what are the most important questions that my listeners want answers to?

And we're going to run through them quickly,

and hopefully this will be a one-stop-shop for at least tertiary answers

to your most important questions.

First was morality and ethics foundations.

Is morality objective and universal, e.g. does UPP hold up against religious, theistic, or secular alternatives like divine command theory and hedonism? Great question. And the answer, of course, is yes. Next question. All right. So, does UB hold up against religious, theistic, or secular

alternatives like divine command theory or hedonism? So a commandment is not an argument, and

escalating the power and authority of the commander does not make something true. The richest man

in the world, the most politically powerful man or woman in the world,

can say that the physically strongest man in the world, the tallest man in the world, the man with the

loudest voice. None of them can say the two and two make five, and have it be true. There is no

power in the universe strong enough to make the irrational, rational, to make the

anti-rational, rational. So religious commandments are just that. So the big challenge, of course,

is that morality evolved to serve rulers, not virtue.

And so if you look at sort of historically developed morality,

it creates exceptions for the rulers, which is kind of the point.

The purpose is, if you can convince your livestock to respect fences that aren't there,

then it's a whole lot cheaper to run your farm.

And because it's a whole lot cheaper to run your farm, you end up with more money for military,

conquests, and so on, right? So the more self-regulating the tax livestock are,

the more efficient is the tax farm,

and therefore it will tend to spread.

...