Dialog with a Hedonist

Injustice is worse than violence. It is better to fight than to submit to the arrogance of a settled injustice, even if you fight giants. Better to die free than to live a slave.

Tyranny is worse than violence. The peaceful nation that lives next to a blood-thirsty tyrant, and suffers the tyrant to live in peace, has offended that great duty which human nature, which right reason and heaven itself commands: it is the duty of all free men to spend their blood and treasure to overthrow slavers and dictators, and to strike the shackles from the oppressed. It is not merely permitted to launch an unprovoked attack against a tyrant, it is impermissible to delay doing so. To allow the government of Cuba, for example, to continue, while we still have one fit miltiaman, one unspent cartridge, nay, one knife, is a moral wrong: it is the mortal sin of sloth, the despair of attempting that which duty commands. 

Barbarism is worse than violence.  It is better for civilization to spread than for barbarism to spread, and if this cannot be done peacefully, let it be done violently.

Hell is worse than violence.

There are men who would say, and I was once one of them, that Dishonor is worse than violence. If someone, in perfect peace, and within his legal rights, insults your wife, it is better to fight him and be beaten and go to jail for it than to accept the insult meekly. I cannot argue with these men, for the only reason why I no longer support this view is that a Greater Power, whom I serve and fear, has commanded me to eschew it. But if no such power has so commanded you, what rational account can you give to support your view that violence is worse than dishonor, to a man who says dishonor is worse than violence?

That man who stands between your loved home and the desolation of war and anarchy: and his philosophy is not, and cannot be, peace at any price.

Below are some other questions you ask, but the answers, I fear, will do you little good, since they are not asked as part of a structured conversation. Out of courtesy to you, I answer each as if meant seriously, and perhaps you can tell me what point you are driving at.

You: What is a sin and what is a crime for people to be guilty of? What guilt attaches to one who shuns marriage and children?

Me again: Sin is an offense against the moral structure of reason and reality. For Christians, sin is an offense against the glory of God; for secular humanists, sin is an offense against the glory of human nature and human potential. A man who has the talent to produce art, but instead produces trash for monetary gain, commits a sin, I think both Christian and secular humanist might agree, even if they disagree about the details. Crime is offense against the law. The guilt that attaches to one who shuns marriage and children depends on his reason for shunning it. Is he a priest, who seeks a higher calling, and wants to serve God? No guilt attaches to a priest for being celibate. Is he a playboy, who shuns marriage because he is selfish, he has no character, he wants to use women as pleasure objects only, and never to be in love? He is guilty of several deep crimes, including lust and pride and sloth, and cheats himself of happiness, and destroys his God-given human potential to be a pillar of society. He is a drone, worthless, and he has sold his gold and exchanged it for tin, the metal that corrupts other metals it touches.

You: A churchman has every right to correct the members of his church. He has no right to correct the members of another church or the members of no church. Particularly, if the churchman’s rules are more restrictive than the atheist’s, he has no right to use force to place his restrictions on the children–or the adults–who hold to a less restrictive standard.

Me: No argument here. I merely wonder from whence comes your concept of “rights.”

You: A person who engages in violence is essentially admitting that he has no reasonable way to convince the other party to do what he wants them to do.

Me: Granted. Some people — children and lunatics — cannot listen to reason. And some people — criminals — do not. Against them it is right to use force to compel obedience to the standards of right and wrong.

You: He is achieving his desires unjustly.

Me: This simply does not follow. If I live next door to a child pornographer who sells blow-up dolls that look like my young son, and his business attracts a daily crowd of customers who linger in the street, leering at my boy and propositioning him, and if, to advertise his wares, my neighbor performs simulated or real sex acts on his roof, such that my peaceful enjoyment of my property is curtailed, there are sufficient negative consequences from his nonviolent acts to authorize me to use violence against him, or to call in the Crown to do so on my behalf.  

You: If all parties agree, without threat of violence, to engage in some practice, the practice may be foolhardy, but it is never immoral.

Me: Never immoral? What, never ever? What about an opium den? What about a suicide pact? What about a duel to the death? What about slowly burning a baby puppy to death on the stove, and filming the event? What about lying to yourself?  None of these things has any immorality to it? I wonder what your definition of morality is.  

You: You’ve every right to say that hedonism is wrong. You’ve every right to set up hedonism-free zones on the land you control. You’ve every right to form anti-hedonism clubs and require every member restrict himself accordingly. The evil comes when you set up a law that brings punishment on people who act hedonistically in private. The evil comes when you ban the manufacture or sale of a product or service that aids hedonists.

Me: So if my neighbor is selling child-porn blow up dolls that look like my son, and the local town meeting lawfully votes to outlaw his business, and the courts of law agree that this is constitutional, that is evil, a monstrous evil?

What if my neighbor is running a suicide abattoir, where people who are depressed can come and be unburdened from the pains of life, and he grinds the bodies into meat sausages, which he sells under the name Soylent Green, and only to patrons who fully know they are eating human flesh? What if my neighbor sends around agents to hunt up volunteers, and uses all the tricks and mechanisms of modern mass advertisement to glorify suicide, and urge people to give in to depression?

What about a man who seduces my thirteen-year-old daughter? Have I no right to beat him? I would say I have a duty to do so, and if a higher power did not command me to do otherwise, I would say that I am in neglect of normal fatherly duties to protect and rear the young if I let that seducer escape unmaimed. If state has not the power or inclination to protect my daughter, it is negligent in its duty to protect the citizens.

Have you ever studied law? Do you know that no legal system on Earth recognizes the sources and boundaries of lawful action as following the contour you outline? Now, if you wish to argue that all legal systems on Earth are wrong, please do so, but do not expect to convince someone who does not share your assumptions merely with a gratuitous assertion.

Your dick is not my god: I do not listen to its urgings with respect and reverence.  

Me (being quoted) : “And what if your attempts to escape the consequences of your actions are unsuccessful?”

You: They attach, just as if no attempts were made.

Me again:This admission is fatal to your argument. One of the several purposes of marriage is to identify paternity, and to ensure that no child comes into the world without the support of his father, a loving family, and a home. To promote this end, the traditional law was that no person unwilling or unable to act the role of a father in a family is allowed to engage in the act of sexual reproduction. While there may often be cases, even a majority, where the act of sexual reproduction is sterile, merely because the consequences of mischance are so high—if you father a child when you are not ready, you either have to kill the child or abandon him—a blanket prohibition on imprudent sexual congress is more than justified under any set of principals. Even hard-core libertarians will admit you have to pay your debts, and that it is immoral to shift the burden and risk of your risk-taking activities onto the shoulders of someone (in this case, a child) who did not can cannot consent to bear them. It is like playing Russian roulette with someone else in front of the barrel. If the gun goes off, bang, the unborn child dies or is abandoned, not you. Now, if your birth control is fairly effective, you can add a large number of blank barrels to your revolver: let us say only four barrels in a hundred contain live ammo. Well, pal, if it is so safe, then there is no harm in demanding with the force of the law that the barrel be against your head and not the child’s. You are the one getting the pleasure of the copulation, after all, not him.

So a very simple rule is made and enforce. No one plays Russian roulette unless the barrel is at his temple. No couple copulates unless they are a wedded couple, a mommy and daddy for whom a third will be a blessing and not a curse. That way, if the unplanned gun goes off, there is a house ready to receive the child. Otherwise the Stork throws junior down the chimney of the abortion clinic, where they inject him with saline, and kill the little man, and deny him a burial. Not even a small coffin does he get.

You (continued): That does not make the attempts immoral.

Me: Actually, it does. Even if you assume the consequentialist line of argument (which I do not) once the consequences are above a certain magnitude— such as when someone else’s life is at stake, or her lifelong happiness— negligence in that case is so egregious that it is tantamount to deliberate and willful malice. It is evil to discharge a loaded firearm into a house, even though you may not know for sure the house is occupied. While you are not deliberately aiming at anyone, the risk of harm is so great that the act is beyond negligence, it is malign. Likewise to seduce a virgin you have no intent or means to marry. If she is pregnant, you have fathered a bastard. Killing the child hides the crime, but does not excuse it. Her chances of lifelong happiness are marred, perhaps beyond repair: she must either lower her standards to match yours, in which case she is an unpaid whore, or she must suffer a broken heart, because you are not the prince on a white steed she deserves. It is not merely negligent. It is evil.

You: A person who enjoys the free fall sensation from jumping out of a plane is not evil because he attempts to mitigate consequences by opening a parachute. Ah, but sexual congress isn’t the lone activity that skydiving is. It may affect another person. (It may, indeed, effect another person) How strong does the confidence interval have to be before the act becomes non-evil?

Me: I don’t follow the question here. I don’t know what you mean by “confidence interval” here. I don’t grant the idea that if the evil external consequences are avoided, the evil act is not evil: even when there are no consequences, and no harm done, self-indulgence cheapens your character and weakens your moral fiber. The damage is done to your mind and personality. You become a beast, merely a creature wallowing in base pleasures, enslaved to them. You are no longer a man.

You: A skydiver’s chute might fail and he might land on someone, killing them. But it’s so small a chance with the proper precautions. A sexual encounter might result in pregnancy to term, but with the proper precautions the chance of bad results is just as negligible.

Me: It is wrong for a woman to act like an unpaid whore. It demeans her, it cheapens her, and you are a panderer if you help and encourage her in that regard. Women were made for love, true love, and you coarsen a little girl’s ability to find and experience the wonders of true love if you talk her into hiking her skirts for you, a punk whose love is only skin deep, and who is hard pressed to remember her name the next day when you are sober.

You: The world is not evil, but it is non-ideal. Humans, which are of the world, have desires not met without payment. The world is contradictory in this respect. I think it erroneous to assume that the non-human part of the world is automatically in the right, and that the human part of the world must conform. From what principle does that assumption come?

Me: I am afraid I don’t follow the question here. Are you claiming self-control is from the non-human part of the world? I am not sure what you mean by the non-human part of the world. Reason is human. Using reason to restrain our temporary and self-destructive animal appetites is the sine qua non of human. I don’t know what you are talking about.

I would say the principle involved is the difference between internal and external reality. What is in our minds is under our control, and we bear the responsibility for it. What is outside, things like body, property, reputation, offices, is under the control of men or nature or the gods, and they bear the responsibility for it. We can control what is within us, and we cannot control what is outside us. It is possible, if difficult, to control an unreasonable appetite. It is impossible to force reality to be unreasonable.

You:  I could say the normal definitions of virtue is that which people want to do, and that the normal definition of vice is that which people do not want to do. This would be a definition that more accurately reflects people’s actions, if not their statements.

Me: I now regret that I took the time to type these answers. Go back to school. Read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.

Me (being quoted) : “This is the position of an undisciplined teenager. Forgive me, but this sounds like whining.”

You: Perhaps it does.

Me: Hmm.

You: And if I did believe in a god, I would have a few things to tell him about how things are run around here.

Me: So would I, but my words would be words of thanksgiving, and not of folly. I know a blind man, a member of holy orders, who thanks the Lord for his blindness. I know a preacher who has cerebral palsy, whose afflictions he bears not simply with fortitude, but with joy. That type of courage is impossible for you, because your life is self-centered, and your philosophy is shallow. Of course you would complain to your betters.

You are a complainer. You say you want to have sex without any real-world consequences.  Of course you have complaints, and you would offer them to a being who, if reports are accurate, is not merely older and wiser than you, but not merely infinitely wiser than you, but Omniscience itself. Well, son, even an infinite being cannot remove logic from cause and effect, cannot make selfishness a virtue or define good to include evil.

You see, my religion has daily, nay, hourly examples of men addicted to violence or drugs or stark wickedness who throw away their vices and never return to them once the Holy Spirit touches them. This is the norm, not a rare exception. Your philosophy of selfishness has nothing like this, nothing at all. Hedonism cannot comfort the prisoner in the dungeon or the cripple in the sickbed or the beggar in the gutter. Mine can. Telling a man who lives with daily cancer pain that pleasure is what he should live for is a sick joke. My boss can tell that same man to rise from his bed and walk, or from his grave. Your philosophy turns hardworking serious students into drunken pigs. My philosophy turns boys into men, and my religion turns men into saints. What have you got? Who has hedonism ever saved? Who ever said, “I used to kill men for money, but I found Epicurus, and thanks be! Now I wash lepers! I live only for me, glorious me, wonderful me!!” No one talks like that because nothing in life works like that.

Young lady, please tell the jury your name.

Eloi: Oena.

Me: Oena, do you live a life of pleasure and comfort?

Eloi: Oh, yes!

Me: Oena, would you say that the advance of technology leading up to your age, allowed mankind to do ever less work for ever more reward, until, finally, in your era, you do no work at all?

Eloi: I am not sure what those words mean. Would you like some fruit?

(Objection noted. The court instructs the counselor to limit his questions to the witness’s knowledge.)

Me: Thank you, Your Honor. Oena, would you call yourself a bon vivant, a happy person?

Eloi: I am one of he happy people, the beautiful ones. I never worry about tomorrow.

Me: Do you have any ability to maintain the machinery or infrastructure that provides for you your living? Do you have the self-discipline it takes to study engineering or mechanics?

Eloi: I am not sure what those words mean. Would you like some fruit?

Me: Where does the fruit you eat come from, Oena?

Eloi: (shrugs).

Me: Oena, what do you do when the sun goes down?

Eloi: I go inside.

Me: Why is that, Oena?

Eloi: The dark is bad.

Me: What do you do when the Morlocks come to eat you?

Eloi: Do? I don’t do anything. I am an Eloi. I am one of he happy people, the beautiful ones.

Me: Do you take any provision for your own self defense?

Eloi: I do not understand those words. The dark is bad. I fear the dark. Let us be happy, and talk of happy things! I like fruit! I like grapes and ripe, round peaches. Would you like some fruit?

Me: What do the Eloi plan to do about the Morlocks?

Eloi: (she shrugs and smiles a charming, blank smile)

 Ladies and gentleman of the jury, Oena the Eloi does not even have a category in her mind, she does not have words or concepts for the idea of discipline, drill, training, self-command, or any other philosophical or military or engineering discipline. She is like a child, not like a grown-up. If you see similarities between her “philosophy” (I use the term loosely) and that of the opposing counsel, this is not a coincidence. The Eloi is the end product, not of natural evolution, but of philosophical evolution— she is the future toward which our young hedonist friend is driving as his goal. She is his exemplar, what he wants to be, whether he knows it or not.

My next witness is Louis Wu from AD 2850.

Mr. Wu, please tell the Jury your name and occupation.

Wu: Well, you just told them my name, son. Um. I am sort of between jobs at the moment.

Me: Why is that? Do you come from a future possessed of such economic efficiency that minimal work produces maximal output, and  the noble worker has been supplanted by the noble bon vivant, and discipline is finally recognized as the anachronism it is?

Wu: Don’t be a tanjit ass, boy. I am a …  wirehead.

Me: Please speak up for the jury.

Wu (louder): I said I am a wirehead!

Me: Your ancestors here in the 21st Century might not know what that is. Could you explain the technology?

Wu: I got this tanj wire in my head. I can send a jolt to the pleasure center of my brain whenever I want. Now, I got it on a timer, see, so I don’t give myself too much for too long. Otherwise you forget to eat and stuff. I got to remember to keep myself clean and depilated. Once your stop caring about that stuff, it’s bad. Can’t let your teeth go bad, otherwise toothache will drive you back into the wire. When infection starts near the skull jack, it can get inflamed, the flesh, and you don’t want gangrene.

Me: What is the leading cause of death in wireheads?

Wu:  Most of us die of simple infection. Or diarrhea. Or dehydration. Tanj sots don’t have the get-up to go over the sink and get themselves a sip of water, so they die. Die smiling. That’s why you got to keep yourself clean. Originally, I was taking out the wire four hours a time. That’s the way to do it. I got to get back to that regimen. Some day soon, I’ll start cutting back. Maybe come New Year. Or my birthday.

Me: How many hours a day do you spend under the wire, Mr. Wu?

Wu: I was doing four-on and four-off. Now it is more like twelve hours a stretch, and then a little when I get up, and a little more before I turn in. So, call it nineteen-ish. About twenty hours a day. I sleep five, or less. Not an active life, so I don’t need much sleep.

Me: And what are your ambitions for the future, Mr. Wu.

Wu: I got no future. I am a tanjit wirehead, didn’t you hear me? I am addicted to this wire.

Me: Are you happy?

Wu: Are you nuts? I only got this was because some freak with a tasp zapped me when I was feeling particularly low. The jolt made me happy. It’s pure pleasure. Better than lovemaking, better than whiskey, better than food. It’s pure. It’s pure pleasure. Of course I am not happy. I am trying to beg enough change from passers by to buy a gun so as I can shoot myself. I tried slitting my wrists with a piece of glass I found in the garbage dump where I live.

No, not where I live. Where I sleep.

Anyway, I bled a bit, but it just made me weak, and bugs came out to lick the bloodstain on my mat. Got to clean it. It’s important to keep yourself clean. Maybe come New Year, I’ll get to the washroom, wash the mat. Or get a new mat. Wow. That would be something. A mat that did not smell of piss. I’d like that.

Me: And yet you have achieved the sum of human ambition: you have pure pleasure whenever you desire.

Wu: What am I, a pig in a sty? I am a human being, tanjit, Or I was. Once. I was a spacer. I’ve discovered things—I’ve seen things you would not believe. Trinocs gambling over a black hole. A Protector artifact larger than worlds. A flotilla of planets fleeing from a dying galaxy.

Me: What would it take to get you to put aside your addiction and ship out into space again, to see those things that filled you with such wonder?

Wu: I’d have to get control of myself.

Me: Self-discipline, in other words?

Wu: Call it what you like. I call it being a man.

Me: But why seek these wonders, why discipline yourself, why control your life and achieve your ambitions? After all, the satisfaction of your desires will merely give you pleasure, and if pleasure is the fountainhead and mainspring of human action, you already have that? What is the difference between the pleasure you get finding some new world, and the pleasure you get from your wire implant?

Wu: How would you like a punch in the nose?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if pleasure were the source of happiness, Louis Wu would be happy. In fact, pleasure as such, pure pleasure, is insufficient. His rational mind, his human side of himself, remembers the great deeds he did, and so he knows that some things have a value in and of themselves.

Some things are worthy and fitting to do, ladies and gentlemen, whether they give us pleasure or not. There are some things we ought to like even if we do not, at the moment, like them. We humans have some control, not as much as we should like, but still, some, to train ourselves to like those things we ought to like.

When we take pleasure in noble things, our appetites are rightly ordered. When we take pleasure in perverted things, our appetites are disordered. This is an error in the appetites just as much as a logical contradiction is an error in the reason. Our reason will tell us what things we ought to like and ought not to like, even if the pleasure center of our brain tells us nothing.

If the opposing counsel is correct, and pleasure is the yardstick of moral goodness, then there is no such thing as a disordered pleasure. Discontent is caused only by the reason being unwilling to accept the dictates of the appetites. If the appetite is never wrong, then reason is wrong when it disagrees with the appetite. In such a case, to achieve contentment, the logical thing to do, if appetite is the standard and reason has no role aside from serving it, would be (instead of cleaning himself up and breaking his addiction) for for Louis Wu to get a lobotomy, and erase from his memory the tormenting thoughts of what the life of a man of ambition and accomplishment should be.

My purpose in calling Louis Wu is merely to show that the pleasure center tells us what is pleasing, and does not tell us what we should find pleasing. He is an example of a man whose appetites, his pleasure center, and his reason, his sense of how a man should live to be called a man, are sharply enough divorced that the distinction between them is clear.

Me: Ladies and gentleman of the jury, my third witness is Epictetus.

Master, please introduce yourself to the jury.

Epictetus: I am man, which means, a rational animal. Within me are the faculties of reason, of will, and of impulse.

Me: Very interesting Mr. Epictetus. Would you call yourself a philosopher?

Epictetus: Let no man be called a philosopher until he is dead. If he cannot die unmoved, without fear and without recriminations, we do not know if he is in truth a philosopher.

Me: Someone has asked whether there is any need for discipline. If he were to ask you this, how should you answer him?

Epictetus: I would ask him, slave, how do you want me to answer you?

Me: What do you mean, sir?

Epictetus: Should I reason about an answer, and speak the truth, whether it is pleasing or unpleasing, bitter or sweet? Or should I avoid the strain and trouble of reasoning, and merely answer whatever first comes to my lips, and causes me pleasure to speak, and him pleasure to hear?

Me: I assume if he wants a true answer and a wise answer, if even the answer is difficult.

Epictetus: What makes difficult answers difficult?

Me: I am not sure, sir. Some things are unpleasant to hear, even if they are true, and some things are complex issues requiring patient study to reduce to a clear answer.

Epictetus: So to answer these questions requires putting aside pleasure for a time, in order to discover truth?

Me: To me, it seems so, at least.

Epictetus: So I would ask your someone how he came by his conclusion, whether by philosophy, or some other discipline? And when he had no answer for me, I will say to him, so you see that discipline is necessary, for without it you cannot even answer this question, whether discipline is necessary or not. 

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the reason why I address my comments to you, and not to my worthy opposing counsel, is that if he is correct that discipline and self-control is an anachronism, and if he intends his comment to apply to himself, then he confesses he does not have the mental integrity and tenacity, the manhood, the discipline needed to contemplate my words objectively and render a fair and impartial verdict on their truth. He says, in effect, that he is not worth talking to. I take him at his word, and no longer address my comments to him.

But if he is not correct, and he thinks about what I have said, and answers in a way that shows intellectual discipline, a careful argument or a reasoned response, then this acts as an admission fatal to his argument.

If discipline is necessary for philosophy, it is necessary for other arts, sciences, crafts and forms of labor. The hired hand hand needs discipline to remove a stump from a field the farmer means to plow. Now, with more advanced tools, stump removal becomes easier, and certain tasks that never could have been contemplated become possible. The efficiency of the labor is the ratio between input and output; the future we can envision is one where one workman, equipped with some machinery of cunning design, will be able to throw a mountain into the sea. All this means is that a hired hand will be set the task of moving asteroids, moons, and planets to more pleasant prospects, one mountain at a time.