Hey, Stef, what are your thoughts on the ethics of actions that are, in the immediate moment, not unethical, but in the long run, have the risk of becoming so? Let's say, for example, you develop a sexual relationship with a woman only for the sake of satisfying your vanity, insecurities, and sexual needs without the intention of a long-term commitment. If this action is between two consenting adults and doesn't violate the NAP or UPB, it can't be called unethical. However, should a pregnancy occur, either the resulting abortion or the child raised by two parents who are only drawn together by lust has the potential for unethical outcomes. The promiscuity isn't unethical if both parties are honest about what they're doing, but the consequences can spiral into unethical territory. What then is the ethical status of promiscuity if it is voluntary? Is the correct word irresponsible rather than unethical?
Is the failure of parents to secure a safe environment for their children to be raised in unethical if they had the chance to do so? If so, does this mean that we can create a term like retrospective ethics, which refers to ethical judgments that are validated only by looking backwards in time after the consequences are played out instead of through reason alone? Before the ethical judgments are validated, they are simply speculative, so maybe they can be referred to as speculative ethics before consequences validate or invalidate the judgments. The main problem I found with this reasoning is in finding the first cause. If promiscuity is unethical only when certain consequences occur, why do we focus on the act of sex rather than the preceding acts such as the flirtation and escalating behaviors? How would we locate the first domino that kick-started this unethical chain in order to assign ethical judgment to the correct behavior? Is this why UPB and ethics as a whole cannot be based on consequences?
0:00 - Introduction
8:33 - Differentiating Unethical and Immoral Behavior
10:09 - The Solution to Promiscuity: Freedom of Association
13:17 - Historical Context of Parental Control Over Dating
15:52 - The Importance of Freedom in Society
In this episode, we delve into a thought-provoking discussion led by Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain. The conversation navigates through ethical dilemmas surrounding actions that may not be unethical in the moment but could lead to unethical outcomes in the long run. The topic of promiscuity is dissected, highlighting how voluntary actions can have unforeseen consequences, especially when a pregnancy occurs. The distinction between immoral and unethical behaviors is explored, with immoral actions being inherently wrong, such as rape or murder, while unethical actions are aesthetically negative but not imposed by force.
The concept of promiscuity is further analyzed from a male perspective, shedding light on how most men ultimately seek long-term, meaningful relationships rather than indulging in promiscuous behavior. The speaker shares personal experiences and observations to illustrate the underlying despair associated with promiscuity and the innate human desire for genuine connection and companionship.
Moreover, the importance of freedom of association in addressing issues related to promiscuity is emphasized. By allowing individuals the autonomy to choose their associations and not be financially burdened by others' decisions, the negative consequences of promiscuity can be mitigated. The critical role of social morality, parental responsibility, and societal norms in shaping behaviors and outcomes related to promiscuity is underscored throughout the discussion.
The episode concludes with a call for increased freedom in association and decision-making processes to combat the societal challenges posed by promiscuity. By advocating for individual autonomy, voluntary mechanisms to discourage promiscuity, and a return to traditional values of family and social responsibility, the speaker proposes a path towards a more ethical and cohesive society.Listeners are encouraged to support the show and engage in further discourse on these complex ethical issues.
[0:00] Well, well, good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain. These are some great questions from the community at freedomain.locals.com. Hope you will check out the community, freedomain.locals.com. Hey, Steph, what are your thoughts on the ethics of actions that are, in the immediate moment, not unethical, but in the long run, have the risk of becoming so? Let's say, for example, you develop a sexual relationship with a woman only for the sake of satisfying your vanity, insecurities, and sexual needs without the intention of a long-term commitment. If this action is between two consenting adults and doesn't violate the NAP or UPB, it can't be called unethical. However, should a pregnancy occur, either the resulting abortion or the child raised by two parents who are only drawn together by lust has the potential for unethical outcomes. The promiscuity isn't unethical if both parties are honest about what they're doing, but the consequences can spiral into unethical territory. What then is the ethical status of promiscuity if it is voluntary? Is the correct word irresponsible rather than unethical?
[1:00] Is the failure of parents to secure a safe environment for their children to be raised in unethical if they had the chance to do so? If so, does this mean that we can create a term like retrospective ethics, which refers to ethical judgments that are validated only by looking backwards in time after the consequences are played out instead of through reason alone? Before the ethical judgments are validated, they are simply speculative, so maybe they can be referred to as speculative ethics before consequences validate or invalidate the judgments. The main problem I found with this reasoning is in finding the first cause. If promiscuity is unethical only when certain consequences occur, why do we focus on the act of sex rather than the preceding acts such as the flirtation and escalating behaviors? How would we locate the first domino that kick-started this unethical chain in order to assign ethical judgment to the correct behavior? Is this why UPB and ethics as a whole cannot be based on consequences.
[1:57] Complicated question. I'm a little troubled by the fact that you keep using the word unethical. It's unethical, inappropriate, moral, immoral. These are all kind of loosey-goosey terms. So I don't particularly use the word unethical. I suppose if I were cornered in a way, I would say that UPB violations are immoral and APA violations are unethical. So APA violations are bad behaviors that are not imposed by force. So let's say a man exaggerates his success in order to sleep with a woman. I don't know, let's say he rents a Porsche car rather than own it, pretends he owns it.
[2:46] Well, that's wrong, he's lying, but it's not fraud, he didn't sign a contract, so whatever, right? So these are bad behaviors that are not imposed by force. Rape, theft, assault, and murder are bad behaviors that are imposed by force, or at least where you don't have a choice to participate. The woman who sleeps with a guy who pretends to have a Porsche is participating in it. You don't participate in theft and certainly not rape, theft, and rape, assault, and murder. So aesthetically positive actions, aesthetically negative actions, they're bad things, but you voluntarily choose to participate.
[3:30] So, let's use immoral for straight up evil, rape, theft, assault, murder, and let's use unethical for aesthetically negative actions.
[3:43] So, you know, it's better to be on time, but nobody's forcing someone to wait for you if you're late, right? And people have voluntarily chosen to meet you and you're not imposing anything on them by force, given that you show up late. So, telling the truth, yeah, it's a good thing, but I'm not going to enforce it at the point of a gun. I will enforce protection of persons and property. Like if a woman's about to get raped and she stabs the guy, I'm sorry that she went through that trauma, but I don't consider that at all immoral.
[4:16] So you can't use force against people who are late or people who lie to you when there's no contract and all of that. There's not some material transfer of resources and so on. so yeah if a guy says to a woman in a bar i'm an airline pilot and then she sleeps with him because she finds airline pilots actually exciting and then it turns out he flies, amateur model planes well i mean obviously it's kind of distasteful but this is not a contract that was signed so you can't you can't enforce that stuff at the point of a gun right okay so So, with regards to promiscuity, I'll give you a kind of a secret about men. I don't know if you're a male or female, I suspect male, given the rather convoluted layers of your thinking, but most men are not particularly into promiscuity. Most men are not particularly into promiscuity.
[5:16] Promiscuity is a form of despair. I mean, for both sexes, promiscuity is a form of despair. Bear so i'll tell you this i had some girlfriends i'm not trying to say that like i'm the standard by which all should be judged but i've seen this a whole bunch of times and maybe you maybe it resonates with you maybe it doesn't you can let me know of course but i had a bunch of girlfriends when i was younger and in almost every single case i was looking forward to a longer term relationship that led to marriage almost every single time so we'd get together we'd kiss become you know whatever right and and then the woman in general for whatever reason maybe had something to do with me i'm not sure about that but she just become you know difficult argumentative i don't know if the mind virus of obstructive feminism and so on but they just ended up being, difficult, unpleasant, unhelpful. And so I would usually end up moving on. And then when I met a woman who was, you know, pleasant, funny, helpful, wise, a great person, I like married her within a couple of months, like proposed marriage within a couple of months. And so men don't particularly want to sleep around. So let's say that a man finds a woman who's attractive enough for him to want to sleep with.
[6:39] I don't know, let's say he does sleep with her, and she remains wonderful and kind and happy and positive and friendly and helpful and why, like all these great things, like he'll just stay.
[6:51] Promiscuity is an act of searching founded on despair. bear. And in the past, like I remember doing my research for the Wild West presentation, and at least a third of marriages in the Wild West were shotgun weddings, right? So the couple had slept together beforehand and nobody particularly cared as long as they got married afterwards. So promiscuity is, and I'm not blaming the women for this because Lord knows men can be difficult too. But from the male perspective, promiscuity is hope that the woman you're sleeping with will stay nice, positive, sane, helpful, wise, funny, like a net addition to your life. I mean, most men do want to settle down with a great woman. And so promiscuity is continuing to search like a bachelor. You know, you got some food in your fridge. You're not exactly sure exactly how old it is. You're hungry and you just keep opening things and sniffing them and seeing if they're okay and all that. So are you being promiscuous with your food? It's like, well, no, you make maybe a little taste, maybe a little sniff. Oh, that smells bad. Oh, that tastes bad. That tastes good. Oh, no, that yogurt's got fur on it. And so you just keep going. and then you order in.
[8:18] So I just sort of wanted to point that out, that if any particular woman who's a significant net addition to the quality of a man's life, he will commit to. Again, tons of exceptions, but that's the general case.
[8:34] So I just wanted to point that out. That in a free society, and we're talking about a UPB society, in a free society, this anti-natalist, anti-pair bonding propaganda just won't be there. It just won't be there because you won't have the mechanism of a state to impose ideology on the population. People are always talking about free speech, free speech.
[8:58] Free speech is in a sort of conceptual way, can you say this or that in public. Like free speech is not particularly important if the population as a whole is forced to pay for the indoctrination of everyone through the mechanism of redistribution so what does it mean to have free speech if people are forced to pay for the indoctrination of children that has them raised to be triggered by factual statements in the real world i mean the idea that That government monopolies on education isn't the most central issue with regards to free speech is kind of incomprehensible to me. If you're forced to pay for the indoctrination of children, what does free speech even matter after that? Because it's going to erode anyway. People are going to grow up triggered and aggressive. So with regards to promiscuity, the solution is very simple. And we've known about this solution for hundreds of thousands of years. The solution to promiscuity is freedom of association.
[10:10] That's all it is. It's all that's needed. Freedom of association.
[10:15] If you have freedom of association, the problem of promiscuity largely evaporates.
[10:23] If you have freedom of association, in other words, your resources are not taken from you and handed to others against your will. If you have freedom of association, because forced association is a violation of freedom of association. So if you have freedom of association, this is all solved. If you have freedom of association, then parents finally gain back control over their children's education. And how many parents in a free society want their children trained to hate the opposite sex, to hate, to fear, to resent, to not need opposite sex. Yeah, pay for your kids. I mean, one of the main reasons you raise kids is to continue your family legacy. So why on earth would you put all the effort into having and raising children just for some blue-haired teacher to teach them to hate the opposite sex and end your entire lineage? Like, what's the point? so that's not that's not a thing that would happen and one of the problems with forced association is it completely neutralizes social morality so social morality is disapprovement sorry disapproving of people and being able to act on it disapproving of people means to withhold resources to not be forced to transfer resources so if a woman gets pregnant and there's no forced association, then the taxpayer can't be forced to pay for the costs of her children or child.
[11:48] So given that, an unwanted pregnancy doesn't equal approximately $50,000 to $60,000 US worth of free stuff. They're not moneymakers. They can't be moneymakers. Given that, women will be very careful to not get pregnant.
[12:07] They'll be nicer, right? The John does not have to woo the prostitute because he's paying her for sex. So he doesn't have to bring flowers. He doesn't have to give her poetry and make jokes. And he doesn't have to do any of that because the sex is guaranteed by the transaction. And the woman doesn't have to be particularly nice to the man because she gets the resources either through alimony, child support, to the welfare state, like all of this stuff. She gets the resources anyway. So you solve the problems of promiscuity with freedom of association. Freedom of association means you're not forced to pay for other people's bad decisions. Like whatever you subsidize will increase and whatever you tax will decrease. And so if you subsidize bad decisions, which you can only do by taxing good decisions, i.e. you need a bunch of people who aren't having children out of wedlock in order to fund the people who are, then social morality is destroyed. And when social morality is destroyed, society as a whole are generally forced apart within a couple of generations.
[13:18] Parents used to be very careful about who their daughters would date. There would be chaperones, and the door always had to stay open. She always had to keep one foot on the floor. Why? Because in the past, if a girl got pregnant out of wedlock and the guy didn't marry her, then the parents would have to foot the bill.
[13:42] The woman in general would end up staying with her parents and this is why you have you know these crazy stories of i thought that this was a very late baby from my mother it turned out my sister got pregnant at 15 or 16 and the baby was passed off as a late baby of the mothers that who i I thought was my sister, is actually my niece or nephew. Sorry, I'm a little fuzzy at the fringe edges of this kind of stuff. So when parents have to pay both monetarily and socially for the bad decisions of their offspring, well, they take great care in who their children date and to ensure sure they don't have a child out of wedlock. And there's social shaming and stigma and massive costs to the parents. Because if the daughter gets pregnant, say, a man won't marry her, then the parents put the daughter and her child up. And the daughter is then largely unmarriable.
[14:59] So it's really really tragic and awful but of course when free association is violated, then the parents don't police the children's sexuality as much so i think that's an important aspect of things to understand now it is not good for a child to be raised on average by a single mother so what we want to do is to put as many voluntary mechanisms in place as possible to discourage promiscuity and having children out of wedlock and the best way to do that like whatever the problem is the basic principle i've talked about for like decades whatever the problem is the solution is always more freedom more freedom whatever the problem is the solution is more freedom.
[15:53] So it's hard for us to understand how society operates in a situation of true freedom of association. Freedom of association has been toast in the West since the 60s.
[16:08] I mean, in Canada, of course, we have socialized medicine, which means that you're forced to pay for everybody's bad lifestyle choices. When socialized medicine was put in place, only a small percentage of people were obese. Now it's like half the population. And one of the reasons for that is that the obese don't pay for their own medical costs.
[16:32] So when you socialize things, you destroy freedom of association. Freedom of association regarding the, quote, education of children has been dead in the West for 150 years. This is where the decay really started. So, you know, the antinatalists have taken over government education to a large degree, and so they push all of this, don't trust the other gender, man-hating, feminist antinatalist, it's bad for the environment crap, right? Well, parents don't want that. They don't want their kids to be taught that, but they don't have freedom of association. So if you don't have free speech with your money, in other words, if you're forced to fund things you vehemently disagree with, or anything really for that matter, but if your money doesn't have free speech, every legal scrap of free speech you have on paper is just a mere afterthought. It's just a mere afterthought. So it's hard for us to know how a society functions when you truly have freedom of association. But it functions a whole lot better. So I hope this helps. Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show. I'd really, really appreciate that. I look forward to your feedback and thank you for all these great questions. Lots of love. Talk to you soon. Bye.
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