KOL278 | Bob Murphy Show: Debating Hans Hoppe’s “Argumentation Ethics”

You guys were too polite to each other, it was pretty obvious that you guys were mostly avoiding the elephant in the room, Bob’s religion. Bob doesn’t believe in a God who’s subservient to morality — Bob believes that God IS infallible / perfect. So when God says that pornography and homosexuality (and countless other things) are immoral, Bob has to accept that, even though argumentation proves him wrong — he insanely (ie. impervious to logic / reasoning) will ignore logic. The only saving grace of Christians is that they aren’t clearly told to enforce morality, otherwise there would be bloodshed between believers and non-believers. Luckily they just scold us[1] and tell us that we’ll suffer in the afterlife, which is fine by us.

Around 26:30 (youtube timestamp), when Kinsella says “any ethical claim necessarily has to be decided in argumentation, it’s not like free floating, it’s not out there that you just find it”, Bob will disagree. For him it is ENTIRELY decided by “revelation”.

It shocks me that in this discussion about ethics/morality, the basic definitions of morality / good / bad / evil were never given. Why wasn’t Molyneux mentioned — he provided the only coherent definition for “morality” that I ever heard, “universally preferable behavior”. It’s different from other preferences (like ice cream flavors) because they are *universal enforceable rules*. You can’t force other people to like chocolate ice cream, but you can forcefully prevent them from raping someone or stealing from someone.

Ultimately this debate was pointless. Bob was entirely uninterested in it, he was clearly uncomfortable and unprepared throughout it. Bob didn’t refute Argumentation Ethics, he simply doesn’t give a shit. I guess Bob is lucky that his blind-faith mostly coincides with the NAP, and where it doesn’t he’s not willing to enforce “God’s rules” on us, but it’s really depressing to see that even our friends, who are supposed to value logic and reasoning, ignore us. I guess we really have no hope convincing anyone else then. I guess this coincides with my own personal empirical evidence, trying to convince those around me.

[1] Around 1:8:28 Bob says: “if you deviate from [God’s] rules, there’s gonna be problems, you’re gonna wish you hadn’t.” A good question that a less friendly debater would have asked him is: “Why don’t you enforce God’s rules on Earth? You know that action X (porn, gays) is unequivocally evil (it clearly says so in the Bible), you won’t be punished if you enforce God’s will – there’s good reason to think you’ll be rewarded?”