Universally Preferable Behavior

This post is a description of what I consider to be weaknesses in Stefan Molyneux's argument for Universally Preferable behavior or UPB. Stefan's book on UPB is available on his website, freedomain.com. A super-brief summary of his argument is that we all agree there must be such a thing as universally preferable behavior, and logic puts certain constraints on what UPB could possibly be. In particular, UPB must forbid actions such as murder, rape, and theft, since nobody could want to be murdered, raped, or stolen from. The value of universally preferable behavior arrived at is more or less the same as the non-aggression principle. Stefan makes heavy use of references to what he calls "self-exploding arguments". The idea behind a self-explofing argument is, by making a statement the speaker is revealing he doesn't really believe it. For example, nobody could (truthfully) say "I believe everone should lie all the time." Similarly, it makes no sense to say, "I don't believe you really exist" or "I don't believe you understand a word I say", since making such a statement would clearly be pointless if it were true. It is an interesting line of attack, but I don't think it as strong as Stefan seems to think it is. To prove a statement is true, it is not enough to demonstrate that anyone who purports to disagree with you must be insincere. There are clearly people out there who believe that telling the truth purely for its own sake is for chumps, that it is fine to lie whenever the benefits to lying outweigh the possible consequences of getting caught. The fact that these people will not say so, since to do so would be just to increase their chances of getting caught, does not prove they are "wrong" in an absolute sense. Similarly, although the person who who keeps saying "you don't understand me" must still hold out some hope of someday being understood, the person who used to say it but does not anymore may well have given up hope of being understood. But the fact that he ceases to say "you don't understand me" isn't evidence that he was wrong. If anything, it's evidence that he was right. Here we come to the core of my disagreement with Stefan's argument. Stefan claims that I (or anyone) who argues against the existance of a universal ethical standard is making a self-exploding argument, because by making a positive statement (your argument is defective) I am implicitly making a normative statement (you shoudl not be mking defective arguments. You should fix the defects if you can, and abandon the argument if you can't). He is not completely off-base here. I am implicitly making a normative statement. I do feel that people should make sound arguments. Further, I think this is not merely a matter of personal preference, but is implied by other charactersitics I may have. Everyone with whom I shares a certain common ground should agree with me. But not everyone period. I don't consider my ethical standards to be universal. There are many people who think it is a waste of time to worry about the truth of factual matters that have no pragmatic significance. I'm not one of those people, but I can't prove them normatively wrong. Quite the contrary, if someone starts with the premise that truth is only of value as a guide to action, the only way I could attempt to convince them that some particular fact mattered would be to argue that someday it might make a practical difference, in essence conceding their point. There are many people who believe that studying ethics is a waste of time, that people will behave just as ethically if not more so if they simply trust their feelings as to what is right and wrong rather than trying to ground ethics in philosophical principles. I don't know if they are right or wrong or even if there is as answer to that question, but the fact that these people are unlikely to engage in philosophical debates is no good argument against them. There are many statements in the book with which I could find some issue, but I think this represents the core of my disagrement: The fact that I personally endorse something very much like what Stefan calls universally preferable behavior does not prove that I consider it to be universally preferable. I think many other people have very different prefernces, and it is not at all clear to me they are "wrong" in a any absolute sense.