then it's not fraud anymore. So fraud can't be good, but fraud is a sort of special category because fraud usually, I mean, rape, theft, assault, and murder are all involving physical damage three and the stealing of somebody's time with theft. Fraud, if it is a soft theft, like you're taking the 500 bucks with no intent of shipping the iPad, that's straight up theft. But there are a whole lot of gray areas when it comes to fraud.
[59:48] Misdirection or, you know, putting, I mean, if you, um, if you go out on a date, I mean, it's a hot date or whatever, then you're going to, shave really nicely. You might get a fresh haircut and you'll dress to the nines. You put on a little aftershave or whatever people like these days and you're putting your best foot forward. Now, if you get married, you're not going to do that every day, probably, right? Not going to get a haircut and shave perfectly every day, right? So it's sort of dress suit to sweatpants kind of thing, right? So you're putting your best foot forward and, you know, if you're having a job interview, then you're going to show up 20 minutes early, but you're not going to show up to work 20 minutes early, right? You might in fact be late sometimes, right? So you generally put your best foot forward. Is that fraud or is that just wanting to make a good impression? You know, it's all very sort of interesting from a philosophical standpoint, but where it generally turns into legal matters is when there is objective and clear material damage, right?
[1:00:55] You send me the 500 bucks. I don't send you the iPad. You're out 500 bucks, like clear, right?
[1:01:00] And the problem with infidelity is what is the clear material damage? It's optional. Now there is, and I think Robin Williams got sued for this back in the day. There is clear objective damage if Bob goes and sleeps with Alice and then brings back home to his wife.
[1:01:21] Herpes or some other sort of sexually transmitted disease, then he has assaulted her, right? Because he has defrauded her. He's sleeping with another woman and therefore he got an STD and he passed it to his wife. And so, and you can get sued, at least you used to back in the day for that kind of stuff. And you know, that makes perfect sense to me because you basically turned your dick into a bioweapon and it's made somebody sick. And with herpes, it's, I don't know, it's pretty permanent, right so so there are times when it's clear material damage um if bob's wife has a business, and bob um has a credit card on that business and then bob goes and puts a lot of non-business related expensive on the expenses on that credit card then um well that's fraud because they're supposed to be for business expenses and there's legal risks involved and all of that so yeah so that that all sort of makes makes sense but if he just goes and sleep with someone there's emotional damage maybe maybe see here's the thing i mean some people's marriages i mean you've heard some of the call-in shows man some people's marriage is pretty pretty atypical right so there's you know let's say that the woman has um she really she really loves the guy but she has some physical issue where she can't have sex for whatever reason. And so she says, okay, listen, stay clean.
[1:02:51] But, you know, I want to stay married to you, but I can't give you sex. We love each other. Go have a mistress. I mean, we could think of a variety of reasons where that could be, that could be the case.
[1:03:07] So infidelity is tricky, even if the woman doesn't know about it and is emotionally hurt by it. She might choose to stay in the marriage for the sake of the children, right? And this could happen, of course, with men or women, where the typical example is the man wants to sleep around and the woman is like, okay, fine, you can have your side hussies as long as I'm the one you come home to every night and you keep paying the bills. So that's a kind of de facto arrangement, even if it's never spoken about. So if somebody punches me in the face, the damage to my face is not optional. If somebody has an affair, the end of the marriage still remains a choice. You can choose to work it out. You can choose to look it over. You can choose to even discuss it and make it a sort of frank part of the marriage, if that makes sense.
[1:03:56] So it is quite, it's quite complicated and, uh, it's not objective and there's not usually outside of STDs and things like that.
[1:04:06] There is not, um, material damage that is quantifiable. Emotional damage. I don't know. It's really tough, you know, pain and suffering, that kind of stuff. It's really tough to figure that, that kind of stuff out. So that generally is not you know i'm upset you know give me x amount of dollars it's not usually something that courts can handle you can get pain and suffering but it has to be in conjunction with something that's more objective because otherwise you know just about anybody anybody could complain about pain and suffering and sue and get money and and that would be far too open to abuse if that makes sense so mere pain and suffering is usually not something that would be legally actionable i think i don't know i'm obviously no lawyer in the present but in sort of the future or if a free society just being upset would not be actionable because it's not quantifiable it's not objective and so on and so if there's monetary damages you could include pain and suffering but there has to be some underlying objective damage in order for there to be clear fraud and quantifiable and and measurable and so on right which is why i guess your point is if it's not put into the contract initially right it's not put into the marriage contract or the prenup or whatever then uh simply being upset is not enough to say uh violence uh should be done against against that right does that sort of make sense.
[1:05:31] It does make sense. And yeah, I can see now how much more complicated fraud is than the other four rules.
[1:05:39] Right, right. No, fraud is notoriously challenging. You know, there are, I think it was in England, there were women who sort of tried to get a movement going where, let's say a guy shows up to a bar in a pilot's outfit. And he claims to be a pilot and a woman sleeps with him it turns out he's not a pilot he just basically has a friend who's a pilot or he rented the costume or something like that or let's say a guy comes to pick up a woman in a very expensive sports car and it turns out you know after she spends the weekend with him it turns out he's actually kind of broke it's his friend's sports car and he's like well i never told you directly that it was mine or i said it's my sports car but I meant it's mine for the weekend. Like, you know, all of this kind of stuff. And there was a guy, I don't know if this is an urban myth or not, but there was a guy in China who married what he thought was a beautiful woman. And he then had very ugly children. And it turned out that the woman had had massive amounts of plastic surgery. And of course, as you know, plastic surgery does not change the genes doesn't change the genetics so what does this mean?
[1:06:57] Because, you know, one of the reasons that men choose beautiful women is not just for the pleasure of looking at beautiful women, but also because it gives their children a significant advantage in life because attractive people just generally are more successful and make more money and are generally more positively perceived and so on, right? So is that a kind of fraud let's say a woman has a giant nose and has plastic surgery to reduce her nose and then never tells her husband and then the kids are born with these giant noses which can't be corrected until what mid-teens that's generally i don't know if and when but that's generally when you see it happening so you know then the the dad has to put up with his kids being called uh you know big nose or hey your nose was on time but you were five minutes late all of that stuff through their childhood right so uh and if he knew how big the woman's nose was he might not want to uh to marry her right so there's a lot i mean people do this as well sorry the last sort of example now this is why fraud is very interesting to me is that let's say that um you have a really crazy family and you bring some woman over but your family pretends to be sane you know no seriously I mean, it's a very big issue, right? They pretend to be sane, they're positive, they're jovial, they're joking, they completely clean up the house and all of that.
[1:08:20] And, you know, I mean, is that fraud? Because then you might marry into that family and then their true stripes come out and they're crazy and so on, right? Is it fraud if you are a slender woman, you get married? Married i mean i had a friend many years ago he married when he married his wife was 110 pounds and when they divorced she was over 300 pounds well so ah you know it's uh it's it's a tricky situation it's a very tricky situation um i do think that in um in and also here's another thing that happened sorry this is an interesting one as well i don't know if you've heard of this but, If you ever talk to a priest who does premarital counseling, or anyone who does premarital counseling, but often it's a priest, and you say to the priest, hey, what's the most common thing you see coming up in these premarital counselings? And what he will often say is, well, what comes up is crazy amounts of debt that one party has not disclosed to the other. Now, if you date a woman and you've been dating for a year, you want to get married and so on. And let's say you get married and sometimes it shows up after marriage when.
[1:09:42] That's horrible.
[1:09:43] Yeah, sometimes it can show up after marriage. Is that a fraud? Well, I think it is. I think that's straight up fraud. Because if a woman is $100,000 in debt, doesn't tell the man and then somehow he becomes responsible for half the debt or something like that, that is really predatory. So, yeah, but what about before they get married, before he's legally maybe perhaps responsible for some portion of the debt? What then? Let's say he wouldn't have dated her for a year or two if he knew about the debt, but let's say he did date her for a year or two, invested all of that time and money, and then he finds out about the debt before they get married. Is that fraud? I mean, these are all, you know, let's say that there's a guy who is a serious drinker, but for the first couple of months, he pretends he doesn't drink that much. Like maybe he'll go on the date, white knuckle his way through only one or two drinks and then go home and pound back a 12 pack or something, right? So he hides that he drinks or he hides that he smokes or he hides that he does drugs or something like that. Is that fraud? I mean, it's all very interesting and complicated. Or let's say that a man says to a woman, she says, listen, I'm dating seriously for marriage. So if you're not interested in marriage, then tell me and I won't waste my time, right?
[1:11:00] And let's say that he has no intention of getting married, but he says that he does because he was the dater. Is that fraud? Well, again, these things are very, I changed my mind. It's hard to prove. It's not like he wrote this down in some nefarious fiery journal or something like that. So there is, and of course, you've heard this a million times in call-in shows when I talk to people and say, well, what were the red flags? Because, you know, a lot of times people will claim to be victims when it turns out that they're not in fact victims because there were red flags everywhere when they were heading in and that's tough for people right so yeah it is.
[1:11:37] Uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's tough. What about a woman who says to a man, I want to have kids. And he's like, ah, I don't really want to have kids and not sold on it. And then she starts dating him, hoping to change his mind. Right. Well, that's a conditional, right. And, and if, but if, but she doesn't say, if you never want to have kids, I'm not going to stay with you, but she goes in trying to change his mind. Is that a kind of fraud? Because she's there under false pretenses so it's it's quite complicated uh and so to me because of the complicated nature of fraud there has to be clear objective damages right like if if you uh don't send the ipad when someone sends you the 500 bucks that's clear it's like 500 bucks never got the ipad and it's objective so or or if it's spelled out in the contract but this other stuff it's so kind of, It's goopy and complicated and so many edge cases that I think the law can't really deal with that kind of stuff. The law can deal with that which can be objectively proven.
[1:12:41] And there's not much in human relationships that can be objectively proven in that way.
[1:12:46] Wow yeah i never realized it's an entire universe of fraud all these categories yeah i did.
[1:12:52] I haven't so much deception in human life yeah i mean just look at these you know i mean just a stupid example like if you wear glasses every time you go to pick up your glasses there are all these absolutely beautiful people staring down at you on the wall with their glasses on right.
[1:13:09] Because they're like and of course in shops yeah everybody knows that you don't put your glasses on and look like that guy but nonetheless that is uh they they program that because it makes you feel that way you know or you see these guys uh uh selling beer right they're selling beer they all have six packs and and all of that right and it's like no most people who drink beer do not have six packs and certainly drinking beer will not give you a six pack so uh but you know there's all of this misdirection and all of this you know every time you see a uh a food commercial you know they've used weird glues to hold the food in place and make it look a whole lot better than it actually is i remember the first time after i saw commercials for a big mac i remember the first time i actually opened up the box i'm like what the hell is this driven over roadkill doesn't look like anything yeah like what i've seen uh so yeah there's just a lot of that kind of stuff as a whole and i mean you can't police it all obviously i would rather people be more direct and honest and not manipulative in their ways of communicating but i'm you know that's not about to vanish from the world. So anyway, yeah, that's why I think that the issue of infidelity.
[1:14:20] Is not something you can use force in because you just, you don't have the information and there's ways to prevent the infidelity, which is to inform the wife. There's ways to prevent the infidelity without using force. And if there's a way to do something without using force, that should always be preferable to using force.
[1:14:41] Right yeah yeah um i just wanted to check in uh how has been this conversation for you so far are you enjoying this no.
[1:14:49] It's great yeah i'm kidding me upb.
[1:14:51] Is one of my favorite topics.
[1:14:51] And then for you.
[1:14:52] Awesome awesome i i have some more stuff yeah.
[1:14:57] Yeah go for it.
[1:14:58] So um this is coming from listening to your series about history of philosophers and my interest in that was sparked because i read like a very high level high level i mean um general book about history of philosophy and i have never read anything about philosophy um my only exposure to philosophy was from your show so i had like an idea of what philosophy is and then i'm reading this book about history of philosophy and i'm one third in and i'm just thinking what is this garbage like what is this garbage was it um will.
[1:15:38] Durant has written one of the more famous histories of philosophy but it could be it could be someone else i mean i'm just personally by.
[1:15:43] The by the people.
[1:15:44] Who listen to this the history of philosophy series is some of my best work but.
[1:15:47] It is fantastic yeah it's really good um and then i was thinking um who in your opinion from like the great philosophers of history was the closest to formulating something like upb.
[1:16:03] Oh um i mean the the person who's always who seems close and i just talked about this on the last live stream, I think it was. But the person who everybody thinks is the closest but who's not the closest is Immanuel Kant. This is act as if the principle, if your action becomes a general law for everyone. But it was not rigorous enough, and it was not universal enough. So, Aristotle with, you know, life lived in the pursuit of virtue is the best life. Okay, yeah, but, you know, never quite.
[1:16:43] But he's not answering the question of what virtue is.
[1:16:45] Well, yeah, and I mean, anybody who didn't notice that there was a significant proportion of slaves around, I have some doubts as to their moral acuity. And although he only had a very negative view of women which given that i love my wife and daughter is not a huge plus for me i play to have a more positive opinion of women but like many people who have a more positive opinion of women he's a complete communist so um yeah i don't know maybe john locke with his economics but and he's certainly this moral philosophy but, most moral philosophers are just you know wouldn't this be great and this is really nice and this is you know honor and honor and honor and and and um honesty and and decency and upright and virtue and it's like it's just a bunch of positive words that create the general fog of wouldn't this be nice right exactly exactly yeah so i i yeah i think uh i would say i mean it's funny yeah i mean certainly ayn rand i really can't find much fault with her metaphysics and epistemology, it's just that you know her argument that um reason best serves uh mankind and and therefore we should pursue reason because it is our best tool of survival it's like it kind of ignores the fact that i mean there's tons of people who make a fortune by lying their asses off.
[1:18:08] Right i mean we've we've seen this even under covid like just people who just made billions and billions of dollars, just lying their asses off. And you could say, ah, yes, but for society, it's like, but she was an anti-collectivist, right? So she was into individuals. And there are, sadly, individuals who, and a lot of it has to do with the state, but not only that, they just, they make an absolute fortune and their survival is very much served by society.
[1:18:35] Lying just utterly utterly lying so yeah so i i metaphysics epistemology great economics really good but you know and and also her her outright dismissal of she was introduced i think through maria rothbard to the idea of a stateless society and she just had utter contempt for it and and waved it away you know and look i mean nobody's perfect with their reasoning of course right but when she just says uh i think her argument against the sort of dro idea was she's like okay so one private agency comes up against another private agency and they can't resolve their differences and the whole thing falls apart therefore you need a government and it's like that's not critical that's not um sorry that's not critical thinking that's not okay let me see if I can work with this idea, really get it. But just creating something that's an obvious issue without working to try and figure out how you would solve that issue is kind of lazy, right? So she should have said something like, okay, so there's a problem. One DRO disagrees with another DRO. What did they do? Well, clearly they're going to have to have a common standard.
[1:19:50] Otherwise, nobody's going to accept protection from DROs. It's sort of like saying, well, one railroad wants a certain width of rail.
[1:19:59] Another railroad wants a different width of rail. How are they going to transfer their trains? Well, they can't. Therefore, you need the government to run railroads or something like that, right? And it's like, well, no, but they're going to sit together before they start building rails. They're all going to sit together and hammer out what the best width of rail is.
[1:20:19] So that they can, you know, in the same way that when I first started on the internet, there were these proprietary forums with their own graphical user interfaces. They used their own data transfer techniques. And then generally people moved to things like TCPIP and email can go everywhere. And so the common standard tends to win out. And so the fact that she she wrote an entire book of uh of 19th century railroading right that's based on taggart was started in the 19th century and all of the rail widths were the same even though i don't believe that there was a government law mandating the rail widths right or even if there was some sort of government law the incentive of the free market would be to have standardized widths of rails right so absolutely.
[1:21:07] It's kind of like language right nobody enforces which words mean what but we kind of figure.
[1:21:16] It out it's a little bit of that sorry i mean i hear what you're saying i mean because of the state right so people have taken fairness to be an equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity or they've taken the word equality and yeah so yeah so um there is a certain amount of enforcement of language but just because grappling and holding on to definitions of words is so profitable uh for for people but certainly in the free market languages is hammered on and worked on on a continual basis and so but yeah even something like your cell phone companies you you can there's a lot of places you can basically travel like canada usa mexico and you can use your phone like you're at home and it's like well.
[1:22:05] But why? Why? Why? It's like, because it's profitable. And they figured out how to exchange data on each other's networks. And they've worked on that so that they can provide these offerings to people. And then they don't have, I mean, I remember back in the day, if you traveled outside your country, I mean, you left your phone on airplane mode, because like, if you, you know, suck up eight bits of data, it could be 50 bucks, right? So, yeah, they've worked to sort of trade these kinds of things. And you can send an email to India, which goes through like 30 different computers and they all handle it and they send it and they receive it. And there's no, well, I mean, you know, my email standard is different from your email standard. And therefore we can't, like, there's just a general cooperation. Although I don't think there's been a, there's certainly not an international law that says everybody has to deal with emails the same way. They just kind of work it out because it's profitable. And of course, if your DRO promises to protect you from a certain thing and the other DRO doesn't agree, then your DRO will simply pay you that, right?
[1:23:00] Whatever it is, right? Because people don't want to have an excuse from one DRO saying, well, the other DRO didn't agree. And therefore, right, I can't reimburse you. But you would have a contract clause, which says if my DRO, let's say I get into a traffic accident with somebody who has a different DRO, and their DRO doesn't pay, then my DRO pays. Because, you know, I want to get paid, I want to make sure of that. And all DROs would have that clause in them. And so they'd all figure out the best way to work together so just the fact that she would dismiss this out of hand was a fairly rare lapse in arrogance and imperiousness from her so i think that was fairly uh fairly damaging to her credibility uh to to a certain degree so uh yeah i'm i'm gonna have to just say uh me but yeah as far as closest goes, it's you know i i don't know anyone who's come up with the uh argument that, stealing cannot be upb because it self-detonates as a concept and i even got uh god was it steven some rationality rules guy i even got him to admit that so that's a truly original argument and it's the kind of thing that once you get it it's like oh that's so simple right so it is it is.
[1:24:13] Eerie how simple it is.
[1:24:15] Right right but that that the whole generation of upb was just a massive exercise in blank slate-ism like I just had to say okay everyone's wrong we're wiping the blackboard clean I'm absolutely going to start from scratch as if I know nothing nothing at all and because I had all of these you know I studied a lot of different moral theories over my time they're all bouncing around in my head oh so yeah it is uh it that was just an exercise in retreating to um a completely naive blank slate uh no no history no mind sort of theory if that makes sense.
[1:24:49] It does yeah and i had no idea about aristotle's and plato plato's opinion on women um that's quite interesting i'm i'm quite surprised that uh plato was more positive um, because he's like the in from my perspective like the ultimate bad guy of uh philosophy.
[1:25:11] In yeah i mean i have this general theory which i talked about in my album review of pink floyd's the wall which is that uh femininity plus the state is socialism communism and masculinity plus the state is fascism and that is the uh the uh the sort of twin poles that we're we're working with and so for me when a more feminine personality unites itself with state power it tends to work towards socialism or communism pretty quickly so and that's a little bit on the aristotle and plato divide.
[1:25:46] So in that divide would plato be the socialist.
[1:25:52] Yeah yeah no i mean i've got a whole i got a four-hour presentation on plato which you should check out at some point but yeah i go through all of the republican uh yeah no he um he wanted children no family uh every all the children raised in common and uh partners are random or assigned and oh no it's just and so because you didn't even know where you who your parents were in plato's ideal society you could end up marrying your sister and oh just all kinds of terrible stuff yeah.
[1:26:20] Yeah yeah i was uh thinking also about ai and upb so the the rules that are upb compliant, we kind of um let's say we kind of already have them or have always had them, um across all societies like most like if you went to japan a thousand years ago and you asked people about murder rape assault and theft most people would say like yeah yeah that's that's immoral and i was thinking do you think um like could we come up with some surprising rule that's upb compliant like some um let's say hey ai figure out all the like propose all the possible moral rules that you can think of like billion and run them through upb do you think there could be something that we haven't thought of ever like as a.
[1:27:21] Human i mean yes for sure and and that might be because of different circumstances and so on right so uh yeah i mean copyright is one question copyright plus ai is a whole other question right because they've been just basically i think a lot of ai creators have been just pillaging texts all over the place so uh yeah i think so but that if you go back to japan right and this is you know everyone has these thoughts when you're a kid right which is you know if i shoot someone on the street i'm a murderer if i shoot someone in a war i'm a hero if i shoot someone on the street um.
[1:28:00] I i go to jail or or i get executed if i shoot someone in a war i get ticket tape parade a medal and a pension and it is confusing right and so the the i think the most surprising thing for people about upb is that because it aims at, invalid or self-contradictory moral theories. It aims at the biggest predators. So, I mean, of course, look at totalitarian states in the 20th century killed a quarter of a billion of their own population, of their own citizens, right? An aggregate across the world, democide it's called. People got slaughtered more by governments than just about any, and that's even outside of war. That's just, you know, Cambodian style, killing your own population. So to me what what undermines and underpins the philosophies that cause the most harm it's not where people accept that rape theft and assault and murder is wrong right because people do accept that the question is expanding the definition so that it includes the greatest predators so to take an example of theft right so we'd say it's counterfeiting wrong well yeah Why? Because it's pretend money that dilutes people's purchasing power. I'm like, hello, welcome to central banking, right? So that kind of stuff.
[1:29:24] Is it morally okay to enter into debt on someone else's behalf? In other words, can I go buy a car and then just take some guy and have him pay? He said, well, no, of course not, right? Okay, well, then national debt is having the children pay for what you want, right? Having the children pay. And clearly that's bad, right? So it is not so much that, I mean, where people accept is in the private sphere, rape, theft, assault and murder is bad.
[1:29:52] The question is, what about the false ideologies that are doing the most harm to people? You know, like if somebody were to come and steal 25% of your money, you know, that would be pretty terrible. However, of course, As I'm sure you know, since 2020, the American dollar has lost about 25% of its value, which means all the people with their money in the bank and the cash in the bank, they've lost about 25% of their money.
[1:30:18] Now, if you have $100,000 one day and you log in the next day and it's $75,000 and there's been a withdrawal of $25,000, well, you're pretty mad, right? You call the bank, what the hell's going on? They track it down. But if there's just a central bank that keeps printing out a bunch of money and then you still, it looks like $100,000, but it is only in fact able to buy $75,000 worth of goods and services, that's what you need to see. And it's the invisibility of that stuff you know it's certainly wars of aggression, you know it's funny because people have these um this fascination with you know the Jeffrey Dahmers and the son of Sam and uh you know all of the serial killers and I'm like well but compared to wars like wars of aggression it's nothing it's like it's not even a rounding error it's like 10 million people in the first world war 40 million people in the second world war it's like oh no but this guy killed 20 people it's like no that's bad but it is um it is the false moral, arguments that people accept that upb kind of aims at and that's why it tends to be uh quite upsetting for people.
[1:31:27] Right like the exceptions the that are there on purpose.
[1:31:33] Yeah yeah for sure for sure.
[1:31:36] I have a question about the seven categories that you specified in the original book in 2007 and then comparing them to the three categories in essential philosophy so the seven were good aesthetically positive personally positive neutral personally negative aesthetically negative and evil and then in essential philosophy it was good aesthetically positive and neutral so So just to clarify if I understand it correctly, basically the personal ones and the neutral have been simplified into neutral?
[1:32:10] Yes, because I'm basically looking at morality insofar as it affects interpersonal relationships. So the personal one felt a bit extraneous. I mean, I think it has value, but it's not quite the same. I mean, there's some overlap. Like you can say, well, it's my choice to smoke. And it's like, but if you're the sole provider for a family of 10, your choice to smoke is not just your choice because it affects other people right and so there's a sort of challenging overlap between one's own personal decisions and its effects on others so uh you can say well it's my choice to drink now if you're just some guy living in a cabin in the woods and you tend your own chickens and well then you can drink right i mean nobody can really stop you and you're part of any social contract but you know if you're a parent and you drink and then you can't really parent because you're too drunk and then you lose your job and then your family starts getting really hungry and so on. So there are personal decisions which shade into implicit contracts you have with other people. And so I felt that that was, it does draw people into a rather complicated world of how our own personal decisions affect.
[1:33:23] Others and so people say well i have the right to take drugs if i want because that's the sort of libertarian argument of self-ownership and it's like i completely understand that it's my body my choice but if you have children in the house your choice to take drugs is no longer just yours alone i mean are you a parent by chance no well i hope i certainly hope you will be because obviously you'd be a great guy to have raised right so thank you but yeah if you're a parent um you really don't have the right to drink when you're taking care of kids and you don't have the right to do drugs when you're taking care of kids because you you can't make good decisions and and also you know i mean just practically if you are drinking or doing drugs and one of your kids gets injured and you need to drive them to the doctor well you can't do that right so you're just not prepared or able to make better decisions regarding people so i would say that.
[1:34:27] That the sort of personal ideologies it's like am i allowed to sing well sure but, what if it's you know right next to my wife's ear and she got very little sleep last night, do you know what i mean it's there's a lot of sort of overlap stuff and so i think i really wanted to just focus, I mean, the big problem that people have in their life is with, say, the deflation of the value of their savings, right? That's the big sort of sneaky-fingered pilfer theft that goes on with inflating the money supply. And people usually don't have that much of an issue with people singing next to their ears when they're trying to sleep. So I wanted to simplify it in essential philosophy to things that allow people to focus on the most dangerous elements. And of course, banking being, being a big one.
[1:35:19] Makes sense, yeah. And regarding the podcast, it's in the premium section. It's from 2022. It's called New UPB Category. And you define something shortened as UPS, aka Universally Preferable Standards, to distinguish that from UPB. Do you remember that one?
[1:35:44] Yeah, yeah. um i it's sorry the difference between the scientific method and the practice of science it's ubs and upb uh okay um so upb so if you say what is science well is science the actual experiments or is science the methodology of the scientific method and so right the the upb as, saying moral standards should be universally preferable behavior. They should comply with the requirements of universally preferable behavior. That's a way of evaluating in the same way that the scientific method is a way of evaluating individual scientific experiments or individual proposed past the truth. So if somebody says, well, I've got a double blind experiment and I'm measuring this, that, and the other, and there's a control group and all this kind of funky stuff, you say, okay, well, that's pretty good. That certainly conforms with the scientific method so it's valid science if somebody says well i had a dream and a vision and took some i don't know peyote right and and this is what i believe is the case they would say well i don't know what that is but it sure as hell isn't science right so there's universally preferable standards which is here's how you evaluate uh moral proposals and then there's upb which is the rape theft assault murder stuff so.
[1:37:02] Right right so upb would then refer only to the conclusions the like the specific moral rules not.
[1:37:11] To yeah so if you say um i'm in manufacturing well you could be the person who designs the machines that produce say widgets or you could be the guy who packages the widgets you know takes them off the conveyor belt and puts them in the box both are elements of manufacturing but one is the cause and the other is the effect so um the capital goods that would produce or the capital equipment or machinery that would produce the widgets is the process of manufacturing you know packaging the widgets and shipping them out to customers is is a different sort of category so uh it is the difference between saying okay so somebody says helping the poor is moral okay morality is upb so let's put helping the poor through upb and see if it can be sustained no it can't be right so that would be, is this science, is this not? Is this a valid UPB proposition? And that's the methodology. However, going through the argument of saying rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be UPB, that is an example of seeing UPB in action to produce moral standards.
[1:38:20] Okay. I think I will have to re-listen to that one. But thank you for going through it with me. I still don't, like, I would not be able to explain it right now to somebody else, but...
[1:38:31] Well, just, yes, I find it just, and this was a problem. I want, I can't just prove my own moral standards. I have to have a way of disproving other people's moral standards, if that makes sense. And so UPB is used as a methodology to disprove other moral claims. You know like everyone has a right to education okay so everyone has a right to education but that's asymmetrical because the person who's doing the educating is also has a right to an education so everybody has to both educate others and be educated at the same time which is impossible therefore it's an invalid moral argument does that sort of make sense.
[1:39:12] I i think yeah i'll think i think i will have to re-listen to.
[1:39:15] It no no hang on we'll get it right So everyone has the right to be educated. So how do we put that through UPB? We say, okay, so everyone must universally be educated. Everyone has a right to an education. Therefore, everybody must universally be educated. But it's impossible because somebody is going to have to be teaching them. But that person is a person as well. So the teacher also has a right to be educated. so you can't both transmit knowledge and receive knowledge at the same time imagine me trying to explain upb to you while you were trying to explain algebra to your kid it would be impossible impossible right so everybody has a right to an education everybody should educate and be educated all the time well people got to sleep so it doesn't pass the coma test and you can't both educate and be educated which means it's asymmetrical which means you have to divide humanity, into two categories, those who are doing the educating and those who are receiving the education. And you have to have opposite moral standards for them, which means it fails the UPB test because you've got this different categories of people with opposite moral requirements. One has to teach, the other one has to be taught.
[1:40:29] And so on. So, I mean, that's how you would disprove that through the methodology of UPB. And that's how you, through the methodology of UPB, you establish the rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be UPB. So it's fine for me to prove my own ones, but I also need to have a methodology by which I can disprove other moral propositions. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:40:49] I get that. But where in the book would you then use UPS? Like in the original book, if you were to rewrite it now with the term UPS, where would that actually be used?
[1:41:03] I mean, I think it's used implicitly, which I know is not quite as good, which is why I brought it that more explicitly. From the very beginning, people were confusing people. The word UPB in the same way that people can be confused about the word science. Does the word science mean the particular scientific experiment or the general principle and practice of what is good science? Is it the scientific method or each individual enactment of the scientific method, right? If it's just the theory, but there's no practice, then nobody's really doing science. If there's only practice with no theory, then nobody's doing science because they're just doing stuff off the seat of their pants. Does that make sense?
[1:41:44] So science has to be both theory and practice in order for it to be valid, right? If everyone believed in the scientific method or claimed to, but instead they used chicken entrails and tea leaves to try and get to their conclusions, right?
[1:41:59] Then that would not be valid science, right? So having the theory without putting it into practice is no good. If you have the practice of quote science without any particular understanding of the scientific theory or the scientific method then you're not doing science you have to have both an understanding of the scientific method and then implement it in your actual experiments it has to be reproducible it has to be falsifiable you know all this kind of stuff can't be purely subjective it has to be measurable like all of this sort of stuff so um science is both the theory and the practice and they're two sides of the same coin and upb is both the theory which is how you evaluate moral propositions and the practice which are a rape theft assault and murder are wrong and so because i use the same term for both the theory and the practice and somebody says if somebody says i want to teach you about science you don't know if they want to teach you about the theory or the practice.
[1:42:57] So they have to, I mean, there are courses on science in universities, but there are separate courses on the philosophy of science or the theory of science, if that makes sense. And the theory, through Francis Bacon in the 16th century, the theory had to predate the practice. So that's why I had UPS as university preferable standards, and then UPB, which is the behavior which UPS validates. But I still have not come to any particular decision about how to deploy those terms.
[1:43:29] Yeah, like how to misphrase it.
[1:43:31] Yeah. And because for me, the fundamental barrier to UPB and the spread of UPB is the stuff we talked about at the beginning, sort of the aforementioned, well, nobody wants to have wild moral theories that disprove a lot of what people believe in the world, because that makes your social life pretty difficult. Nobody wants that. And I'm not putting you in this category, of course, because you're really working hard to get it, which I hugely appreciate and thank you for that, by the way. But for a lot of people, UPB is their conscience. And if you have a really bad conscience, then your conscience senses UPB as something that validates itself. So, for instance, if you are a parent and you hit your kids because they forgot stuff or whatever, right, then you have, as a principle, we should hit people for their cognitive deficiencies, even though their cognitive deficiencies aren't really their fault because they're kids, right? So if you have as a principle we should hit people for their cognitive deficiencies well when you get older and your concentration and your memory starts to lift to some degree.
[1:44:50] Then you don't want that principle right because that principle means that your kids could be justified i mean they shouldn't but they could be justified by your own moral standards, of let's say you forget your doctor's appointment or you forget your keys or where your keys are or you forget where you parked your car, then can your adult children hit you because you have a cognitive deficiency? Well, no. I mean, they call them senior moments, right? You just get old and you forget stuff sometimes, right? So, if I start to talk about UPB, then people keep their conscience at bay by dividing things into false opposites, right? Well, they were kids, I'm an adult, it's totally different. It's like, but the principle is cognitive deficiency. Can you hit people for the inevitable effects of unchosen cognitive deficiencies like kids are young they're impulsive they don't remember much right and they lie right that's just part of growing up right so, so people keep their conscience at bay with these artificial moral decisions and what happens is UPB begins to unite these moral divisions and turn them into sort of these clean elegant principles but that makes people feel bad, And so they tend to avoid it for those emotional reasons, right? I mean, of course.
[1:46:05] The example is...
[1:46:06] Sorry, go ahead.
[1:46:07] There are so many things that I can tell when the defense mechanism, like literal mental immune system of a person rejects whatever I'm saying because they don't want to deal with the implications. So UPB is just one of those.
[1:46:24] Yeah, right, right, right, right. Yeah, moral unity is very upsetting to people as a whole.
[1:46:29] Yeah and another thing that i was struggling with in the book was uh arguing against upb affirms upb um can you walk me through that but like very slowly because.
[1:46:44] No that's that's a tricky one for sure i i appreciate the attention to detail so if i tell you that upb is wrong, then I'm telling you that you should believe things that are true and discard things that are wrong.
[1:47:03] I agree with that yeah.
[1:47:04] So that's UPB.
[1:47:05] That makes sense.
[1:47:05] It is universally preferable to believe things that are true and reject things that are false so if you say, that you should reject UPB, because it is universally preferable behavior to believe things that are true and reject things that are false, then I have just tried to dismiss UPB while deploying UPB.
[1:47:32] But in this sense, reject is referring to an internal state in someone's mind.
[1:47:40] Sorry to interrupt. If I were to say to you, you must believe and accept as truth that there's no such thing as truth, what would you say?
[1:47:53] That's self-contradictory.
[1:47:55] Right. So if I say to you, UPB is just a methodology for determining truth. And if I say to you, it is universally preferable behavior that you not believe in universally preferable behavior, that would be the same kind of contradiction, right?
[1:48:11] Uh-huh.
[1:48:15] Okay if i say it is uh you you there's no such thing as truth you must accept that as true that would be contradictory right absolutely yes yes and if i say there's no such thing as upb, and it's upb for you to accept that you would i mean just from that formulation like forget the content of upb from that formulation that would be self-contradictory right there's no such thing as UPB and you should apply UPB to know that there's no such thing as UPB, right?
[1:48:45] Yes, yes.
[1:48:47] So when someone says to you, UPB is false, they're saying to you that, not that I don't like the font it was written in, or I don't like the guy who wrote it, they're saying it is objectively false. And they're also saying that you should discard that which is false and only accept that which is true. In other words and not just personally but universally, because if you were to say well no i'm i'm a special case uh for me it's it's good to believe things that are false and reject things that are true they'd say no no no truth is objective right you have to accept truth if you're going to make a truth claim it has to be true objectively right, so but i still don't yeah go ahead i.
[1:49:32] Don't still don't see how believing something is behavior um.
[1:49:38] Because they want you to change your behavior. They want you to stop advocating for UPB.
[1:49:44] But not necessarily they might just want to correct you like in your mind not.
[1:49:49] Okay that's fine so correct you compared to what, based on what based on their opinion nope based on truth based on universals based on objectivity, because they don't say to you i feel uncomfortable when you talk about upb so you should stop doing that they don't say that right yeah they say upb is false and you should reject upb it's like by what standard by a universal standard the truth is preferable to falsehood.
[1:50:23] Okay yeah uh i'm trying to hold it like too many things in my mind at the same time with this i have that feeling but uh.
[1:50:34] You're not alone. It is a tricky argument, for sure. But it's only because UPB is a methodology for determining truth from falsehood, consistency from inconsistency. So, UPB, we can just think of it as a synonym for truth. So, if somebody says, you should honestly hold the belief that there's no such thing as truth, then you would recognize it as a contradiction, right?
[1:51:03] Correct, yeah.
[1:51:03] If somebody were to say, it's accurate to say there's no such thing as accuracy, that would be a contradiction, right?
[1:51:12] Yes, yes.
[1:51:15] And so if somebody were to say it is upb to reject upb we recognize that as a contradiction now then the challenge is universally preferable behavior is in this case a preference for correcting somebody else according to universal standards does that make sense uh.
[1:51:34] Okay maybe if i rephrase it as you should not believe this they're making a claim about what you should be doing um right because in like when you say it is upb the the statement the other person did uh it is upb to not advocate upb um like it just.
[1:51:59] Well no they they don't just say not advocate upb they say upb is false.
[1:52:06] Upb is false right um but in in the action that they're telling you this you're they're correcting you right so.
[1:52:15] They're trying to change your behavior you have to break out what they're saying and what the word false means upb is false which means that it is self-contradictory it is um inconsistent but whatever you want to say it's false by some standard right yeah and the standard is universal it is false not i don't like it i don't like the guy who wrote it i don't like the font right it is false it is in the category called false right yeah yeah and false is negative compared to true right yeah and it's not personal it's universal yeah so truth is universally preferable to falsehood, so if somebody's going to say to you so truth is universally preferable to falsehood is a upp statement is.
[1:53:20] It though because um it's a statement about not it doesn't deal with behavior if i say truth is uh superior to falsehood then.
[1:53:29] Now you all all speech is behavior.
[1:53:32] Ah okay so like.
[1:53:34] Saying we don't psychically transmit these things right saying.
[1:53:37] Truth is superior to saying falsehood would then be.
[1:53:40] Yeah or writing it down or handing it over or communicating yeah.
[1:53:44] Communicating truth is uh superior to okay and uh, Yeah, and then...
[1:53:54] Okay, so I would say to that person, is it universally preferable to believe things that are true or believe things that are false? Or to advocate for things that are true or advocate for things that are false? In other words, is it universally preferable behavior that when I say something is true, it is actually true?
[1:54:14] Yeah, and if they respond, they are implying that saying true...
[1:54:23] Well, if they say it is not preferable for you to advocate for true things, then I would say, well, then why are you telling me UPB is wrong? The moment you tell me UPB is wrong, there's a whole bunch of implicit standards and universals in that.
[1:54:39] Yeah.
[1:54:40] If you think, if you say the world is banana shaped and I say, no, it's shaped more like a sphere, I'm not imposing my will on you. I'm not saying I prefer this kind of jazz to that kind of jazz, right? I prefer the color blue to the color orange or whatever i'm telling you without a personal stake in the matter i'm telling you that you are wrong it's not personal it's just a fact that when you call the world banana shaped you are wrong because the world is not banana shaped right, yeah so i'm correcting you according to that which is that if you are saying the world is banana shaped and the world is not banana shaped i should correct you because you should be saying things that are true and not things that are false, right? In other words, if you claim that your statement is true, it should have the characteristic called the truth, right?
[1:55:25] Yeah, yeah.
[1:55:27] And so if somebody says to you, UPB is wrong, they're saying that it's universally preferable behavior to hold opinions that are not wrong, but are in fact right. So they're deploying UPB in order to dismantle UPB. This doesn't work.
[1:55:42] Thank you so much for your patience with this. I will still...
[1:55:45] No, no, I appreciate the questions. I appreciate the questions and the great questions.
[1:55:49] Awesome, awesome. I have one which is sort of, I don't know. It feels more like an interview question, but I'm curious.
[1:56:00] Yeah, let's make this last one, but I appreciate that. Yeah, go ahead.
[1:56:03] So since you published the book in 2007, it's almost 20 years. Uh do you feel like a lot of progress has been made in like or no maybe that's not the way i wanted to ask more like um, uh it's like what group of people let's say or was the most receptive to this from your experience like basically the experience that you have accumulated so far by talking with people about this um were there any surprises or like i know for example that libertarians were like maybe natural candidates for this but they haven't been that interested like people who are who politically identify as libertarians um so yeah it's not a great question but it's very vague no.
[1:57:00] It's a great question you're basically asking what progress has upb made in the world.
[1:57:04] Oh yeah yeah so what do you think.
[1:57:06] Sure well uh to me um it has been about the most successful moral theory in history. I know that sounds very contradictory. I understand that, but I'll sort of tell you my reasoning and you can let me know what you think.
[1:57:22] So, a moral theory should, I think, be judged on its practical effects in the world. And i did the rough math that just if all we do is focus on parenting that about 1.5 billion, fewer attacks upon children have occurred as the result of the work that i do, so that is 1.5 billion reductions in acts of violence in the world it probably is a lot more i was going as conservatively as i could because you know i don't want to having come from the sales and marketing world i want to undersell rather than oversell.
[1:58:15] And you came up.
[1:58:17] With that Sorry for interrupting.
[1:58:19] You came up with that number by, let's say, how many times a child is on average hit and then how many people.
[1:58:27] So I came up with that with total number of listeners, total numbers of shows listened, some percentage of those being UPB or parenting shows or anti-spanking shows, and people having average numbers of children and assuming that it reduces it by X percent. And I can't remember the exact math, and if I went through it now, it would probably be different. But the basic idea is that there have been billions of fewer listeners.
[1:58:56] Check one check two.
[1:58:57] Yeah yeah sorry about that i have a tablet that occasionally will just power down without giving me any warning so sorry about that we're plugged in we're good to go, nice um so yeah i was saying that to me what matters with the moral theory is not many people not how many people believe it but how many people practice it now of course the belief is necessary for the practice but i am more concerned with the changes in people's behavior rather than the changes in people who just accept the theory. So let's say a bunch of libertarian theorists had accepted the theory and worked to propagate and promulgate the theory, and we all agreed that UPB was a great way to analyze and prove moral theories. So let's say that we all did that, but it remained only theoretical and nobody had stopped hitting children.
[1:59:50] Right so that to me would not be successful even if it became a big sort of worldwide movement and people were really down with it but it didn't actually stop people from hitting their children that to me would not be successful what i would gauge the success of a moral theory by is particularly and moral theory centered on the non-aggression principle it would be, founded on or judged by at least by me because i'm a practical right i'm a practical guy So it comes out of my sort of business training and manual labor to some degree, is that it matters how many instances of violence are reduced in the world. And I don't know a moral theory that has produced, you know, billions, a billion plus reductions of acts of violence within the world. I certainly know of moral theories that have done the opposite, you know, but probably not in the first 20 years, things like communism and so on. But as far as UPB leading to peaceful parenting, right, because the goal has always been.
[2:00:58] What is the most prevalent violence that we can do the most about, right, what is the most prevalent violence that we can do the most about, and given that the violence against children results in all other kinds of violence and dysfunctions in society. It's not just that, you know, 1.5 or whatever it is, billion fewer hits have been inflicted on children.
[2:01:28] The fact that those children are growing up with less or no violence means that they are different people entirely. Children who are subjected to violence grow up very differently from children that are not subjected to violence. So there's a huge ripple effect going forward because they reject violence as a whole. They will not be violent in their relationships. They will not be violent in their lives. And they will raise their own children peacefully, almost certainly, right? And so in terms of in the 20 years since well i guess 17 years or whatever since 17 or 18 years since i put out the theory if i look and track at the actual reduction in tangible violence in the world it's a billion and a half maybe two billion or whatever and again these are sort of very conservative numbers that's uh amazing that's amazing in terms of.
[2:02:23] Practical reductions in the amount of violence in the world and i honestly cannot think of any other moral theory that has achieved that within 20 years right now you could say of course that one of the greatest moral theories in terms of reducing violence would have been um, abolitionism the the anti-slavery and so on and you know obviously that was a great moral crusade and so on, but it also was enacted with, you know, 600,000 plus men getting killed and, all of the tragedies that have kind of flowed out of all of that violence. So in terms of practical productions of violence, not using a central violent agency, like say conscription and so on. Well, I think that UPB, in fact, I know for a fact that UPB has done more practical good than any other theory that i've i've ever heard of for sure.
[2:03:19] Good job thank you.
[2:03:21] Well thank you i appreciate the questions and of course i'm always happy to chat uh with upb if you can send me the links to the things that you talked about i mean i'll put them in the show notes but i really do appreciate your time today.
[2:03:32] Oh which do you mean the like the podcast for ups for example and and such.
[2:03:39] Uh yeah if you have a list if not i can look them up myself. But if you have a list of the UPB shows handy, I can put them in the show notes.
[2:03:46] I will do that.
[2:03:48] All right. Thanks. I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for the great questions.
[2:03:51] Thank you too. It was an awesome conversation. Have a great day.
[2:03:55] Take care. Bye-bye.
[2:03:56] Take care. Bye-bye.
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