Objective Morality, Subjective Morality, Nihilism.

the topic of today's video is neither directly nor indirectly related to veganism but i noticed the first comment in my comment section is about veganism not that surprising if you know a little bit about me or about my channel and i'm probably going to mention veganism a few times as a useful sort of parallel or useful sort of contrasting example but two parallel lines by definition will never intersect these two things we're discussing although comparable are very much discreet it's one thing as a vegan to [Music] deal with people who just never thought about any of the ethical issues involved in veganism it's never occurred and you know sometimes people pretend sometimes people you know uh have an artifice about them you know of uh acting out the role of someone who's never thought about these things when really they have when really they've put quite a lot of thought into justifying why it is they eat meat right if they're not vegan sometimes people pretend they haven't thought it through and in fact they turned out to be ex-vegetarian or ex-vegan or they had an ex-boyfriend who was a vegetarian or vegan they've put a lot of thought into it but sometimes you really deal with people for whom this these are just new and unfamiliar concepts they've never applied their intelligence they've never provided they've never applied their powers of analysis to this part of their life at all and then obviously you deal with a certain kind of reluctance on their part to look back and regret the ethical decisions they've made let's say over 10 years leading up to the conversation you're having and quite possibly including ethical decisions they made that same day what they eat for lunch and maybe you're having the conversation over dinner um now regret is already i think of tremendous philosophical significance tremendous political significance it's already a complex difficult to understand topic that's very very different from one culture to the next dealing with regret in a japanese context in the 21st century very different from a western european context and dealing with regret in western europe in the 21st century very different from the 18th century so on and so forth you know what the process is of going into examining and recognizing the extent to which you yourself were wrong and you were self were culpable um with examples like veganism you know um the quality of regret and the qualitative aspects of understanding why and how people refuse to reflect refuse to analyze refuse to take responsibility refuse to regret the the qualitative aspects of the refusal to admit your own wrongdoing they're extraordinary and they're very difficult to compare to anything else now briefly digress with the caveat or even stated these things are quite quite specific to your culture sometimes specific to your gender and ethnicity and subculture and so on and so forth like i think it can be genuinely said that the concept of sin is very different in judaism as opposed to christianity it may be very different in catholicism than it is in mormonism or you know within christianity different contrasts could be could be drawn up you know and by the same token um it can be said that you know jewish people may experience regret and the reluctance to reflect on their own actions and and regret them in a way that's really qualitatively different from a catholic person from a certain type of protestant person uh so on and so forth um with all those caveats have been stated it's remarkable to me that i've spoken to so many cigarette smokers who could say with no hesitation in a sense they could say with no self-doubt with no agony um that they regret smoking cigarettes for 10 years and they don't feel weak when they're doing it you know if anything they feel strong you know they look back and they say this is this terrible thing that was such a big part of their life now many of you might be thinking about the possibility of getting cancer but that's only a possibility a huge percentage of people who smoke cigarettes never get lung cancer you know uh when i've spoken to people face to face very often what they regret are things that actually did happen things that weren't hypothetical just give an example saying oh i remember you know fighting with my ex-girlfriend so much i remember having to go outside and smoke cigarettes because my girlfriend didn't want me smoking in the apartment and then i'd fight with her about that so again compared to dying of cancer this may seem trivial but if it goes on for 10 years it's not a trivial part of your life they look back and realize they were justifying all of these conflicts with their girlfriend they were instigating they were the cause of these conflicts with their girlfriend and possibly conflicts with their parents conflicts with their co-workers conflicts of their body that these things all hinged on this habit they were attached to that nail in hindsight uh they can they can look back on it and regret it okay it's remarkable to me that people are so much more reluctant to engage in this kind of reflection and regret about the difference between a meat-eating diet and a vegan diet and you know even within my own culture i have to ask why why why is it so different from smoking cigarettes why is it so hard for you people you know and look you know we all have different kinds of talents maybe i'm especially talented at regret you know what i mean like maybe that's one of my personal strengths is i'm really good at regretting things and maybe other people aren't um now i said before you know actually a frighteningly small percentage of people have serious health consequences from smoking cigarettes there may be smaller things they can notice they may smoke cigarettes and notice it's harder for them to walk up a staircase you know they may have these kinds it's kind of astounding by contrast what a large percentage of people have negative health consequences from eating a non-vegan diet from eating meat milk eggs etc you know melissa and i we know an amazing variety of people who have had serious serious negative health consequences from eating meat milk dairy nets from eating from eating cholesterol in brief and point one we're not that old yet when i'm when i'm in my 50s when i'm in my 60s how many of these people am i gonna know right and point two we don't know that many people we don't have that many friends we're not that welcome to if you have a huge social circle you know a lot of people have had heart attacks and other cholesterol-related ailments so i'd have you know okay well it's a it's a bigger it's a bigger survey and i've got to say it's really striking to me how reluctant they are to regret these decisions now i said very briefly at the beginning of this video regret is significant philosophically regret is significant um politically i knew a man i honestly can't remember his name now i'd have to go dig through my email history and he was slightly famous in the history and politics of cambodia so he was famous to people like me who really cared about the history and politics component and people read english because with cambodia there are people who read in cambodian they're people who read english and they're also people who read french there's a big french language literature in cambodia it's kind of a different scene the francophone politics of cambodia real lively scene in paris and some of the suburbs that have a big cambodian xl population you can imagine and you know um it really haunted me it really disturbed me that i had a direct eyewitness testimony from a very elderly man who knew who known uh this white western author about the history campaign who'd known him for many years and he this this eyewitness told me you know that guy he really was pro-communist he really did support the khmer rouge and paul pot at a certain stage of that historical development now i was kind of furious and astounded by this this is my fundamental problem is i can't believe anyone would be that stupid um i'm in my 40s i hope i'm over it now but wow it was it it has been a struggle and maybe it still is a struggle for me to really engage in discussion analysis instead with the profound assumption people can be that stupid you know and you see things differently um but anyway this guy i read his i'd read his work read is formally published researched written work and what i couldn't accept about that wasn't that he had made a mistake and later changed his mind it's that i had never seen him write a single word of regret you know i mean there are different forms of communism in the history of the world but i mean one of the most egregious the most outrageous i mean you know if you knew someone and they'd been a communist in japan in the 1930s and then they changed their mind in the 1940s you know well okay communism within japan you know okay maybe maybe they weren't so crazy it was how is it possible for someone who could read and write the cambodian language fluently a highly educated you know white western man how is it how is it possible for this particular man to have supported paul pot specifically the khmer rouge specific this extreme form of communism specifically and then in writing books about this stuff years later to not have real soul searching real regret i mean i want to want to see the agony on the page i want to see it spilling out thing it's very very alien to me and um [Music] you know i knew this guy to some extent and i mean look the point of my telling this story now is really for me to just tell you how much that chewed me up like how much that hurt me emotionally that i didn't know how to deal with it now some of you guys don't know much about the history of cambodia the history of communism in cambodia okay some of you may have met people face to face in real life or here on the internet who in a sense are nazis people who are neo-nazis you know but those are mostly people who are just kind of playing a game with words and abstract ideas and that they may be trying to get followers on instagram and they may be trying to shock and horrify their own parents to be different kinds of games going on in their own head it's very different to meet and talk to someone who was alive at that time who was there who was involved who in that sense was a nazi and i'll tell you something it doesn't it doesn't really matter that much whether or not they literally have blood on their hands like if you met someone who was a journalist but they were alive at that time they were a journalist supporting the nazi party and supporting the atrocities you know it's maybe that's much more disturbing maybe that's much worse than meeting and dealing with someone who who was just a normal rank-and-file soldier someone who just followed orders and pulled triggers in the army fighting for the nazi side uh well okay so my encounter with that particular scholar of of buddhism scholar of the history of cambodia et cetera i covered all these basis to some extent um and really a cambodian specialist uh sure that's like the shocking discovery that someone you know really was a part of uh the nazi party in that period when they had power when they were committing atrocities and you know there are different ways to measure the number of people massacred but the khmer rouge they are one of the very few regimes in the history of the world that at least have a credible claim like when being compared to the nazis like who was worse the body count and the violence it's so extraordinary in such a short span of time uh the khmer rouge are certainly on the list of the worst examples uh in the history of the human race were they actually worse than adolf hitler in the nazis oh it's certainly a judgment call but anyway they're on the they're in everybody's top ten list for the worst examples of human nature not just in the 20th century but in the whole history of the of the human race so you know i i'm aware that i kind of do live my life with this sort of unstated demand that there are things people ought to regret you know and i have i have to admit a certain kind of outrage uh not the people made mistakes not that people made the wrong decisions my outrage is knowing what you know now looking back now why can't you regret it um i don't think i'm extraordinary in this respect but i might be unusual in thinking it through in such a kind of crystal clear form and expressing it to my friends you know what i mean expressing it to my other people i know in my life friends relatives colleagues what have you um that's really a requirement i have with people in my life you know it's one thing to do an evil act and you know evil acts they can be deeply personal they can be very subtle you know it could be just something you said to someone uh you know in your own personal life maybe in your professional life too but might not be actions that have a body count or have easily palpable consequences but you know i i think it's one thing for somebody who said something that that's really terrible whether to you or someone else and it's another thing when you when you say to them afterwards maybe days afterwards maybe years afterwards you know oh look looking back don't you regret that now don't you regret you know what you did so i think i think regret it's um it's tremendously significant philosophically politically and in this sense uh personally you know you are what you regret maybe to a much greater extent than you are what you do that you are what you know what you learn you know you're very limited in what you can learn we can all look back and regret our own ignorance what it is you have the opportunity to learn what has even occurred to you to research or look into or question you know you can remain ignorant about things your whole life or for decades again actually veganism is a good example i've met people who got to their later years middle age or elderly and they never questioned where milk comes from they never questioned how cheese was made they really never thought about it yeah it's they never asked the question they never did a google search where does cheese come from how has this happened you know that's very alien for me i'm just a very curious person in that way but you know where they sincerely you never thought about it okay so you know what you know it tells me a lot about you but it doesn't tell me everything what you do you know the decisions you make the actions you take the initiative you show tells me something about you it doesn't doesn't tell you anything but regret what you regret and what you refuse to regret it runs deep it tells me a lot about who you are and when you look in the mirror uh for any of you i think you i think you feel me i think you know what i'm talking about here uh whether they are things very personal and you know trivial in terms of their consequences terrible things you did to someone else that may have just been words you've spoken things that you've done that harm people or you know very material things things with real world palpable consequences um in our regrets we reveal to ourselves and others who we really are now i only know one person who took up the position of moral nihilism we could say moral aestheticism i'm going to describe and define those terms just a second get into semantics in a second i only know one person who had adopted the position of moral nihilism and then reverted to switch to went back to believing in moral realism more realism here meaning that there is an objectively real sense in which something is morally good morally evil good or bad uh and that is you know i have to admit to myself that is strange and disturbing to me in the same sort of way that somebody being ex-vegan someone who's lived as a vegan let's say for two years and then makes the decision to go back to eating meat that's more disturbing to me than someone who's just never thought about it who's never been vegan at all and again in some cases you have to accept never thought about it it can really mean never gave any thought to it never made excuses never analyzed it people can live in total ignorance well you know if you were vegan for two years and i saw you come on youtube and give arguments in favor of veganism i saw you refute arguments against veganism it's very hard for me to accept that now you've you've switched sides it's much harder for me it's more disturbing for me right and yes in most cases the people's reasons are just laughable they're just ridiculous they are reasons that nobody could or should take seriously it's still disturbing for me it's still upsetting for me do you think my father had good reasons for supporting joseph stalin no they were laughable i mean even for a child i could refute them as a child do you think my father had good reasons for supporting mao zedong and his masters no right still disturbing it's still upsetting right and why because those are excuses he lived by those are those ideas those decisions those moral compromises those beliefs if you like had real world consequences so no matter how stupid no matter how preposterous no matter how laughable they are right still upsetting still disturbance still matters and i tell you it's still it still matters to me um so i have to take a moment here i think to describe to you and this may be the most important part of the video for a program any of you the sense in which nihilism matters in ethics because i think it really does matter i don't think this is just a philosophical um this isn't a philosophical parlor trick this isn't a game being played on a chalkboard that doesn't have consequences people in there in their real lives and i'm going to say something for this is the most flattering thing i can say about the other side of this argument the arguments in favor of eating meat are fundamentally just boring to me like they're really not interesting they're not really worth thinking about or understanding in depth you know the arguments people give to justify smoking marijuana i also find incredibly boring i mean oh uh in most cases both the justifications for eating meat and the justifications are smoking marijuana they they don't amount to much more than people enjoy them and whatever they enjoy they're gonna make excuses for it's not there gotta tell you something the excuses for and the justifications for moral realism they are interesting and i can even say that they are important this is a rare case of an argument where from my perspective as a nihilist i can really say i think that both sides of the argument are worth hearing and worth understanding and worth treating in some depth now i admit i haven't described or defined yet moral realism um of course it's wrong of course it's almost laughably self-evidently wrong in what sense can one moral judgment be correct and true for all people at all times in the same way that a law of physics like gravity is correct and true for all people at all times regardless of whether or not you're living in a culture that understands gravity whether or not you're living in a culture that even has words in its own language for gravity or let alone science and specific uh mathematical formula to quantify gravity i mean another example here is uh the value of pi not p-i-e but p-i you know these mathematical relationships between geometric figures and you can say in a sense this is true in all times for all people in all places now another one that's actually a little bit a little bit more dubious people make these claims about music also uh anthropologists a dug up i think it was a flute made of bone i'm sorry this is i believe this is more than ten thousand years ago it was really really ancient and they were able to scan it with some kind of computer technology so there's a bone and had been hauled out in the middle and holes have been drilled in it to make a flute and so i'm sorry but let's let's say it was ten thousand years ago for the sake of argument and they were able to prove that already at that time before the development of writing for the development of our culture and civilization human beings already had the same sense of tune and harmony that some of the properties of music were already true with this uh you know the idea of what the gap should be between two notes or two octaves or something there were some things that were that were consistent true well all right now we can argue against this the idea of what music or harmony is there ought to be was it really the same in ancient china ancient india ancient europe and those interesting examples of music because we have written records for these things for what music was in ancient china uh we have evidence to work from what music was in ancient australia the indigenous people of australia another interesting question anyway you know this idea of something being um objectively real and that morality and that the judgments of ethics and the distinction between good and evil right and wrong um that this can be true at all natural people i think what makes it interesting what makes it worthwhile to really think through that side of the argument very thoroughly even though it's incorrect is closely parallel to the way in which gender equality may be descriptively false but still have a kind of prescriptive value this is going to be much easier to understand with examples than abstract reasoning you know let's say we have a society that decides equality between the genders is really important so therefore when people apply to work for the fire department we are going to have exactly the same tests applied to men and women now some of those tests are intellectual but a lot of the tests for working in the fire department for being a fireman as we still say it's a gender specific term they deal with your ability to for example lift another human being and carry them out of a room or carry them out of a building you know perhaps when surrounded by smoke and fire perhaps in very difficult circumstances a lot of brute strength involved right so if we commit to the abstract idea of gender equality and that can be stated in the following format it can be stated as committing to the axiom that men and women are equal now do we really mean that what if what we really mean is that men and women should be treated as if they're equal even when there are some inequalities well a counter-argument which probably wherever you're living in the world whether in europe or north america not if you live in saudi arabia not if you live in afghanistan but many of you are living in parts of the world had to address this is a real world problem debate because if you embrace gender equality in that sense then the result will be that you have astoundingly few women working in the fire department some women will be able to pass the same tests as the men some however the women the tiny minority of women who are strong enough to meet those standards they instead have the option of being an olympic athlete like this is part of your competing there are a lot of really good jobs those women can have and then you get into this in the military also like okay well if you're only interested in women who are over six feet tall who can do a certain number of chin-ups they exist you know some women are stronger than some men and whatever will that tiny minority of women have a lot of really interesting job opportunities in life that's why they may not be willing to become a fireman as we still say fireworker you know what should i say that um a fire extinguishment employee you know uh and they may not be willing to to work for the military so if that's the principle of gender equality that you take and put into practice right the outcomes may be unequal they may exacerbate inequality the result is that in the entire fire department you have 800 men and only five women or you may have zero it's hard to deal with it's really hard to deal with now at the opposite extreme and i have lived in places where this was an ongoing controversy they have systems where for the sake of gender equality they have unequal standards for men's equipment and they have the same tests but it's you know if you're a woman you have to lift less weight and you have to run up and down fewer stairs while carrying less weight and this kind of thing well the result of that policy is more women are employed by the vertebrae mhm but when a house is actually on fire right if someone is lying on the floor choking and they need a fireman to lift them and carry them out of the building right it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman that's that's the task confronting you you know now i say this honestly um look i'm gonna go further i think if you have a human heart you have to have mixed feelings about this there has to be part of you that wishes we could have a fire department that's 50 men and 50 women or 55 45 that's nearly 50 50. that would be better that would be good you know i it would be a better world if that were possible and it's difficult to have the sort of uh sound foil you know to just accept living in a totally unequal world we say well the only really thing that matters for this job is that you can lift and carry someone out of a fire and if we need people who have that kind of brute strength and who are willing to work at this relatively low wage you know because again there are women who can do that but they may be olympic athletes they may be working just as fitness models or what have you they have all kinds of different job opportunities in front of them the tiny minor women who could compete at that level and then you then you end up with a 100 male workforce in some of these jobs with that being justified paradoxically by a commitment to gender equality so this is the sense in which the idea of moral realism remains interesting and worthwhile to contemplate and philosophize about it and so on and so forth even if it's false right so even if the claim that women and men are equally strong is false i.e when you look at a population of 10 million people how many women are strong enough to do the job of environment and how many men are the available labor pool it's not equal right but there's still a sense in which it's interesting we're talking about whether or not we ought to politically organize the fire department on the basis of of gender equality um in this same way i think the the perennial appeal in every sense of the word perennial the perennial appeal of moral realism is that the world would be a better place and that our own lives would be better as individuals just in our own psychology their own reflections their own thoughts and dreams and so on in our own private reflections and referee that it would be better if we lived according to this fixed standard if we lived according to this notion of of moral realism now i've already said that's not what i believe i i don't subscribe to i don't support that that tenant or that claim uh but i think it's interesting enough and i think it's important enough to really be taken seriously and it's sort of like ethical cantianism in that no matter how laughable it might be no matter how easily refuted it might be um it is something that's perennially going to come up again and again what do i mean by uh cantonism specifically in ethics one of the ideas kant is most famous for emmanuel kant is that um now this i'm just thinking this video is going to be demonetized because i pronounced his name kant rather than can [Laughter] uh one of his most influential ideas is that what is immoral for one person to do uh is immoral for everyone to do that if you wouldn't approve of everyone doing a certain action then you shouldn't do it yourself so if you feel that you personally would prefer not to fight in the war but you think it would be unethical for everyone to refuse to be drafted to fight in the war this is a sort of kantian problem was very simplistic now look you know as i said this is actually very very easy to refute not everyone is a medical doctor not everyone has two legs there are actually very good reasons why the the moral standards and decisions that apply to me or that i make may not apply to another person there are real reasons for subjective factors to to intervene why you in particular may be justified in in making a moral decision that you would disapprove of in in others so it's but still you know i think that a lot of people do live with um frankly an almost magnetic sense of being moved and guided by that kind of kantian way of thinking if i couldn't approve of someone else doing this action how dare i approve of doing it myself this comes up a lot many years ago we talked about minimalism on the channel it was probably because i had one supporter of the channel shout out to jake eames who was very consumed by this at the time um you know there are people who really are consumed and haunted by this notion that oh well i wouldn't approve of someone else using this disposable bag using this disposable light bulb using this disposable plastic spoon you know i wouldn't approve of a million people or a billion people doing this thing that has some negative ecological uh outcome therefore i have to live my whole life devoted to basically coming into a kind of consistency with what i think an idealized person should do and what i think should be universally prescriptive behavior behavior or requirements that all people want to follow so again this is an example of something that you know uh it does it does haunt people now again it's been many many years ago i don't have to go into it now from my perspective it's childishly simple to overturn but even if i overturn it it still matters people still means that people still has consequence people's lives uh well if you have just signed up to fight in the us army against the taliban if you're in the middle of that war yeah you have to be willing to eat food that comes in disposable packaging right so mre is the abbreviation which stands for meals ready to eat war involves plastic forks and plastic knives do you want to win this war or not you know now there are a lot of other ethical compromises you make in war but if you are making the commitment that it's worthwhile for you personally and for uh i don't know 20 other men or in your battalion or something you think it's worthwhile for you to go to this small village in afghanistan and fight this battle it's completely preposterous for you to lose the battle or or indeed surrender to the other side because you will not use the plastic fork you will not use a plastic knife you will not use disposable packaging for your food well guess what this can be generalized i want to write a book i'm going to use up a bunch of pencils and paper you know now it's not the case my situation i don't disapprove of other people using pencils and paper i don't disprove other people using plastic forks but for many people they're committed to a minimalist ideal and they're not thinking of this in a way that is relative to the goal they're pursuing or the outcome they're pursuing they're instead thinking of it in this cantian way uh generalizing uh you know to this massive extent about what all humanity uh ought to do and then they feel beholden to this notion of what all humanity they ought to live up to it or live down to it as a kind of minimum standard i'm looking at the uh comments here but i don't think there's anything here that should should derail my monologue i do see your comments coming guys i appreciate them if you have a second hit the thumbs up button it'll help people find the video both while it's being uh recorded and after melissa you want to jump in it is a very minor thing but minor major hit it i felt there was no good time for me to interrupt your monologue but a gender neutral term for firemen would be firefighter ah firefighter right why don't you put on these lights once you put on that one and that one because it's getting dimmer now we actually have the snow falling and the one right above you yeah uh yeah that's good that's enough okay um okay i'll read and respond to some of these comments but if there's anything else you want to say but if you want to want to jump on that um i'm happy to hear it i'm happy to be distracted yeah uh it's a good point you know when people think in generalities about feminism about the quality of right gender that's a very good example to use just yeah i respect that right well look you know people at a very deep level they want to presume that the more generalized argument is the more powerful it is the closer they come to writing a law of physics you know that someone's a universal axiom and you have to with maturity appreciate that the opposite is true the more precise and particular and incisive your arguments are the more particular so one of my ex-girlfriends this is many many years ago before i'd uh met melissa before i met the woman who became my first wife and my first ex-wife many many years ago i remember she asked me a challenging question about how i would teach morality to my own daughter if in future i i had a daughter and um she sorry i'm forgetting the precise word she used but she meant morality in relation to sex before marriage in relation to whether or not you'd have an abortion if you got accidentally pregnant morality in this province which you know stereotypically and actually is very often something the father sits down and talks to with the daughter and the answer i gave her really shocked her and really impressed her and i said it pretends the answer i gave her was it depends on the particular girl and i was able to say i knew her and i knew her sister to some extent i said look at you and look at your sister you're blood-related and you grew up in the same household and you're such totally different people what i would have to say to you about sexuality and ethics and what have you like you know if you were my daughter or what have you it's totally different from what i would say to your sister and it's true they were they were two sisters who were really very very different people now as you can imagine the conversation went further from there but i was making the fundamental point that what would be really traumatic and difficult to deal with for one girl is something that would another would kind of take in stride and laugh at and wouldn't uh wouldn't be flummoxed by or wouldn't be wouldn't be slowed down by it all there really are in this province it's worth time but there are things that are really really different now i talk about this sort of thing in my book um using some much more erudite and less sexy you know um allegories and and metaphors but um you know how you teach politics to someone who has a tremendously energetic risk-taking character someone who is willing to and maybe someone who already repeatedly has risked their life by committing to an extreme course of action in politics that may be very different from how you teach politics to someone who's fundamentally a lazy a lazy stubborn uh conflict avoiding person you know we can come up with any number of people but you know if i'm really teaching politics i'm really teaching morality if i'm really teaching philosophy what if the most important thing to recognize isn't this objective and even transcendental sense of right and wrong good and evil what if what's really powerful is understanding in this particular and incisive and analytical way you know who i'm teaching and to what and what outcome you know so and this what i've just said to you it doesn't come to anyone naturally this is not there's old man's wisdom here i think nobody nobody realizes this at say age 11 and then maybe a few people realize it at age 16 and more people realized age 26 oh wow because i think it is really natural no matter what your upbringing whether you're raised christian muslim buddhist hindu or totally nihilistic atheists uh i think it's natural to cling to that idea of a law of physics even if you don't have the words for that you didn't grow up without your tradition something that's true for everyone at all times no exception that that's that's strength that's power and not this um not this business of being like a tailor and when someone walks into your tailor shop and they say they want to buy a shirt you don't say oh well this is the best shirt you start by taking a look at them it's like okay what's the right shirt for you i've got to tell you that seems weak from a childish perspective or from a teenage perspective but you get more mature and you realize that's the real strength that matters our ideas of standardized education yes that's that's a really deep point actually sorry go on yeah yeah yeah my education and seeing how if i would have had the right inputs how i would have approached things differently uh in innumerable ways um but because the education was standardized because we all had to reach these benchmarks at the right time um yeah i i no no i mean you're right the what i was saying as a kind of law of physics mentality really it's much more directly an extension of the standardized system of education mentality yeah and certainly when i was growing up i was really keenly aware of that that um our sense of what was right and wrong as children was in large part based on how we felt the teachers ought to behave how they ought to treat us how and you know even though we were aware of things that were unfair you know that we you know and it's very easy as a child think well we ought to all write the same exam and it all ought to be graded fairly for all of us these are some of the first meditations on justice and injustice that we have as children and their um their influence lacks uh lasts a very long time yeah yeah absolutely i mean how do you how do you grade all essays in the class this name i mean when it's something creative well let's give just two really simple examples you know aristotle is very interested in the question of uh at what age do you teach math to a child at what age do you teach spelling reading and writing at what age you teach music to a child now basically every country in the world coming with a standardized system of education that well the correct answer is it's not going to be the same for all children right like really you know if you're working on a system of one-to-one tutorial whereas one tutor working with one child for each of those subjects maybe this child can start learning math at age six and this one at age four and this one at age eight and you know genuinely for their benefit i don't just mean pandering to them or something like where really it's not the same but physical education i saw an interview with a guy who became an olympic athlete i'm sorry i forget all the sports he played but he was in he was in many different sports and he was so enormous compared to children his own age that parents would complain why do you have a child from the eighth grade playing with the fourth graders you know i mean like when he was in fourth grade people assumed he was many years older than the children and then just a couple years later the complaints instead from parents were why is there an adult playing with the children why is there a grown man so he was someone who went through puberty at a very very early age relative to the other other kids in his grade and he was something of a giant and as i say went on to become become an athlete well you know yeah if you're training someone as an individual if you're training someone even just for a sport that's one thing and when instead you have a standardized system of education okay so grade four now we're all gonna learn volleyball well you know maybe some people were ready to learn volleyball two years earlier and some tears like you know uh these are simple and crude things but unfortunately the implications are actually deep and vast and uh and go on go on forever they go on for the rest of their lives so yeah somebody was making a comment about um equality versus equity um and left-wing feminism and so on and so forth well yeah i think this is probably this is deep and shallow at the same time the way that most people are thinking about equality most of the time has to do with the education system either how their teachers did treat them or how they thought their teachers ought to treat them you know either what the exams really were or what the exams ought to be that there should be one standard for everyone at all at all times and yeah i think that does actually get to the root of um you know the belief in objective morality about good and evil being objectively real wouldn't it be reassuring if the difference between good and evil had this same kind of quality um which again is introduced to us in this convincing and coercive way by the formal education system okay interesting question from bonjour trieste or no i'm sorry bonjour uh distinction what's the difference um bonjour tristes asks quote is the main meaningful difference between a moral absolutist saying their stance is law in a nihilist staying their subjective stance ought to be law that the nihilist is capable of changing his or her position okay so great question i wonder if you've read some chapters of my book i'm writing a book that's not published yet but i've shared some chapters if not you will very much find the answer to this question in my book and i'm wondering if you've read the book because your your way of phrasing the question is kind of right up my alley it's very much how i like to to to deal with these things uh so in my book no more manifestos there are some portions of the book that are negative in the sense of explaining to you explain you what it is i'm opposed to what it is i'm against explaining to you what is bad and evil and wrong but there are also portions of the book that i think are very clearly marked out as positive or i'm telling you look this is what my philosophy is about positively not just these are the advantages of my philosophy the cell's going to make your life better but positively this is this is what i'm preaching in this in this sense and um the positive aspects of nihilism are explained in one chapter so in a sense the whole book is talking about nihilism but some chapters more than other um has a lot of ground to cover uh the book but one of the chapters expresses it in an a protracted allegory of two bakeries one bakery that's run by true believers and one that's run by nihilists so this is a hypothetical thought exercise that will never exist uh in the real world but the bakery that is run by believers they they believe they know what good bread is they believe they know what a good croissant is they believe they know what a good brioche is they have a sort of written constitution they have a tradition they're beholden to and they say there is one way to bake this product and we have to live up to that standard we're beholden to that standard forever so their idea of good bread is not based on what the customers like it doesn't change from one decade to the next or one month to the next about what uh customers like another good example be a birthday cake like they can just keep on making birthday cakes the same way and it's not gonna change the passion right they have a notion set in stone now this may sound preposterous but if you know people in cuisine plenty of people are like this they'll tell you they run a traditional hungarian bakery uh what have you you know um uh they'll tell you you know uh that they we at this bakery carry on the uh tradition of uh parisian bread from the such and such arundi's mall from the such and such century you know they have a they have a specific notion of baking of the art of baking that they are working hard to continue and promulgate for future generations and they don't care if it's out of style they don't care if it's popular they don't care if that's not the kind of bread people want to eat and it's not the kind of brioche people want to eat um and you know i present there in a sophisticated way the type of doubt that nihilists live with and then the type of innovation that comes out of that doubt where you are willing to say to yourself even with something as as tangible as bread well i don't know what good bread is and i don't know what the right recipe is for the winter of 2022 i'm not sure we're doing this the right way i'm not sure we're approaching this problem the right way i'm willing to ask new questions i'm willing to do do research i'm willing to innovate and i'm willing to experiment and my experiments may have risks involved right like i'm willing to try things that are new and different and i'm willing to fail a few times before i i get it right so um you know you've asked a good question is it just that the nihilist is capable of changing and now by the way the relationship between belief and law the relation between nihilism and law many chapters in my book talk about that in great depth so if you read the whole book you'll know everything i have to say about law the justice system the court system the police the constitution and belief and nihilism being kind of possibly this is a huge portion of what the book deals with although the book is also in large part a thesis on the philosophy of education and the reform of education so it has a lot to cover um well you know okay change change is objectively real progress is a shadow of our ideologies um it's a shadow cast by our ideological convictions i might say to be more precise what about innovation what is the most important difference um is the willingness to innovate and even the the desire and the motivation to innovate right and um you used the term moral absolutist i actually haven't used it in the video before reading your your totally fine internet it was just not thermos yes um when when you think about moral absolutists what is the role for innovation from the perspective of moral absolutism now look at the taliban it's not a lot of capacity for innovation there and you know for long centuries you can look at the catholic church and you know these may seem like cartoonish examples of moral absolutism when you know people on a one-to-one basis um they may have forms of moral absolutism that are more i don't know they fit more seamlessly into our 21st century liberal society but nevertheless um the their in their lack of capacity for innovation their reluctance to innovate indeed what i said begin this video the reluctance to regret anything so there's a lot of other significance of the reluctance to look back on mistakes and work right this is a big big difference that has big implications for people's lives as individuals and when you scale it up and and talk about society as a whole you want to see something yeah just getting back on the topic of the man who who supported paul pop that support of the khmer rouge um and how still i think today uh communism tends to have this revolutionary quality to it that it's a new thing at least to me like i still think it has this um but it is not annihilus it is not a nihilistic idea communism it is not an ideology still and it has all the problems of uh you know committing to an ideology of belief in systems so um i guess i don't really have a question so i can formulate this question though no i i see what you're getting at so look um i'm gonna talk about communism economically because it's more palpable the same way i was talking about bread as something you can see and touch but what i'm about to say is not merely true about economics it's true of religion and not just political ideology also uh when you go to the grocery store and you see 10 different brands of orange juice or maybe 20 different brands of orange juice depending on where you are in the size the coaster see many different varieties of orange juice it is very easy for a communist to say it's very easy for a marxist to say that orange juice would be cheaper and the economy would be more efficient as a whole if the government shut down 19 out of the 20 orange juice companies centralize the production and distribution of orange juice so you get just one national orange juice company right and then you can imagine the advantages in terms of economies of scale in terms of reduced waste better distribution and you can look into it there will be some advantages not dramatic in terms of production because ultimately there were farms that are growing oranges and there were factories processing processing into juice but you can say okay now we can reorganize all these things and in the short term you can uh you can gain an advantage in efficiency maybe you can produce cheaper orange is real the problem is this is just one step this is just a single stage of analysis this is just a single stage of transformation it's much more difficult to see that over a period of 50 years genuinely the free market competition between 20 different orange juice companies that actually is producing the possibility of innovation all the time just mentioned i said producing the possibility of innovation it's possible there's no innovation it's possible but i can't say it makes innovation inevitable uh there is some innovation there is some adaptation going on all the time and when you close that down then instead you have none now just say an example i talked about in my channel years ago was the indigenous religion of taiwan so the the religion of the indigenous people of tamwon prior to the arrival of christian missionaries which by the way is not the same as what religion was in mainland china at that time very different people speaking a different language a different culture so on and so forth now the indigenous religion they had was so horrible that you can easily make an argument that their quality of life improved by converting to christianity i'm not going to get into details uh you might for the sake of hypothetical argument you can just imagine the most horrible religion in the world where christianity is a is a positive alternative in terms of people's actual lived experience okay um this is a single stage of analysis right even though christianity and even the total conversion of society let's say like society let's say they embrace christianity to the same extent as the dark ages in europe full-on medieval repressive controlling exchange okay with just a single stage of analysis we can talk about the advantages but over 50 years and over 500 years what you're losing is the potential for innovation that actually the best thing for the people of taiwan and the best thing for the people of ancient greece in ancient rome is if you're going to have religion to have 20 different religions all competing with each other each one criticizing the other and you know and really i mean competing it's can often be in a very direct sense where you know one religion invites you to attend a feast or a ceremony they say oh no no i can't go because there's this other religion with this other german and they really make the case oh no no you should come to our religion not that one ours is you know now of course for me as a nihilist you can talk about i mean then you have a very different question would you be better having 20 um competing and relatively weak religions or zero have absolutely everyone subscribed to the philosophy of isolazard fortunately this is not a real world problem you know the reality is we have a choice between do you want to have a society like saudi arabia or do you want to have a society like the united states of america or denmark where the philosophy of azeroth gets to compete with many other religions now again unfortunately united states of america it's not 20 small religions the christian church is enormous and very powerful and then you get it's ev it's not as bad as saudi arabia but very very far from ideal indeed anywhere you might live uh take a look at um uh oh how simian is in the audience what a joke [Laughter] they let you out of the out of the psych ward huh pow i haven't heard from in a long time [Laughter] ah right so this is pretty good so babe um uh if you live in utah and you want to put your kids into a school how many schools do you have to choose we know in utah you have mormon but probably you tell you've got mormon catholic and maybe one or two protestant domination that's all i'm saying is the the number of religions that are at that level of uh institutional development and frankly economic power it's the amount of money they have the amount of amount of you know amount of land they own these kinds of things uh and you know i don't i used to be a buddhist i used to be a teravata buddhist and i had to ask the question well where are buddhists supposed to send their kids to school you know and you know where in america is there a teravata buddhist um school your children can attend so no now terrible buddhism does exist within america it's not zero but it's incredibly marginalized and buddhists have to make hard choices about that but where they're going to send their kids to school so no this is just to uh make it palpable make it make it easily understandable but yeah many parts of the united states you're down to just two or four churches that have any kinds of power and although that'll be different from one one part of america the other certainly um you know i heard an autobiographical statement from somebody recently whose childhood was totally dominated by scientology and he grew up in in just the right neighborhood of los angeles his parents chose to live their attention where scientology was this dominant force in people's lives it was sent to scientology schools scientology is a dangerous cult in case you didn't know it really is it really is a terrible religion so yeah what um what those choices are we'll will differ from one place to the other um anyway yeah so i'm pointing out the difference in in terms again this video as i've phrased it is contrasting um moral realism to nihilism and i should talk about moral aestheticism kind of in between and what exactly that means but the term used here by uh bonjour tristes is uh asking about moral absolutism and yeah i think i've i've illustrated now sufficiently what the negative knock-on consequences are of moral absolutism even when there is a short-term advantage so now melissa raised the issue of communism communism is a very useful example because communists are moral absolutists they're not moral relativists et cetera et cetera they're you know it's it's a system of moral absolutism and they they do indeed believe there's a sort of transcendental and eternal sense of of good and evil right and wrong i know too much about marxism so i can now digress into the details of the arguments they would make against that claim but anyway i'm i'm not going to you know um uh but yeah as i say in the same sense that communism snuffs out the competition between different brands of orange juice by giving you just one brand of orange juice they're also snuffing out the competition between a lot of different ideas um [Music] ideologies political ideas philosophies beliefs and you know the capacity for criticism and doubt and cross-examination to break beliefs and assumptions apart and challenge them with something new so in that sense it's it's a sort of classical old-fashioned uh form of moral absolutism that has these terrible disadvantages um okay so i've made the concession that i do think that moral absolutism is uh it's worth thinking about and it's worth taking seriously i don't think the excuses people make for gambling are really worth thinking about where things are so i don't think the excuses people make for smoking marijuana or eating meat or thinking about or things seriously and again i admit there's this one person i know on the internet where it really did sort of disturb me to see that he went from uh espousing more relativism moral aestheticism he switched sides and went back to saying that he instead believes now in immoral absolutism and by the way he didn't uh convert to christianity or islam or anything like that there were there were no religious trappings um but he he switched over to the view that differences between right and wrong are fixed and real in the same sense that the laws of physics are fixed and real and these you know the law of gravity uh is eternal uh regardless of what opinions human beings might make up about it now i'm going to argue against my own position i think the reluctance to deal with nihilism and to deal with moral aestheticism i'll hear get into a little bit more moral aestheticism is almost nihilism but not quite it's going 80 or 90 of the way towards uh total nihilism i think it is identical to our reluctance to feel regret um if you believe that there is one standard of beauty that is true at all times and at all cultures for all people if you think that the difference between something being beautiful and something being ugly is real in the same way that the law of gravity is real in the same way that uh different principles of geometry are real at all times for all people um you can look back at the history of the world and you can regret periods of time when people were in error or when the vast majority of people are an error but you're only regretting it sometimes not all the time you then also get to feel the joy and exaltation or affirmation of your own ego when you feel that the tide of history is on your side or whatever you want to say um uh when you feel that the opinions and values of your fellow human beings are affirming your own position um again there are many things about this that are ridiculous if you believe there is one set of aesthetic ideas that define what is good in architecture well there are many centuries in the history of china when people's idea of what good architecture was is totally contrary to your own you're claiming it's immortal and true for all people at all times but people are capable of living in an error about it for centuries or perhaps forever um and they can be an error in fifty percent of the world and not the other fifty percent of the world and the fifty percent of the world that's wrong doesn't see any advantage in the figures that's right it does lead to some very strange connotation but by contrast you know my position of nihilism means that you're basically always looking back and regretting and doubting everything that you're living your life with this kind of profound openness to the possibility that you are wrong and that you don't really know what's right and you don't know what the right decision was and all you can really do is analyze what the presuppositions were however aside however stupid and however brilliant that went into why people made the decisions that they did at the time whether you're talking about yourself or about other people i'll give you an example of how this really is part of our our day-to-day life because obviously most people do not talk about architecture this way i've met some who do i've known some architects i've known some people who talk about architecture passion there are people who talk about the history of architecture that way and sculpture and art there are there's a whole department for those people at the university and it's not the department of psychology it's not the psych ward um you know it's very comforting for people to be able to look back at the history of the last 10 years now and say that clearly um there is a morally real difference between donald trump and hillary clinton that clearly uh the morally good person or the morally better person as an objectively real fact was hillary clinton and that clearly the morally again in this in this sense of something being real in the same way that one of the laws of physics is real that you know the real truth is that people ought to have uh voted for for hillary clinton and not for for donald trump well i don't live my life that way i don't think that way not even in my private thoughts and not even with my conversations with with close personal friends um i i most of you probably also know some very bad things about hillary clinton i know some very bad things but because i know some things that are some kind of terrifyingly immoral decision decisions she made uh before she became a candidate for president i know some terribly immoral things she did before her husband bill clinton became president and uh yes yes y'all she made some shockingly immoral decisions during her competition with bernie sanders for who would be the candidate to become president united states ah how quickly we forget but if you're drawing up an assessment of hillary rodham clinton's ethical character and then you're making predictions about what kind of president the united states you would have been or what the consequences of that would have been there are really worrying really terrifying signs that she could have been even worse than donald trump i'm not joking now my point here is not that i'm right and you're wrong my point is that i don't know and that i'm willing to live with that doubt i'm willing to live with a kind of perpetual doubt and perpetual regret this is many steps beyond skepticism this is nihilism you know and again even if i'm just talking to a personal friend i mean even i'm talking about mother or something like there's no political con i'm not performing for an audience and what i'm just thinking to myself i do not think in terms of dogmatic certainty that way i don't look back at something as obvious as the election of donald trump and say oh well that was obviously a disaster because donald trump is obviously an evil and immoral and stupid person and obviously there is some objectively real you know sense in which the morally right thing to do was to vote for uh hillary clinton or the morally right thing to do uh sorry sorry or that there's some real sense in which hillary clinton is uh morally good again with the word real meaning like the laws of physics and that's not just uh so that's not just known or measurable objectively something that really exists at all times in all cultures that's not relative to my subjective judgment it's not relative to my taste it's not relative to the times we're living in it's not relative to the objective you're trying to pursue right like if you're recruiting people to play on your basketball team who is the best basketball player that's maybe relative to me and my taste but it's also relative to uh the objective stated of who can uh shoot a basketball i do not know if hillary clinton is better on a basketball team than donald trump but obviously this framework provides us the very different set of yes in some ways objective uh measurements about uh who is good and who is bad and so on so you know uh my point is this in the same way that people live their lives with an almost magnetic feeling of being drawn to some of these principles uh from the kantian traditions this idea of you know what's what you claim to be true for yourself ought to be something that's true for all people if you feel something is good for you it should be good for everyone and so on and so forth that you wouldn't ever do an act that you would consider evil for someone else to do uh so on and so forth um you know likewise i think that people want to escape from this sense of doubt they want to escape from this sense of regret and so that drives them toward the belief in objective morality thinking that morality is uh is objectively real oh i'm just taking a second to glance your comments melissa if you want to want to chime in now um so uh rafa in the audience welcome to the audience ref i don't remember uh talking to you and um ever but anyway i'm sorry if you've been here before i don't recall your your name and your your photograph yourself rafa asks quote as a nihilist do you think that there is a moral imperative towards innovation isn't that a belief to improve society and humanity as a whole is good so rapha the kinds of decisions you have to make as a nihilist are of the following kind would you rapha prefer to go on vacation in thailand or saudi arabia now i am not here making the claim that in any this is a good example for moral realism is thailand a morally good country we could raise a whole lot of different questions to controvert the claim that thailand is morally good they have a very high rate of murder a very high rate of prostitution a very high rate of drug use alcoholism there are a lot of social problems in in thailand um all right we we can go into a critique of you could even go into the advantages that saudi arabia has over over thailand i've met people who lived and worked in saudi arabia i i don't know if i could say any of them liked it but they did recognize that there were advantages to to living there well you know the decision i have to make is where am i going to go on vacation and despite all the problems thailand has including problems with the actual you know design of its parliament its military the power and control of the royal family in contrast to the military and the elected assistant government uh so we i really sorry i know a fair bit about politics more than most white people speak english okay i can i can tell you all these things that are wrong with thailand i'd rather go on vacation in thailand you know now what if i have to live there for five years would i have to live there for 10 years you know would you rather live for 10 years in thailand or 10 years in saudi arabia now let's ask the question of what if you are a citizen of denmark do you want the future of denmark to be more like saudi arabia or be more like thailand these are the questions we we get into now um again it's totally fine i don't mind the challenge you you ask about improving society okay in terms now sometimes the limits of the language being what they are i do use the word improvement i don't treat this as a word i refuse to use for some logical reason or something you know for some as some philosophical parlor trick you know i'm not afraid of the word improvement but what i'm saying to you sincerely is this if you're working in a bakery and you want to try something new and you want to try something different you don't know whether it is an improvement or not innovation really is incompatible with the concept of improvement even though you know we treat them as almost synonymous like you want to have innovations in the system of education well are those innovations going to be an improvement or not they're going to be an experiment and an experiment by definition is something where the outcomes are unknown so if i'm running a bakery i can try 12 different things this month and i can fail 12 times before coming up with a recipe that really works on the 13th time you know that's innovation all right now i do not think stasis is an option i don't think saudi arabia has the option to stay the same i don't think afghanistan has the option to stay the same i think afghanistan's going to change i think saudi arabia is going to change whether they want to or not you know and i think the united states of america is going to change i think denmark is going to change i think thailand is going to change so without any of these ideological preconceptions or commitments that belief entails yes i am willing to put my paddle down by the side of the canoe and i'm willing to row i'm going to lend my strength to the struggle to move this boat in one way or another but i do not believe in a fixed standard of good and i don't even believe that what is good is knowable you know and out of this doubt comes a complex and i think useful political philosophy that we can apply in different cases on the scale of a society of millions of people living together on the scale of a small town that maybe five thousand or ten thousand people living together and this also has implications for how we live with our own husbands and wives boyfriends and girlfriends with our own small circle of friends and colleagues living with that kind of that kind of doubt now i'd say also this has come up before about an hour ago i think it's interesting that culturally we pre we perceive a character who has no doubts as strong but i think that is misperceiving weaknesses strength someone who clings to an axiom or a principle um clings to a fixed notion or fixed set of values i'm saying that the real strength is actually that ability to adapt and doubt and innovate and experiment and and deal with the consequences now um it's an extreme example but it's i think a useful one briefly let's go back in time just to the year 2016. what was the best thing for americans to do for the future of afghanistan in 2016. what would be good for the american army for the american government i'll tell you one thing you need a lot going back just that short time just going back 2016. right you need a lot of really radical fundamental openness to regretting the decisions you made in the past to looking back at the decisions you've made starting in september 11 2001. we go all the way back to the 1970s a u.s policy in afghanistan afghanistan pakistan india china they're all linked u.s u.s policy in central asia can you know okay you can go back a long way and go back to the 1970s and start regretting the decisions you made that could lead to a brilliant new plan a brilliant new strategy for what to do in afghanistan central asia pakistan pakistan matters a lot you know okay or you can live your life as a kind of moral absolutist you can live your life based on belief and for many people that is how they live you can live with a refusal to regret the decisions that were made as recently as 2001 a refusal to look back and regret the decisions that were made in 1971. afghanistan involves decisions a refusal to regret the decisions that were made six months earlier right well if i had been involved in american military planning and american political strategy for afghanistan central asia pakistan india china for that part of the world you can imagine i would have been the guy in the room saying hey hey let's really go and question our presuppositions here guys and even at the level of a thought experiment to be willing to sit there and hypothetically think out well look guys up to this point up to the year 2016 we've been totally dependent on pakistan as our strategic ally uh [ __ ] pakistan what if we make pakistan into our enemies well like what let's think through a bold new strategy where we're fighting against pakistan instead of fighting with them now hashtag spoilers if you'd done that in 2016 everything would be different if you've done that in 2011 everything would you know so i i'm choosing an example but my point is not the real world outcomes of that my point here is to highlight the willingness to reflect the willingness to analyze the willingness to question the willingness to doubt and that's all predicated upon a kind of unbelief a kind of rejection of belief a refusal to believe in things and you know the idea of u.s foreign policy being good it's very different from the fixed notion of good in the catholic church or in the muslim faith the transcendental good that the distinction between um what's good and evil is fixed forever by some ancient sacred text but in practice they're not that different in practice there is a hush and a sense of awe in the boardroom meaning there is a secretness and there is a taboo that governs what questions can be asked and what questions will go unasked what is thinkable and what is unthinkable okay so another great one i'm sorry obviously livestream can't go on forever but i'm happy to have these these challenges so longtime viewer of the channel do you want to give me the kiss uh asks quote is the provision of pornography for free on the internet an improvement so i said quote i shouldn't have because i actually did paraphrase is it a good thing is it an improvement for the world uh to have pornography freely available on the internet okay i'm willing to begin researching that question with the profound assumption that i don't know now japan is in many ways a wonderful society denmark in many ways a wonderful society thailand in many ways a wonderful society is that in part because they have the freedom to produce and consume pornography or is it despite that like is it actually a cancer eating away at japanese society danish society and thai society right but i'm willing to really examine that starting from the presupposition that i don't know now i think if you research it you're going to start coming to broad or specific conclusions if we are contrasting that to societies where pornography is really forbidden and really suppressed by the government then we're looking at a place like saudi arabia right now i'm not suggesting you a simple cause and effect relationship there and i think if you really are uh examining this uh i was just reading an article this morning that was talking about actually the problem of child pornography in japan uh there are there are negative aspects to pornography in japan there are definitely negative aspects to the knock-on effects of pornography and uh sex work prostitution in terms of the attitudes men have towards women i would say it also has negative attitudes part of me has negative consequences for the attitudes that at least some women have towards men i'm really willing to um appreciate and analyze all these things right this is very different from an argument that proceeds from belief to belief and that's the way most of our ethical discourse goes and that is really the kind of prison that a belief in moral moral realism leads you into when you think that moral judgments and ethical decisions are like transcendentally right or wrong that they're right or wrong at all times in all places for all people in the same way as the laws of gravity um these geometrical theorems and so on and so forth um that really leads you into this prison where you can't engage in that kind of questioning also in terms of your your personal relationships with people but in the scale of society of millions and on an intermediate scale as well when you can't say look i don't know you can't really do the research and you also can't engage in experimentation and innovation now i'm going to give you a more specific challenge back this is from do you want to give me like this so everywhere in the world that i know of basically the age at which people can start producing pornography now is is 18. uh i don't i think there probably a couple places in the world where instead it's 16 you know um i'm not even gonna google it but you know generally the legal age to produce pornography is now is now 18. okay tougher question would the world be a better place if it were illegal to film yourself or be filmed producing pornography until you were 21 24 26 thirty six you know like i don't know assumptions you could in theory you could divide japan into two halves and half of japan it's illegal to film pornography or look at pornography where anyone is under the age of 30 and in the other half it's 18 or 16 or or whatever it is now that's challenging right if you're over the age of 30 yourself and some of you will just say oh come on who has sex at all when they're over 30. you know i get it you know but now that's challenging now when we're not just talking about having pornography versus not having it but we're talking about a very narrow sense of the age of consent not the consent to have sex but consent to to produce primary ah okay and then the the knock on effects of that now you know my fundamental point here is i do not begin or end that discourse by saying to you that i know the truth and that my conclusion about what's morally right and morally wrong is true for everyone at all times and always has been and always will be and who who can say that 18 is the right age you know who can who can say that it's quite a recent thing that 18 emerged as the as the standard you know uh still in some parts we can get married at 14 you know uh even within the united states people getting married at 14. think about the implications of that people are getting tattoos at different ages too you know and you know there is a counter argument if you keep letting people delay making decisions with these these tremendously serious consequences so people don't just go to high school they go to university and they continue living in their parents house and their parents are making these decisions for them you have the problem of the infantilization you know of of the species basically so look there are serious questions with with really interesting uh implications you know right but i'm saying my way of approaching this really creates the the possibility for you know reflecting on what you assumed in the past and regretting it a large part of learning comes in the way of regret it creates the possibility for uh research it creates a possibility for innovation and the belief-based discourse or just the perception of the world in terms of fixed real moral values it it prevents all melissa if you want to jump in again i'm just reading the comments again yeah paul simeon says fair point saudi arabia has great dates this is date as a noun we need to saudi arabia great days great coffee so a lot of people don't know that some of the best coffee in the world still is produced in saudi arabia it's not what they're famous for yeah it's true a hummus no you never hear about saudi arabian falafel hummus can the saudis not get some credit for their cuisine vegan food in saudi arabia so earlier you were contrasting innovation with not progress but there was another language generally um but do you think that by using the word progress that you inevitably have an idea of what is the perfect you know making progress toward perfection or is it progress right yeah so melissa is asking about the uh implications and innuendo of the word progress so arthur schopenhauer has this great dictum that's somewhat underrated in his significance which is we judge every time we use a verb it is certainly true that using the term progress you are revealing the fact that you believe in a beginning a middle and an end some destination you're moving that you've made a judgment that one thing is better than the other with that haven't been said of course i'm not afraid of it but you should really be mindful um now look just today heard a lot about progress toward the decriminalization of heroin cocaine fentanyl hard drugs progress progress that includes the legalization of marijuana progress that includes a larger and larger percentage of the population being on prescription antidepressants you know so this is a great example well what other people call progress i do not call progress so no i just in that way you need to be mindful of it um you know but i mean for the most part you just encounter that as a cynical ploy of people to try to get you to agree with their political views without really mentating it without really thinking it through sure but something like improving the system of waste management here in victoria for example it would be a sign of progress if the waste was being directed to a treatment a water treatment facility rather than being developed into the water right and in these real world in not just you know discussions of ideology and philosophy i think i'm i'm i'm even more comfortable saying that that would be progress to to right right but but it's not so different from saying it's better and that's all i mean the word progress isn't any more or real no but the this video is about ethical judgments you know obviously in the case as no conclusion is not that you shouldn't make ethical judgments but you've got to be aware that you're making an ethical judgment you know obviously you can make an ethical judgment that sewage treatment is better than dumping untreated sewage into the ocean it's very unsurprising ethical judgment but you know i mean many people are flabbergasted when they find that there are human beings who refuse to drink water with fluorine fluoride in it you know there are people who uh refused to use toothpaste and so on and they didn't realize oh this isn't just something that's real and absolutely no this this is a moral argument you have to make you know that's all let's just really understand sorry uh yeah i just say i think that in the same sense that i think i think like right that is that it's generally like comparable to the waste management uh becoming more becoming a more vegan society i think is promised right but that is just an ethical decision in your head that's the tragedy of it and you know if even if nobody disagrees with you so even if and this may be the case even if there is nobody in our society who will stand up and say that they think your argument about sewage treatment is [ __ ] like nobody will say that but for decades here for at least 50 years that was what they because they just refused to build a sewage treatment planter and by the way you guys can imagine there were complaints in the newspapers and there were actually a lot of complaints from the government in seattle in america there were international complaints because they have to deal with the same water and they're like look we spend all this money doing sewage treatment and you guys don't and we get your pollution like washing up on our beaches well even if nobody stood up and made a kind of ethical or moral argument that that's not progress or that's not good or is not necessary in in reality implicitly they did live accordingly so no the point is by switching from good from from switching from explicitly ethical language to a more technocratic language talking about progress you don't escape the relativism and the aestheticism of your moral judgments that that's you know that's all that comes down to that this is your idea of what's good or what's or what's better or what's an improvement now you know you can get out in the world and you can you can make it convincing for others you know i compare it to singing a song there was a guy named 50 cent he was a rapper and he had his story to tell and he had his song to sing and it was a song that included rage and revenge and violence and hatred and resentment towards his own mother and resentment towards the man who murdered his mother and resentment towards his ex-wife and memories of his own criminal past and his time in jail you know okay and it was also a song of hope and desire and greed wanting to be rich you know he made his song matter to the whole world but it's not good and it's not progress and it's not necessary and there's nothing universal about it and when i was living in thailand at laos it was quite funny for me to talk to people who didn't get it look at that time 50 cent was really still famous and it was you know it was ongoing charts uh chart topping hits you know we had hit songs and hell's coming out and there were people in in laos i remember particularly i don't remember talking about this in cambodia like look what what do you people like about him what's you know you know they would also say things like he's ugly why do you why do you like him so much well we don't care that he's you know whether or not you think he's ugly subject plenty of women think he's beautiful or he's handsome you know but regardless you know what what is this guy he's he's ugly he's a criminal he's stupid he doesn't say anything intelligent you know uh his you know his his rhymes aren't particularly erudite or what have you i remember people also complaining that he rhymed too slowly he didn't rap in a very fast or skillful way like other rappers well you know no there's nothing objectively real but he's sang his song and he made it matter now some political leader some demagogue could sing a song anywhere in the world that convinces people for a time that it really is morally compulsory for them to be vegan that it's morally compulsory for them to brush their teeth that it's morally compulsory for them to really care much more about pollution going into the water or the air than they do and i say for a time for a reason tragically it's very unlikely to last it's very unlikely to last as long as the muslim faith which is so many centuries under its belt and it's still going um but you know this is the sense in which that that term moral aestheticism is i think so terrifying if you take ethics morality and politics and you're willing to admit the extent to which these things are you know just like the fine arts it's terrifying nobody wants to think that you know nobody wants to think this is just like the question of who's going to be the next hit rapper you know the next fad the next fashion that there isn't a sense of definite uh direction and and progress you know that that there isn't a a universal or transcendental or real sense morally real sense transcendentally real sense in the way that gravity is going to continue to be true regardless of what we think about it that it's instead going to be in the realm as shakespeare says of you know there's neither good nor evil but thinking makes it so you know um now i just need to point out in terms of regret some of you let's say you have a friend who was a rapper at the same time 50 cent was a rapper you might look back and regret and say my friend was a better rapper his lyrics were more meaningful his story was more worthy of being heard but your friend wasn't a successful rapper there is no objectively real sense in which you can say your friend should have been more successful than 50 cent like you have to realize this sort of reckless terrifying arbitrariness not randomness but arbitrariness with which one man's words take on power political power religious power symbolic power and yeah ethical power emotional power you know um somebody has a song to sing and people decide for whatever combination of reasons that they're going to hear it now we can analyze that i mean we can analyze why did everyone hate hillary clinton so much in that one crucial year it's for real reasons not for no reason why did they decide to give donald trump a chance even if the reasons are bad you know we can we can weigh into that but um [Music] it's a very different type of regret when you're looking at history in this way and you're able to regret everything endlessly uh without the island of certainty provided to you by moral realism by the sense that there is you know there is a real and true answer to each of these questions even if nobody but yourself uh seems to know it or agree to it sorry i'm just catching up with your written comments guys so many of the things i could answer here uh generally many of these questions um i could say read my book a lot of this stuff is discussed in the book and i'm not boasting to say it's discussed not in a way that's just autobiographical it's not just meaningful to me but it is discussed in a way that can be applied directly to the questions of how do we organize the criminal justice system in our time the legal system how do we write constitutions how do we write laws what is democracy in our time what was it in the ancient past what should it be in the future so these questions are talked about in length and with depth with practical applications so i do think they're talked about in a way where it's it's going to be meaningful for your life whoever you are as the reader not just the meaning that nihilism has uh for myself there's one interesting question here someone called t-man or perhaps tamann says uh quote there are indigenous cultures that seem to reject western ontological and epistemological true false distinctions yet are obviously not moral nihilists uh coming from an anthropological perspective yes but you know my claim uh my argument in favor of historical nihilism is not on the basis that there ever has been any culture in the history of the world that has been nihilistic um you know quite the contrary i mean we all should admit that you know nihilism on the level of a society or even of a church or a town has never existed it has always existed for extraordinary individuals individuals can become nihilists or can become nihilus too to some extent you just have to stop believing in things and you know you have to you have to start to critique and reject uh the reasons behind belief and so on and so on uh you know i don't need to get into the definition i was in this video and i've certainly made other videos talking about it um but anyway i i wonder there's nothing wrong with you with you uh raising that that fact uh i would also just point out it's certainly something just described discussed in the book um you know again in a way that's i think useful and applicable to people's lives nihilism is not incompatible with coercion nihilism is not anarchism in order to take a positive view of anarchy for example the fact that you are a nihilist does not mean that you're opposed to the government compelling people to brush their teeth you know the compulsion of innumerable kinds exists in every society i mean again anthropologically and otherwise uh it exists also in every you know modern organized urban society however you know to stick with that one example i remember reading very serious arguments written by specialists in that field as to why for scientific reasons the government of laos a third world country should not introduce fluoride into the drinking water and these people were not hippies they were scientists in exactly that field and they were really saying that the the scientific reasons for why fluoride was introduced in western countries in the past those have now been debunked that with the progress of science now we should not be fluoridating uh tap water uh drinking water and so on and i when i read that report i'd never thought about that before i just it never crossed my mind to question and criticize the assumptions and you can imagine it's one of those things like well back in the 1950s we assumed this this and this but then there was more research in the 80s and now we know this uh again that is certainly an example where i have not come to a conclusion but that's it's an example where even these things that seem self-evident seem to be self-evidently good or something seems to self-infinitely progress at that time laos as a third world country they did think of progress as being catching up with countries like japan countries like the united states of america and just imitating the technology they have and imitating the form of social organization they have uh well think again you know that's that's the the role for doubt and examination and regret and innovation that comes from a more more nihilistic uh perspective a perfectly reasonable question someone asked where am i selling my book i assume i'm just going to put it in english on amazon that's going to be direct purchase of amazon it's possible i will speak to a publisher who convinces me to do otherwise but uh my feeling about that has changed over time i mean the book is so subversive it's so anti-establishment i mean it's it's really dissident literature it's a sense of being a political dissident as soon as i read certain parts of the book and i think why would i even talk to a publisher no publisher can carry this you know it's so so contrary to the the norm in our time and i should just accept it being a direct purchase from amazon only but sure there are other times frankly when i'm reading other parts of the book because i'm doing final proof reading here uh where i feel the opposite that i think wouldn't it be great to have a relatively mainstream publisher or even just a small political dissident publisher carry this book and promote it so and so forth so no i i do um i have mixed and changing feelings of that but i think the short answer is amazon.com the title of the book is indeed no more manifestos okay um there is plenty of humor in the book i have a question about that from paul simeone it does sorry if you read the book as a whole uh there's some parts of the book where i think i've accomplished something great and having the most humorous and light-hearted hearted approach imaginable to describing police brutality and actual police massacres so it deals with some very very tough uh episodes from american recent american political history maybe the most light-hearted and entertaining critique of the history of the american constitution you've ever read also there is humor and there's humor where i'm mocking myself and this humor where i'm talking about my own family background i do have jokes about my relationship with my now deceased father and so on there's a personal touch to it there's a humorous touch to it but with that having been said you know it's tremendously serious subject matter and that's why i also say i kind of despair of the possibility of a of a publisher taking it on because it is so serious and if you're not already familiar with my school of thought which most of my readers will be from youtube like you just imagine someone sitting with us who hasn't yes it doesn't have any familiarity with me i can imagine just how just how disturbing it would be okay so look guys um i've got also some questions about max turner indeed as other people said there have been many youtube videos with max turner some of you guys might remember this some of you might not but years ago i say this in closing the video this is my wrap-up comment by the way there was another youtube channel and they identified as anarchist and i i had a kind of conflict with this youtube channel they attacked me and denounced me and i remember writing to the guy and he did reply i said look why are you being so mean to me i've actually been quite respectful and cordial to you while analyzing and disagreeing with your views because i'm not an anarchist by the way the guy um he had been a doctrinaire anarchist he was someone who believed in the doctrine of anarchism he had been a dogmatic anarchist and then he had a turning point in his life when he read max sterner now max sterner really isn't a nihilist but i think some of the questions that lead to nihilism do get asked by max turner can lead people on the on the path to uh making some of these breakthroughs and their philosophy and their critique of politics anyway so he had this kind of unbelievably um [Music] emotionally overwhelming breakdown where he realized that for him anarchism which had started as a critique of religion had just become his religion anarchism which had started as a critique of social conformism had instead become for him a suffocating political ideology that entailed some kind of uh conformism i remember one of his ways of putting was he realizes now that politics is not ultimately about being right it's not ultimately about believing the right things that politics and philosophy really are about your own lived experience now on some of i sympathize with the guy you know like it's this was a real breakthrough for him he had been an anarchist he read max sterner and he ended up rejecting anarchism for the same reasons that he had formerly rejected communism and conservatism and most mainstream political thought in order to embrace anarchism but now he realizes the anarchists of itself is the problem he has to take a further step towards uh nihilism or at least towards uh skepticism at that time he started described himself as a as a as an egoist i think he didn't say a nihilistic egoist maybe uh something like this started using the term the term egos and estimates started a period of real uh uh reflection you know yes you know the the point of philosophy the point of politics and the point of political philosophy is not to have you know a sort of checklist of all the things that you're right about all the things that make you morally superior to other people that's the point of catholicism many parts are saying oh so uh did you get baptized did you go through a confirmation did you take your vows did you attend the right ceremonies do you believe all there are things have you read the whole list of doctrines how can you memorize and recite uh certain passages of the bible oh yeah you're going through the checklist oh these are all the things that guarantee you now you can feel certain that you're right now you can feel certain that you morally spirit other people and intellectually spirit other people also this is what your spirituality consists of is a checklist and you know your identity becomes the checklist and your checklist becomes the identity and at some point you don't know who you are but you know what's right and what's wrong you know what's morally good and what's morally evil and in your commitment to that knowledge and you're clinging to that false sense of certainty that becomes your identity and you are before and above and beyond everything else you are a good catholic whether or not you're a good man um you know uh it's it's laughable to me but obviously on some level i i can sympathize with that guy's struggle um you know philosophy ultimately is about problem solving it's a set of problem solving tools so how is it that so often the problem the problem solving method itself becomes the problem how is it that so often uh the critique of political institutions becomes a suffocating and oppressive political institution how is it that the rejection of one political ideology so often produces another that may be as bad or worse or as i said before in a very different context it may be better in the short term the new ideology may be better the all the ideology just for the next five years when you think about it over 50 years or over 500 years it starts to become suffocating um starts to have these disadvantages that may not be apparent in just a single stage of analysis when all you're thinking about is abolishing the old ideology that you want to get rid of and uh of course a terrible terrifying example of that is to look at what happened in the french revolution and uh the dictatorship of napoleon bonaparte that ensued uh afterward and to really ask yourself what decisions would you have made at each step of that revolution and what would you have regretted looking back on those decisions just five years later or or what have you you know knowing knowing what i know now what should i have done at that earlier stage of the revolution and look i sorry just to just put a human face on again very briefly i've been reading a book it's actually here on camera this book contains some really gory details about the american revolution that i didn't know before uh it describes in the american revolution basically the civil war between the united states and england at that time call it a revolution uh it describes atrocities it describes revolutionary violence it describes people being tortured and some of those atrocities uh some of them are carried out for cynical reasons that come up again and again in revolutions like you're interrogating and imprisoning people because they happen to be wealthy and you wanna and the revolutionaries want to steal their wealth to use it for the revolution [Music] so uh knowing what i know about that history and looking out it's very difficult to think about what decisions i would have made at different stages of that revolution and what i would have ended up regretting because those are decisions you make that have you know once you've made the commitment once you've said the word that maybe all it is you don't get to change your mind now that's the side you're on and you get to see all the unexpected consequences of the revolution that you're a part of of the war that you're fighting this is very true the french revolution it's very true of the american revolution and um you know it's very very hard for people to look back and say these were my reasons for fighting this war these were my reasons for joining revolution but these were the unexpected outcomes and that wasn't what i was fighting for so this comes back again to this light motif throughout this video of the capacity for human regret and there's a sense in which you can feel responsible for the decision you made but you can't feel responsible for the outcomes some people would have chosen to support the revolution for all the right reasons but then would be horrified by the outcomes some people would have chosen to oppose the revolution for all the right reasons fight for king and country but then be horrified by the outcomes of that and realize where where that went and so on for every side of the french revolution at every stage what terrifies me about the year 2021 2020 2021 2022 this little span of three years what terrifies me is that nobody perceives themselves in this way to be in the midst of a revolution and we are we are living through a period of the revolutionary transformation of our own societies of the planet as a whole not even saudi arabia can stay the same not even communist china can stay the same not even conservative but democratic japan not denmark not switzerland not the united states of america the societies we live in 50 years from now are going to be far more different from what they are today than they are today being contrasted to what they were 50 years ago we are in the midst of a period of transformative social change and one of the reasons why the revolution is going so badly is that so few of us are willing to reckon with the kind of regret that's entailed when we perceive ourselves as the revolutionaries that we really are you