Transcript for:
Lecture Notes: Moral Philosophy and Consistency

i don't think that you should ever kill a human being ever well except in that case okay well wait hold on clearly you don't believe that then there's something else you believe let's get to the root of that let's find out what you actually right my general belief is i feel like if you have a certain political position i feel like it should be justified what i mean is i feel like we should have logically coherent and consistent ways by which we take questions apply some rigorous moral standard to them and then generate answers that will be consistent with the answers that we'd give to any other question so there's two parts to this one something is not consistent it is meaningless okay what i mean is that in any given system you have rules for that system if you decide that you can break some rules then you could break any rule because it doesn't make sense to have a system where some rules can be broken that means that you're actually using another system right does that make sense like if you're saying like okay i don't think you should ever kill a human being ever well except in that case not getting okay well wait hold on clearly you don't believe that then there's something else you believe let's get to the root of that let's find out what you actually right so it's important to have a system where all the rules are they make sense i'm sorry when i say that makes sense where all the rules are consistent so you always follow them they're like you have to do this otherwise it falls apart um and then you you should be consistent throughout the entire real set if you believe that you can't do something that should be consistent throughout the whatever blah blah blah you know with reasonable addendums addendums additions changes you need to be consistent it needs to be logically coherent when i when i try very hard to do this even though i don't know anybody believe this when i say the word when i say the word logical or rational what i mean by that is like premise premise conclusion so if i say you have a logically coherent argument i might say something like you should never kill somebody unless you're threatened um joe represented a threat to susan therefore susan can kill joe something like that right like like it should follow like either syllogism or some like reasonable pattern of like oh well if i believe these three things then this conclusion logically follows any moral system you have should be logically coherent okay it like makes sense when you line all the statements up and it should be consistent you like have the same set of rules you apply everything to okay ideally if i were to ask so i feel like when people are asked a question how do you feel about this thing there's usually two things that people's minds go to one is do i have a visceral reaction to it right so if i say how do you feel about eating [ __ ] oh [ __ ] i have a sense i've got a sense that like immediately says this is bad it's the first thing people appeal to and then the second thing people appeal to is what is the correct answer that i'm supposed to give given the groups that i belong to i think that that's the second answer you give when people run out of those two things most people don't actually have a rigorous process by which they can evaluate whether something is good or bad or whether they do or don't like something i think that that's like that's something that i strongly believe in maybe people will disagree with that but yeah so for instance if i say how do you feel about socialized healthcare we don't have an initial like a sense response to that okay well what groups do i belong to okay i'm a liberal i'm a blah blah blah okay cool i like universal healthcare right that's generally it now they might think they know some justifications but really what they're doing is they're just going to repeat what they heard from the group knowing that they have to support it yeah because it's the group or whatever what i want is i want to have some internal system that i've designed that allows me to take moral questions and generate moral answers okay like that's important to me that's very important to me it's one of the most important things to me so how do we do this okay the very first question that we have to start off at we have to go all the way back okay is we have to ask what is goodness what do we what do we consider to be the good in my actual opinion this question is unanswerable this is a question that the the answer to this question is going to draw on um on something external of like human knowledge good is an ill-defined concept i don't believe that there's an actual answer blah blah blah blah so i i have like my own little answer for goodness basically okay um i'll i'll walk you through this a little bit okay so since i don't believe that there is like an objective good objective truthful good moral whatever i'm not religious i don't believe in any sort of like moral realism or objective moral truth because i don't think that we have ways to feel or see morality i don't think we can sense it or detect it or argue about it basically what i do is i say that there are things that i have that i want to fulfill in my life that make me happy those things are to me those things are good so i basically have some like internal happiness i try to maximize and fulfill uh my own internal happiness well i'll just call this ih you guys have to remember what this [ __ ] stands for if this is like what if this is like what i'm trying to maximize right my goal is to live a life where i can satisfy this like internal happiness as much as humanly possible now typically okay because i'm not a god all right i'm not like um capable of doing most things on my own um i can't hunt on my own i can't create um clothing i can't build houses there's a lot in my life that makes me happy that i need that i can't provide for myself what i need to do is i need to get this from from other people as well right as a side note i assume that everybody else functions off of this very same moral principle now people are going to argue that they don't but i think they do what what i call internal happiness um i think they call religion or some other weird [ __ ] or conscience dantologic i don't care um i think that most people try to satisfy some internal preferences they have so what i realize is i can't satisfy these of my own so i have to satisfy these by way of interacting with other people in order for them to be motivated to satisfy my internal happiness i have to do something that increases their happiness as well right so like economics i wouldn't say that happiness is like a zero-sum game right so if one person on his own can generate five units of happiness and another person can generate five units of happiness i think that these two people coming together could generate 50 units of happiness the more people that work together the more overall like happiness that you get so if i agree with this right so i want to be happy and i want to maximize the amount of happiness for myself i need to have other people around me that are capable of like feeding into my own happiness right i have to have like a group of people family and friends society whatever you want to call it that are capable of like satisfying the needs that i have right so this might be um we'll just put like house clothes friendship subs if i have my internal happiness that i'm trying to have satisfied through other people through these things right i would assume that they have their own internal happiness as well so we kind of have to like enter this like exchange where like i'm offering things they're offering things and then together we all kind of work to build upon this type of like happiness through every person this is like this is like roughly my my moral view of like how the world works i think that everybody's trying to satisfy things that make them happy individually and i think that um we do that by satisfying each other's like desires and wants so that we all like kind of like work off of each other's happiness make sure this happens is there an argument against this idea i think this is the best way to view things um i think that if you go through this model i think it gives you a good understanding of how other people work i think it gives you a good approach to other relationships i think it gives you a good approach to how the world works if we take this little mini model here to be true from this position we get into this kind of world where we have i guess you could call this a form of like social contract so basically what this is is i agree to respect some rights that you have and you agree to respect some rights that i have and then by way of doing that we all kind of like ensure this like better world for all of us however it should be noted okay the only reason uh oh no okay okay that's so that's like on an individual personal level right okay so all right i i would say that all of this up here okay roughly all right then the philosophy browser changes i'd say like roughly up here i would call this like meta ethics kind of okay basically i'm trying to figure out like well what do what do i consider good technically it's a little bit different but whatever right so this is like good okay this is the goodness the goodness is other people make you happy you make other people happy okay boom all right now if i want to figure out like how do i apply this consistently throughout all of society how do i create a society where everybody thinks this and we all work together and everybody's happy blah blah blah blah i'm gonna we're gonna call this little [ __ ] is basically um this is gonna be something called rule utilitarianism okay which is like a little branch of consequentialism so that's this is a fancy way of saying what i would want to do is i want to craft a set of rules for society okay that i believe maximizes the happiness of every single individual a rule here might be something like i don't think anybody should steal from anybody else without provocation because if we have a society for instance where people are stealing right you're literally detracting from another person's happiness for your own selfish gain and if everybody started to engage in that behavior it would be a race to the bottom where everything would be [ __ ] right so like a good rule for society would be no stealing right i think that's like without provocation right so you can make arguments for things like taxes or whatever later on but yeah how do you come up with the rules do you self-reflect such does it come from yourself so like a rule would just be anything that like i think would maximize like my personal happiness so i'm being a little bit vague or vacuous with the term um personal happiness there because what i'm assuming is the assumption that i am without provocation means nothing if you don't define that term so when i say like provocation what i mean is like is there a justification for doing an action that increases the net happiness in society is there a justification for performing a certain action that makes everybody better off of everybody like adheres to set action so for instance a form of theft that i think would be morally justifiable would be a thing like taxes okay so how are taxes um justifiable because if i steal a little bit from the wealthiest people the amount that they lose their the impact on their life is going to be very little but the net gain and happiness between everybody else in society is going to be very high and also when everybody else in society is super well off your net gain and happiness is going to be higher off as well right take for example a business owner in a city if he's taxed and other people are taxed a little bit higher everybody else in the city makes more money that means that business owner has more people to sell products to um less of his tax money is being wasted on like crime enforcement et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera right so theft would be a form of like justified thievery how do you balance between social well-being and rights i mean i would argue that rights that exist i think would be an extension of things that contribute to your personal happiness so for instance i have a right generally i have a right to bodily autonomy the reason being i don't know if i could be happy in a society where other people have a right to use my body against my consent generally i would say that like the function that rights serve is right or kind of like a shield to protect you from other people [ __ ] with you right rights rights are something that basically serve to make so other people can't come in and [ __ ] with your your internal happiness basically so we have rules in society blah blah blah blah okay so do i want to talk about like tit for tat systems um no i don't think so if you engage with somebody or if you encounter somebody okay i think that all of a successful society is built on this type of exchange if you find people that are not willing to engage with this type of exchange then in my opinion this is going to sound like extreme but in my opinion all bets are off as soon as somebody has proven that they're willing to drop this level of consideration then i think it's fair to drop your level of consideration for that person as well this is why i think that there are some people whose views are fundamentally incompatible with what i would consider a well-functioning society for instance a group of people that view themselves as racially superior to another people think that it's okay to take certain groups of people and excise them from society those groups of people won't be able to live in harmony with the other groups of people because they're trying to be eradicated and it's going to cause like a lot of disharmony between these groups of people right so like highly intolerant groups of people or people that aren't willing to share this social contract with broad groups of people without valid justification um so for instance if those other people are aggressed on the first or whatever um would be people that are considered like unable to reciprocate like or be a part of like these types of um societies general so this is like a general rule okay general rule is that i need some reciprocated value here for me to want to reciprocate value with you reciprocated values right we'll just say that none of these terms actually mean anything you can say whatever the [ __ ] you want okay so if we have all of this set up okay one of the things that's guaranteed okay so we're getting so now okay so we've moved through the meta level this is the normative level now we're getting down to an applied level okay if somebody would have talked to me about like let's say that i have boom i have my house okay me feeling like i have a house and me feeling like the security of that house is guaranteed to me by society these are very very very important things to me okay um i don't want to live in a society where it feels like anybody can take my [ __ ] or destroy my [ __ ] um i don't think i would consider that society dysfunctional right because if we come back up here like what does it mean for me to be happy well for me to be happy i need to have certain things that are guaranteed to me people aren't going to steal [ __ ] for me people are going to [ __ ] kill me um people are gonna rape me people are gonna take me like these are things that like are important to me to maintain my happiness this is like an agreement that i have with everybody else that lives like in my society right so if i'm in a society and somebody approaches me okay and this person is saying hey i'm going to destroy your [ __ ] okay in in my view of morality this person is not reciprocating to me a system that says that they're going to be respectful of the things that make me happy as soon as a person has aggressed on me or aggressed on another person in that manner where they're attacking this person's like internal happiness where they're going against what this person like wants to get out of society in a way that's like a direct attack on their [ __ ] i think that this person has a right to do whatever they need to to stop this person from from carrying out that aggression yeah this so this is basically where um in in a highly abbreviated manner this is where like i build my model for self-defense so if you're going to attack my [ __ ] you're going to come at me okay and then we can add a few more rules to make this more generally favorable so for instance like i should have some obligation to put this person on notice maybe in their internal happiness model maybe property isn't that important to them so they actually don't see this attack on me as that egregious they wouldn't think that like oh wow i didn't know that that was part of your contract right so there should be some obligation to put this person on notice like hey if you attack my house i'm going to [ __ ] kill you um right i think that you have that obligation to do that before taking action although i think in society most people should reasonably understand that and then there are other things that could augment this as well so for instance if this person is four years old they probably don't have the cognizant like know it all like or wherewithal to know that they're breaking this contract we wouldn't expect somebody that's four years old to be able to make that decision if a person is like out of their mind on drugs or whatever then arguably if we consider them compromised maybe killing them would be and i think oh i don't know i'd have to think more about that one because they're still threatening to destroy your stuff and they're still engaging in an act that's leading to an action that i'm threatening around happiness but um yeah it's kind of abbreviated but i think that like this is basically where my argument for self-defense comes from another person is not reciprocating with you the contract that we all agree to live by in society and has shown a disregard for things that make you happy therefore i don't believe in any sort of objective morality or anything i don't think you have an obligation to protect this person against their own harmful wishes their harmful wishes being to destroy your property and then endure any harm that might result from you defending your property okay there it is destiny would you agree that killing a four-year-old would be justified to save your livelihood if there was no other way right it's possible so the way that i would explain this is that um if if a four-year-old was in a position to okay so this is a little bit complicated right so i don't consider four-year-olds to be moral agents meaning i don't know if they could do something that i would truly consider to be right or wrong since they're not moral agents of their own i would consider a four-year-old that is a human being to be an extension of their parent a form of property basically so if a four-year-old is out causing significant harm to you and you have to kill that four-year-old i can't even imagine how this could be the case but if that was the case then the responsible party for that would be the parent of that four-year-old for letting them get into a place where they can actually cause that harm so for instance actually we can spin up an example of this this is a good question so we spin up an example of this what if i'm driving down the street and then a four-year-old child starts crawling in front of the street right out of out of nowhere a [ __ ] ninja four-year-old starts crawling or not crawling i guess before they start running out in the middle of the street okay let's say that i can either swerve and i swerve off the road off a canyon because i'm driving in maui and high i'll swerve off the road and then i die or i have to run over the four-year-old right well in that case well [ __ ] it i'm not gonna suicide myself you run over the four-year-old okay you make the decision to kill the four-year-old to save yourself from great personal harm maybe you and your whole family are riding around right if that's the case i think that you're morally justified in killing the four-year-old but the responsibility for the death of the four-year-old lies on the parent of the four-year-old the parent was the responsible party of the four-year-old the four-year-old can't make the decision to put your stuff at risk the parent knows that the four-year-old is capable of doing that and by allowing the four-year-old to roam you know the risks of that happening in a given area so you bear the responsibility of any action taken by that four-year-old so that would be like that would be like the chain of responsibility there basically can you apply that logic to defending someone else's property for sure so let's say that i have a piece of property and let's say that i feel like that property is threatened by another person okay another person is going to come and destroy my property let's say that they have five friends okay so let's say six people are coming to kill or destroy my property right if i know that i can't defend this property on my own and i know that it's gonna like significantly curb my you know internal happiness to lose the said property i think i should be able to reach out to society and say like hey can you please help me defend my [ __ ] um to some extent we already have this agreement with police officers right hey i can't defend my [ __ ] i'm going to make an appeal to the public infrastructure can you please come and help me do it right in the case that a police officer isn't available maybe you ask a friend i don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that um i would expect that if somebody was threatening somebody else it's okay to ask somebody else for help for it if i was at a bar and a six foot nine dude came up to me and said he was gonna [ __ ] kill me i would ask a friend for help i wouldn't be expected to deal with that on my own i don't think that that burden should be placed on the victim of an aggressor what if people don't follow your rules not society's [ __ ] no matter what they do they get [ __ ] on aka civil disobedience put it uh um i don't think that civil disobedience contradicts my system in any way scishow reform i i'd be curious how i think that people that live with different systems than me are generally incompatible with any reality that i would want to live in i think that in general most people have internal preferences that they try to satisfy and that we ought to be respectful of other people's internal preferences as well if you have some moral system that makes us that you can disregard the wills and wishes of other people in aggressive manners then i would consider you to be in every sense of the word an immoral person and immorality should either be purged or reformed whatever is more likely i guess destiny shouldn't everyone more or less agree with all of this uh maybe i don't know do you think that defending random people's businesses with lethal force is justifiable even though the person doesn't know whether it actually threatens their livelihood like unrequested defensive businesses i think that anybody that um in my opinion anybody that thinks it's acceptable to walk around and mat and cause massive destruction to other people's property is incompatible with like a healthy functioning society not not with private property with public property i can see other arguments here but not with private property no unless they feel that that person has done like an individual wrong to them so like if anybody wants to defend like anybody's random private property i think that strangers could do it i think it would be morally justifiable i don't wheel out this argument because it's obviously a more extreme take and i'd have to walk through all this to get there but i think that the concept of defending like private property as a concept can be done um much the same way that like you could pull a random person out of a pool or if you saw somebody's car rolling down a hill you could run and like try to apply the parking brake or whatever that like everybody ought to be roped into defending everybody else's stuff protesting in a street would be justifying the system sure of course you can protest if you want yeah is there anywhere your system breaks no i think if a system breaks then it has to change it's not a good system i don't i mean i wouldn't think so obviously but um yeah destiny what happens when one person's internal preferences contradict somebody else's a bad preference is one that demands other people to violate things that would satisfy their own preferences in my opinion there's like an incompatibility there but i don't think i have any internal preferences that contradict other people's so radically or if they do i would argue that i'm correct and they're incorrect and [ __ ] them so like basically like i have an internal preference for instance for taxation and society because i believe government provides goods that dramatically increase the well-being of all of its citizens there might be other people in a society that feel like oh well i totally disagree with taxes taxing me is thievery for me well i would say okay well you're incompatible with my society so i either have to make you bend to my will using force so we do that with police for instance like you have to pay your taxes or you get arrested or we kick you out of society or we go to war i guess over it um it's connected because social contract is the benefit of feeling intuitively valid however the application the system in regards to our people actually feel isn't distinct some people feel [ __ ] plus some protest isn't rare or some rioting against the systems that's your system i just don't think that in any moral system i don't think rioting against private property can be okay i think rioting against public property can be justified pretty easily but so would you um not just be a hedonistic i don't know i'm trying to find i'm not trying to label the words or whatever there's like other we we could talk about like um egotistical um psychological egoism or ethically i don't care about that [ __ ] when i'm not it's just like really basic we can do this without using any big big meme words can you define a period that cause mutual respect for property such happiness to fail in our current societal system i mean so arguably if we take this broad concept of self-defense right what does self-defense mean self-defense means that somebody is somebody is aggressing on you in a way that makes it so that you can't satisfy your internal happiness right what we could talk about is we could talk about the black community at large okay so the black community has a feeling that the united states as a whole is aggressing on them in a way that's preventing them from satisfying this internal happiness so whether that's the perpetuation of systemic racism um in forms of like criminal justice system in forms of poor funding for schools um in forms of uh you know redlining and gentrification that's pushed out of homes right black people might have this feeling if that's the case then black people are morally justified in protesting or fighting against this system black people would have an argument there and since earlier i said it's totally fair for us to defend other people who feel like they're being aggressed on because we would want other people to defend us if we're feeling aggressed on it i would expect non-black people as well to be able to join those black people in terms of protesting what they perceive to be aggressions towards whatever satisfying their internal happiness it's like where the justification for protests would come from protests are not so in my world view a protest is not a form of aggression a protest is a form of self-defense against somebody else's aggression that's how i would view it i think there's a difference between law enforcement defending someone's property and random people defending people's property about being asked to i think the ladder is reckless and is more likely to lead to people getting hurt or killed so we can talk about like the actual application of somebody defending property because that could be done imperfectly however that's not really the moral argument um that's more like a uh that would be more like a practical argument in a practical manner strangers defending other people's property could be so imperfect that it's hard to morally justify it that could be that could be true but however you can also kind of sort of make uh you make an argument even calling the police for this so for instance some people would argue that it's not fair to deport somebody because they're stealing from a store so therefore it could be immoral to call the police on robbers because they might be illegal immigrants and they'll get deported if they get caught right so or maybe somebody's breaking into your place well i could go handle this myself but if i call the cops the cops might kill the person right so you could technically make that argument anywhere if the practical application is low enough i guess it's up to an individual to feel like if the practical application of their belief can be done in a way that's morally responsible so for instance if you were like an ex-cop or you've got a lot of like training with your firearms you feel like you can hear yourself responsibly maybe you're a bouncer bodyguard or whatever and you want to go and defend a piece of property then like you're probably okay to do so right that's up to you that's up to you to figure that out destiny do you think anyone actually disagrees with what you laid out here i feel like lefties are just being partisan um i don't know i'm just laying it on just because some people can see i guess um haven't you said before you think vigilantism is stupid would any form of going out of your way to defend someone else be vigilantism okay so when i okay i know this sounds like a meaningless nation but when i say something is stupid that's way [ __ ] different than saying something could be morally justified okay if somebody punches you in the face okay at a bar i think you could be morally justified in punching them back if you wanted to but i think it's stupid because the threat that you're increasing the likely threat to yourself you're not going to de-escalate the situation um you could represent greater potential harm in the future i think it's really dumb but i think you have justification to do it if you really want to i'm not going to say like dude you i'm not going to say like that was wrong of you to do what am i saying said is that was stupid of you to do right i think those are meaningfully different things if protesting is self-defense and lethal force is justified in self-defense couldn't you justify rioting well i think that as part of self-defense we should probably take like the minimum level of force necessary to convince the other party that what they're making is a mistake right basically that if somebody is infringing on your internal happiness that doesn't give you carte blanche to instantly kill them but use escalating measures to stop them from doing something so that rather than killing them instantly so for instance if if if protests are a form of self-defense against an aggressive government well then you slowly escalate the protests until yeah i mean like in some cases maybe a protest gets the job done if it doesn't maybe rioting if it doesn't there may be [ __ ] civil war like yeah if there was a strong threat of protest evolving into rioting and looting wouldn't the police be justified in preemptively shutting them down according to your system it's it's possible like if you thought that there was such an extreme level of harm that would be disproportionate encounter to the other harm being committed so if the defenders were preparing to enact an extreme form of harm in response to what a perceived aggression i think you could preemptively shut down defenders sure so if i were to think of a small example of this let's say that somebody at a bar is walking up to somebody and they're kind of drunk and they want to punch this dude okay i'm drunk and i'm going to punch you because you're black and i hate you okay all right and the black guy sees the dude and he's like oh okay now i think that the black guy could be morally justified in punching him back okay i'm just using black guys maybe the guy's racist but whatever the guy could be just by pushing him back but what if i see that the other guy has a knife in his back pocket and he reaches to pull that knife out right i think that you could run up to the to the to the guy that's holding the knife and knock him out okay even though he technically hasn't done anything wrong yet but like if you perceive that he's about to respond to an aggressor with an insanely disproportionate level of force like more than he needs to to shut down the aggression then i think that you could proactively take actions against him sure so protesting is valid if you've got like good reason to believe that protests could turn massively [ __ ] violent and cause a disproportionate amount of damage in relation to what they're protesting then i think that you could be justified in shutting that down beforehand yes this is often done in europe when police hear that football hooligans join protests and there's a large chance of riots they forbid the protests sure destiny in an individually morally just is an individual morally just benefiting all the property they own or they only morally just fight on their property it's necessary for their survival the former statement is true um where would the line be drawn this one i think that all private property is defensible um i don't want to live in a society okay i do not want to live in a society where my [ __ ] can be [ __ ] destroyed and i have no way to stop it that's like that would be like an important part for my internal happiness if i choose if i want to be able to defend my stuff from a would-be aggressor i ought to have the right to do that morality is more complicated than internal happiness um i disagree uh i will wholly argue and stay mad all of meta ethics is [ __ ] trash garbage waste of time it's philosophers that are bored as [ __ ] circle jerking against other philosophers that are bored as [ __ ] because they're just out of structure [ __ ] everything about meta ethics and figuring out what is actually good [ __ ] all of us have things in life that we want we try to satisfy those wants that's all morality is okay so everybody disagrees second thing with the militia and the kenosha case generally defending property or the counter protesters attempt to intimidate a combination of protests and writers i mean that's a question that seems hard to answer however based on the videos that i've seen okay like we have to what i think is really important is to look at the order of aggression okay so in kenosha my understanding is that one there was a curfew okay so if we're out past curfew now we have one level of aggression from the protesters that has already put the other side on the defense right um because if you're violating curfew there there could be reasons why now maybe they're just there to continue to protest in which case i'll [ __ ] kirby is fine um however if they're violating curfew and they start to show that they have the likelihood or the proclivity to start to destroy property well then they're continuing to up the level of aggression if this is true then people that are there for the express purpose of defending property like i think that by virtue of having guns out you've put the other side on notice like hey you start [ __ ] [ __ ] up like we've got guns like don't do it or whatever as long as they're making like reasonable efforts to maintain their position and not like also aggress although at that point it's hard to say that the people with the guns there are aggressing more when the protesters are already out past curfew and still contributing to destruction of property what if you got a bunch of white supremacists to defend your property against bail on protests and are black people wouldn't this project application do more on the good if these people have a motivation to harm more people um it doesn't really matter who's defending uh i'll draw my hot tape because i don't really give a [ __ ] it doesn't matter if it's nazis or white nationalists or whoever defending your property much the same that for blm it doesn't matter if it's like black nationalists or nation of islam that are protesting right we have to look at the individual actions that these people are taking just because you might be a bad person or just because you might have some bad moral beliefs doesn't mean that every action you take therefore past that has become bad that's not how that's not how we determine whether an action is good or bad a bad person can do neutral or good things a good person can do neutral or bad things if like a bunch of white nationalists or black nationalists that ever show up to defend a piece of property or whatever then as long as they're not engaging in aggressive behavior or aggressing on another side they have their right to do that what should someone do if guns are illegal except your own house in this country and there were the same riots happening in the city um i don't know it depends if you have the i don't know that gets more complicated i mean depends on how you get a gun and everything yeah destiny the gun people are out past curfew so the curfew is awash no that is not true the gun people are only out past curfew because of the aggression of the protesters out past curfew if the protesters leave the gun people leave as well so no that that is not true the the curfew and the violation of curfew would be on the protesters to be clear protesters being outpassed curfew alone does not make them rioters or destruction or property people or whatever like yeah well the mission depending okay well you're saying express purpose of defending property but my question was were they actually defending property was that the genuine purpose contrasting with the korean stop the shops approach unapproachable um turrets genuinely defending property their weapons here we have a kid getting separated from a militia running around a right with a gun on their back it doesn't look to me like a group of people sitting on the top of um you're trying to like get into people's minds in ways that i i can't if you want to look at the particular situation we've gone from like so like all of this here all of this here is deductive so when i say deductive when i say that something is deductive an example of a deductive thing might be all men are mortal okay is our first proposition socrates is a man okay second proposition if socrates is a man and all men are mortal socrates is mortal that's our conclusion okay when i say something is deductive that means that by virtue of the logic in the argument it is true period full stop right now if we're trying to figure out why was kyle in any given area we've moved away from the realm of the deductive and now we've got to go into the inductive right so inductive might be i walk into a room a person is holding a smoking gun and another person is laying on the floor shot inductively seems as though this person has shot the person laying on the ground i don't know that that's not 100 true that's not logically 100 true that's an inductive argument so why was kyle at any given place when we look when we speak to the intentions of any person we're almost always inductive that's not to say that inductive is [ __ ] or whatever but like it seems to be the case that kyle wasn't there to murder people and we can inductively argue like well why do we believe that how were his actions that his actions something was more as a murderer or as like a protester anthony brothers whatever like we have to go into that but yeah the problem here is you're advocating for the unbalanced power structure of the curfew more or less it sounds like you're saying people seem to follow cliff and be controlled which is the whole point of the protests wrong i reject that so one i am saying that people need to be controlled nobody disagrees with that some level of control is good we don't want a whole city descending into cass or mayhem number one okay number two um the whole point of the protest is not to break curfew the point of the protest is to put the police on notice that [ __ ] is [ __ ] and to gather support across the country and to raise awareness about you know [ __ ] up issues related to police departments that doesn't require you to riot you don't need to riot to be a protester you also don't need to be out past curfew to be a protester most bad things with these protests are generally happening past curfew you can protest just as well in the morning um don't you think having a bunch of metal folding door to protect their livelihoods could have stopped a lot of looting maybe but i don't know if it should be an obligation of a person just because you don't have the particular piece of defensive like infrastructure doesn't give another person the right to loot your stuff would you extend this justification of self-defense to everywhere internationally regardless of each country stands on guns et cetera i ask this because there are times you mentioned having guns as a god-given right glad to be american no no countries have different mexicans oh no no i'm sorry um we have to be very very careful i'm sorry please try to be careful when you contextualize what i say okay so right now i'm having a very fundamental level um like philosophical discussion with you so what i say here is like 100 percent rock-solid like this is what i believe fundamentally when i say you have a god-given right of a gun in another conversation i'm talking about like with respect to the second amendment with respect to american laws et cetera i don't believe that having a gun is some fundamental right that massively contributes to my internal happiness that if threatened by another person i can kill them right other countries like it's totally i can totally conceive of a world where i live where nobody has guns and we're all totally fine yeah i understand self-defense when it comes to property like housing and business but where is the threshold what about a stick of gun a stick of gum you own or something i believe that that could escalate to a lethal situation but then that's on the aggressor for instance let's say you have a piece of gum somebody tries to take me like no [ __ ] you you pull the gun back and they say like well [ __ ] you if you don't give it to me we're gonna fight over like all right [ __ ] it let's fight let's say that the person pulls out a knife it's like okay well i'm gonna [ __ ] stab he's like okay we pull it again you kill the person right you're not killing them over now the way that people look at this is like oh you killed them for a stick of gum their the gum was worth more than their life no it's not that the gum was worth more than their life it's that they made the decision to aggress on me knowing that their life was on the line for it and they decided to take that action anyway and i think that if you put them on notice and you're defending something and they know the consequences if they attack you then that's on them they decided that their life was worth a piece of gum that was the choice that they made you're not responsible for the consequences of their action even if you're the one doling out the consequences it's kind of like it's kind of like when a teacher says i don't give you grades you earn grades just because a teacher fails you on an assignment doesn't mean it's the teacher's fault that you failed much the same way that if you're defending property and you've put the other person on notice i'm going to kill you if you attack me it's not your fault that they died even if you were the one that ultimately might have killed them attacking the property what about a mentally ill person so depending on the level of mental illness we would say that the mentally ill person isn't considered a moral agent the same way that a child wouldn't be and that mentally ill person should be under the possession of another entity either a family or a government or whatever and that that person doing things is a failing of whoever their like caretaker should be wait okay so i do have an issue with you in principle do these rules you have and you're from utility doesn't have exceptions like if they in certain circumstances cause more harm than they prevent so in general i'm not concerned with harm caused to intentionally aggressive parties that understand the harm they might suffer should they do a particular action i view that as a form of consent okay you're strictly talking morally right yeah this is strictly morally like in the real world i don't think that killing people over gum is like a good way to um i don't think it's a good way to run society although maybe i'm not sure destiny something about this feels off like you can conjure any kind of consequences you want for even minor infractions well like um i mean like in general i think that like the consequences for breaking a rule like if we're talking about like public rules for public safety um i think that's a bit different than aggressing on an individual so for instance i don't think that jaywalking could carry a death penalty if the state puts you on notice that they'll kill you if you jaywalk the same way that aggressing on an another individual is the same way what do you think the long-term ramification of that could be someone could then show up with a gun themselves to take that gum and that could be a worse outcome for you maybe well then you'd call more friends over to do it i guess like the thing is is that like the ramifications of my system ultimately ended maybe a civil war if it gets to that level but then it was always gonna get to the level anyway but the ramifications of the other end are well people should just be able to steal and take whatever the [ __ ] they want as long as you can't stop them since you can't use lethal force i reject that world i reject a reality where people can break in steal [ __ ] [ __ ] with people or do whatever because you can't kill them as long as they don't threaten you i reject that moral world i think that i wouldn't i think that my the internal happiness of more people will be threatened in that world versus another one where like hey if you break into people's [ __ ] they might kill you like i think that in that world i think that we can be respectful enough of each other's properties and each other's persons that we shouldn't be running into that like circumstance too often that's damn reality if god says does this game require a standing army to protect the society external agents and sufficiently that if we're talking about like wars with other countries it's more complicated i want to get into that right now so morally you are justified in escalating over the gum but practically if the item isn't important to you you should drop the interaction practically it sounds stupid to kill somebody over gum for a variety of reasons but morally if they're put on notice if they have if they're like fully like cognizant they're not like sleepwalking or whatever i mean they're making the choice that's the choice that they're making right here's an example let's say that stepping into somebody's backyard if you know that that could kill you right you know should you should you do it like okay well let's say you do and you get killed like if a person kills you everybody would be outraged oh they just stepped in your backyard but like you kind of accept the consequences let's say that like a bear lives there instead right well if you step into the yard and a bear is there you know the bear is going to kill you right i think that like if you know the if you know like i feel like you consent to yourself to that harm if you know that if you've been put on notice okay whether it's a bear roaring at you or an angry old [ __ ] white dude with a rifle pointing at you saying hey you cross this area i'm gonna [ __ ] kill you like you've been put on notice like if you're doing it to some extent you're consenting to it like if somebody consents to the consequences you set for them that suggest [ __ ] stupidity on their end it does not automatically justify the consequences you impose with them i disagree i think it 100 automatically justifies the consequences i impose on them on the flip side for you i don't think that somebody being stupid allows them to impose themselves and aggress on your individual rights that would be the flip side of what you're saying well if somebody's dumb enough they should be able to aggress on you without consequence i disagree with that i reject that how to treat the internal happiness of a moral agents such as children mentally impaired animals i view people that are i view people that are non-agents as basically property like i would view them as an extension of some other ownership model so for instance i don't consider the morality of a five or six year old child i would consider them to be an extension of their owners which would be their parents or like an extremely mentally ill person i wouldn't be like morally um considering them i'd be thinking of them as extensions of their caretakers or their family destiny i assume you agree morally with owning some sort of home defense option that kills an illegal entrance onto a property even if no one is home as long as the person is adequately put on notice um and it's reasonable to assume that they're put on notice then i think that that's okay i don't think that most people would violate the property at that point so like there's one really [ __ ] up thing that people do that i don't feel is fair enough in terms of putting on notice i think some people in um [ __ ] i wish i had an example of a story i never discovered this but there was a guy i think that put like zip lines or razor lines or something up at like head level in forests so that if anybody like drove through their forest they would be decapitated wires on atv trails yeah i don't think that that's properly putting somebody on notice it's totally possible that somebody could drive through not see a sign it's totally possible that somebody like just doesn't know about that and then they get killed i don't think that they consented to that level of potential harm or that risk by doing that yeah being put on notice is one thing i see the issue seems to be that they should be able to explain their notice such as x is required for their livelihood or sentimental and not just simply because they put out a notice this is absurd to the point of being atlantic it needs to be a reasonable limit to defensive property i disagree totally disagree i don't believe that it's moral i also i'll flip this around on you then so in nxt so i'm going to flip the question around on you do you think that as long as some piece of property let's say that as long as some so here's my problem ready okay two premises okay here we go let's say that i am sufficiently strong enough that i could kill anybody in hand combat one and two let's say that i can identify a piece of property that is yours that isn't like necessary to your livelihood or well-being okay does that mean that i should be able to freely destroy any of that property that i want because that seems to be the logical extension of your system if the only way to stop me is to kill me and i can identify some piece of property of yours that i can um that i can destroy that's not essential to your well-being or livelihood should i be able to just do that over and over and over again destiny railing of taxation is theft isn't it just the cost of service you see in the nation um well no i mean more wealthy people probably pay a greater percentage than they get back i mean whether or not it's theft is a bit total logical some people consider theft the unjust taking of something so by definition theft is already bad but i mean theft in terms of just like taking something from you i mean like taxation is theft in that way but i mean i think considered like a moral form of theft but some people say that theft is always a moral kind of like a moral murder people would call it not murder but killing some people wouldn't say it's theft it's more like an exchange of miserable i'm confused as to what the good is and what is utilitarianism so the good is an individual's happiness is what the good is basically and then the rule utilitarianism point of view i put is like what type of like rules can we put out to ensure that we're reciprocating values amongst everybody that guarantees the internal happiness of as many people as possible destiny if you are talking in a moral vacuum for the gum scenario and there's only the binary it takes my gum i kill them then i agree but this is so abstracted from reality okay you have to stop this okay if i ask an engineer okay an engineer an architectural engineer is very [ __ ] rarely gonna have to deal with like three plus nine probably ever never actually never because math doesn't exist in the real world i'm a mathematical anti-realist okay if you were to ask an architectural engineer hey what's 3 plus 9 and they were to say what do you mean to ask me what are three i-beams by nine eye beams or what is like a two by four piece of wood or what is like a three plus nine what an absurd hypothetical i've never seen three plus nine in all my days of architecture what a stupid and foolish question if you can't answer an abstracted simplistic absurd hypothetical that means that you don't have this foundation you have no moral principles to stand on and instead you're appealing to some vague form of intuition to try to generate you moral answers and you can't have the conversation you absolutely if i ask you a thing in a vacuum you should be able to give me a yes or no answer now if that yesterday answer disagrees with the practical obligation then you should be able to explain why as well aloe destiny you just talked through the example um of whether or not killing someone over gun was morally justified does any do do you unders do you understand what i just said does he not understand what i just said do most of you understand what i just said do most of you understand why this guy's comment is really [ __ ] stupid or destiny booby traps are not considered self-defense because they're proactive and not reactive it doesn't do giving someone sufficient notice you have to react to imminent danger from a neutral state in other words you must be the agent that responds into the danger it cannot be automatic that's why you're not comfortable you're talking about legal [ __ ] i don't give a [ __ ] i don't care i don't know why just wasting my time reading that argument uh i think murder should be in the societal um contract to be in the hands of the police professional promise solver as a last resort in problem cases and not the okay so what all of you have to answer and you could bite the bullet on this because we might have a fundamental disagreement here is what you have to say is if certain people are trying to destroy your property and the only way you have to defend yourself is through lethal means do you always have to just back off and let them destroy whatever they want i don't think that i don't think that i should have to compel another person to do that okay if a woman has spent 20 years building her perfect garden and she has it and she loves it and that's what she spent her life doing or whatever and some guy is walking up with a molotov cocktail saying i'm going to burn all of your [ __ ] to the [ __ ] ground and the woman can very easily run away and be safe the woman can very easily back off and the guy's not going to kill her he just wants to destroy her [ __ ] [ __ ] or whatever um i i i don't think that i have a right to compel the woman to abandon her stuff and say oh sorry you got to let him kill his [ __ ] i don't think so i think that she has a right to say listen to me i'm putting you on notice if you're going to continue to advance and you're going to try to destroy my [ __ ] i'm going to kill you you now the ball is in your park okay you can make the choice on whether or not you want to accept that consequence but now the choice is yours i've told you what's going to happen if you do it i think the woman has every right to defend her property in that case i don't think that she has to be compulsed compulsed compelled i don't think she has to be compelled to abandon her stuff against a would-be attacker i feel that it's really hard to overcome the absurdity situation so frustrating sure that's an example of specifically adding things to the pile of items destroyed at a certain point that pile of near worthless items comes with something correct also the time required to defend items of little worth i agree that you should be able to defend items of value i'm just wondering what the lower limit reasonably is i don't know i i if i if i go to the extreme hypothetical that i'm given i don't know if i think there needs to be a lower limit i think that if you've sufficiently put somebody on notice and you've exhausted all the other means to get them to back off and they continue to push then i think that you have a right to defend it with lethal force every time does it have someone attrition to ask if you don't consider children moral agency world could killing them with the consent of both parents be moral um if you don't consider children moral agency would killing them with the consent of both parents be moral oh that's that's a really interesting question um intuitively the answer is no why is the answer no i've always joked um the thing is there's an old peter singer argument for abortion that allows you to abort your kids up to like three or four years old i think just because you don't have moral okay okay i think this this is disconnect um just because you don't have moral agency doesn't mean you don't have moral consideration i think that those are two fundamentally separate properties so i think that a child can have no moral agency but i think that they still must be endowed with some level of moral consideration would be the response to that why are they um this is a deeply unsatisfying answer but the reason why they are is because they're humans and that's it that's the only answer there is no reason why um i don't think i don't think that morality is a real thing i don't think there's a good way to answer it um but i would like i would build that answer into my internal happiness model um and in terms of like reciprocated values that like in order for society to function children need to be able to grow up and be happy and healthy and that if we had a society where people were just allowed to kill children on a whim that society would probably be pretty [ __ ] extend that to animals then um or what about a hypothetical proto-human thing um hypothetical proto-human things get interesting animals i don't really care about because animals um animals don't represent any threat to internal happiness ever it's a pretty cold or [ __ ] up answer but i think it's the only good one um so not morally responsible but still the subject of morality yeah destiny why are somebody left supposed to any form of civilized militia based on your reasoning generally because it's something respected in people's internal happiness you can see yourself in l.a um i don't know i don't know much about militias if they're informed responsible then share you'd also go to the real point of view we cannot use the world we could have been executed as children if we're autistic yeah maybe i think that children still have like internal happiness that needs to be respected right and children can also contribute to the internal happiness of other people do we consider capacity to gain moral sentience is considered moral worth no we don't go by future we don't evaluate a current person based on future probabilities um if that was the case then we would be like um like pro-life it would have to be anti-abortion but i don't think that we can make current decisions now like weighing like um i don't think that we can consider like a non-existent life um i don't think that non-existent life has moral consideration that makes sense do you think a person can insanely forfeit their moral consideration by taking the gum um no i mean they could do it for a few reasons maybe they think they won't suffer a punishment maybe i don't know they can do it for a few reasons um do you have a different take on the moral intelligent animal no i don't care i don't care i don't care about any animals it just has to be by humans you know so you admit that this is just a personal thing made up and morality doesn't exist yes edge lord six six six six six six i already said that yeah um destiny this doesn't mesh with your other beliefs and you are somehow going over quickly the reason you value other people is because they can uphold the social contract children cannot do so children should only be given rights insofar as it benefits other adults yeah but i mean i think that's generally what we do right like children are only given rights like we we violate the rights of children all the time right so for instance we force them to go to school we force them to go to bed we force them to eat food that they might not want to eat but we we generally do all of these things for like the well-being of the child right typically anything that we force a child to do against its will we're ultimately doing it for their own well-being under the assumption that these guys aren't capable moral agents that can make these decisions on their own right and then once they make it once they're 18 then they are capable of using their own i agree i would stand for educate scenarios killing children could be a net good eye euthanizing excess kids due to population pressures or perhaps extreme illness or mental problems um yeah that's it's possible it could be sure um that gets into some very uncomfortable eugenics conversations however i will say i think that a lot of pro-choice people unintentionally make eugenics arguments anyways um so for instance when pro-choice people say like listen it might be a life but i think you should be able to abort in cases of like incest or in cases where the fetus is like severely mentally disabled that's a eugenics argument um can you explain the hypothetical the business dying due to another business versus a group of people destroying it how people in the panel were saying those are the same thing so in society we have the ability to compete with other people um based on our economic organization right in our so our currently our system is organized under a system of capitalism whoever can deliver the cheapest goods and services at the highest qualities to people are hopefully the ones that survive in the market and live in the market um if somebody moves in and they out compete you that's part of the contract that we have with each other okay fine like that happens right much the same way that if i have a crush on a girl and i really like her and a better guy comes along for her and she dates him i can't kill that guy because he took my girl in and decreased my happiness the same way that if somebody out competed a business i can't just kill them because they like out-compete my business like that's not how that works um like you wouldn't be justified in doing that now if somebody showed up and like set your business on fire or stole money from you or whatever like yeah um destiny ignoring future happiness seems to have some problems climate change may not be perfect but do you think that extinction level events 200 years from now which causes that originate particularly from now of no more relevance yeah i don't think so um that sucks but i don't see a good argument for it intuitively it feels really bad for me to say but like yeah it seems hard um thankfully intuitively i kind of get around this by saying that like well climate change impacts we are feeling now and in our lifetime so we ought to do something about it but i have like a really hard time um if i go back to like the 1700s or the 1800s and people were starting to invent things like um light bulbs or whatever or we started to get like the early inventions of medicine and i say hey stop industrializing you're going to hurt the earth 400 years from now your lives need to keep sucking and you need to keep dying from diseases i don't know like what moral compulsion that person would feel like [ __ ] well bad things might happen to people in the future that i'm never going to see never going to meet 400 years now they might not even exist they might all kill themselves before then i guess i should make sacrifice now i don't know how you could morally compel somebody to do that so if i could put a bomb underground that will explode 200 years above the earth i mean if there was a serious benefit they're putting that bond around maybe i don't know i think they'd be morally wrong to place a nuke on their ground well like the thing about placing the grounds like well [ __ ] does it benefit you now like if it just doesn't it's just [ __ ] [ __ ] up that just seems like kind of shitty that doesn't seem to be good at all right what would be your argument against eugenics you seem to reject it outright i don't argue against genetics at all i think that i think that there are some totally valid forms of like eugenic arguments but the only reason the only problem that i have with eugenics isn't the price it's not it's not the problem with eugenics um it's a problem with um it's a problem with telling other people what they can or cannot do reproductively that's generally my issue with eugenics but i mean like i think some form of eugenics is like perfectly fine say for instance um these parkinson's the like ultra like genetically heritable disease there are like certain diseases like these like mono um genetic diseases that like um are super highly transmissible or whatever if we could eradicate these diseases by like doing like egg implants or like sperm donations or whatever like i think that would be like a positive form of eugenics avoiding those types of products and they would be like okay um eugenics for like people that like look a certain way that gets a little bit weird i don't think that's a good thing but oh yeah huntington's disease sure do you believe in objective morality of course not the ddos kid was a twitch streamer can you not kill him since he's depriving you of your income as part of a competitive market ddosing somebody is not part of a competitive market much the same that going to somebody's storm burning it down is not part of a competitive market you're like destroying somebody's business like through an aggressive action to just like destroy or disuse their property or whatever right assuming it was a legal action no it was a legal action then that's fine if it's if that's like part of the game if people like oh like ddos and whatever that's like part of like the composition of streaming competition experience and sure that's fine but that's because everybody in that has made that agreement right that's part of that contract that everybody has with each other let's talk about the all right i got like two more of these i'm [ __ ] tired okay destiny if attacking retreating people isn't self-defense since you have other options with a threat let's contract the idea that attacking conservatives can be self-defense it's just the option other options we're taking certains don't actually get through being a poor example oh yeah sure like i don't think that attacking all conservatives is necessarily 100 immediately morally justifiable this would be like a last resort type thing if all voting and all other measures have failed or whatever sure so any legal action a business can take to destroy your income which warrants a violent response um the thing is is that legality should codify our laws legality the law should be a codification of our morals and if we're all operating under the same laws then we should generally accept those business practices as being competitive um and like just because somebody out competes doesn't mean that we should whatever be like we have to go kill them however lee the law is downstream from morality meaning codify not codify sorry codify um just because something is legal a law doesn't necessarily mean it's moral so there it is possible that a business could engage in such an unbelievably aggressive action even though it is the law you reject it you disagree that you think that law exists in some way and then you could start taking escalating measures that could end with violence um so for instance um however killing an individual would really be the solution but like for instance let's say that it's legal to dump waste in a lake that like is destroying a town well [ __ ] you could pick at the business maybe that doesn't work you can start protesting the business you could boycott them maybe that doesn't work you can start destroying the roads that lead to the business if their pollution of your water is literally destroying your village then you can start you could burn down their factory you could start like you could escalate to violent measures to make them stop you know like if they're getting workers to show up and like fight the fires and bubble and they're still pleased you could attack the workers if it comes down to that yeah for sure in that sense you could escalate yeah but it's impossible for the government to take a law that taken account everyone's individual morality well that's the goal of the government it should most law should take into account like almost everybody's like individual preferences they should yeah if kylo ren has threatened to kill the dude before they started chasing him he would be the aggressor not the wrong right yeah but the thing is once cal started running i think he would have like dropped that that would have been a de-escalation and then killing him past that point i don't think is okay okay one more question and i'm going to sleep okay destiny don't plenty of laws exist that should exist that don't necessarily codify morality for example we can say that we should have laws of sealants and that runnings feeling as individual is not necessarily immoral um if we believe that the law is a reflection of morality then we would argue that it would be immoral so for instance if speed limits exist because they represented as a desire to keep roads safe and we acknowledge that going past a certain speed limit creates an unsafe or hazardous condition that can create the conditions that increase the risk towards other people's well-being then in that case speeding would be immoral sure we can do more of these later i think i hope that like um like something that i hope to demonstrate in answering these questions i i hope something that you maybe see or maybe you don't maybe it's all voodoo magic or whatever um even if maybe you disagree on my underlying premises like i would hope that like when you ask me a question and i'm able to talk through it and answer it fairly quickly that it becomes obvious that like even if you disagree with some of these underlying foundations by having this like by having this underlying foundation you can ask me like a relatively difficult question but i can talk through it like pretty quickly because i just have to appeal to like my you know like my fundamental principles here like oh well what if this thing were to happen that would be crazy like okay that would be crazy well let's think right are we aggressing with somebody's happiness like if we are like can this person take reasonable steps to stop it like if they can like are they doing so like or like if you're aggressing on somebody's happiness is that a reasonable aggression like like there are questions we can ask we could very quickly get down to like what is the answer like yes or no as long as we have these like initial fundamental positions figured out there might be some like really weird tricky questions like what if we create an ai that turns into a human being that is sufficiently intelligent like that might get like a little bit strange um because unfortunately i have to bake in i have to bake in an arbitrary assumption here that the only individual happiness that matters is humans that that's just a that's just a thing some people here will do sentient life in which case you would use this exact same oral system to be vegan um but yeah it's called the us flag you stupid [ __ ] this is the only flag that the united states federally hasn't recognized why the [ __ ] are you acting like the different