Hi everyone. Welcome to Active Self-Protection Extra. And today on John's briefs, we are continuing our series on what it means to be a good, sane, sober, moral, prudent person. Over the last several weeks, we have been over good. We have been over sane, we have been over sober. Today is probably the one that we are going to have some significant and maybe even strident disagreements over because today I want to talk to you about what it means to be moral firearms Legal protection is who I trust to help me after a use of force incident. If you're a firearms legal protection member, I will also be on your team as a consulting expert and you can attend our monthly active self-protection training seminars for free. Check out all they offer to their members. At the link below, we've already established I have a heart set on good helping others and being a good part of the wholeness of my community and my world.
We are saying we have connected our actions to their outcomes, consequential, those kinds of things. I have soberly thought through who I am, what my capabilities are, how I work in my world, and what I should work on for my mission. And today then we're going to talk about how those three things together will help us build a moral code. We're going to start here with some definitional stuff, and I want to talk, there's several places you got to go here because quite frankly, this can get into the weeds really fast. And this is where, I mean, philosophers, this is their entire stock in trade is talking about morality and how should we act and how do we act and what we ought do that is ought kind of divide in those things. And that goes, if you've read the ancient Greeks and Romans, you've read Aristotle and Plato or up to more modern folks like Kant and John Locke and Hume and all Thomas Aquinas, if you go back a little bit farther and kind of everyone in between and many modern philosophers as well.
Let's bring it back a little bit and talk about definitions. In fact, there's a couple of things here that's kind of interesting because those definitions can be very difficult for folks. I'm going to look at Miriam Webster's definition here. Merriam Webster's definition of morality, which they really kind of put right together with ethics is expressing or teaching a standard of right behavior conforming to a standard of right behavior. So it's either expressing or teaching a standard of right behavior is that idea of teaching ethics or conforming to that standard of right behavior is expressing morals. Okay? dictionary.com says a focus on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than legalities focusing on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than the legalities of right conduct. And I actually think that's a pretty good definition that we're going beyond the legal stuff. And again, thank you to firearms legal protection for allowing me to kind of get away from the legal stuff to talk to us about a higher standard of being that not talking about the legalities of right conduct, but the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than the legalities of it.
I would also argue though this is kind of up in the air when you read all of the philosophers of the day back into history and all that stuff, that morality is how we treat ourselves as well as how we treat others. That how I treat me matters for how I treat other people. That sometimes people disagree on this, but I think that if I treat me like crap, I am way more apt to treat other people like crap. If I disdain myself, I will be apt to disdain others in more significant manners. So it's not just about how I treat others, but how I treat myself too. That comes into morality. If you want a good priming deep dive on this, I'm going to put a link in the description to a fairly stout and article on Stanford University's philosophy website. And that particular one is a defining issue of morals and what does this mean and how do we define these things?
And as you might expect from an academic paper, it is an academic paper that was fairly recently updated substantially. They go to great lengths to use a lot of expansive words and sound important, but it's a good read and I think the best thing that you'll get away from that is there's a difference between talking about descriptive morals and normative morals or prescriptive morals. So descriptive morals is simply looking at a group and saying, what is their code of conduct? What is the way that that group generally or in a strong majority expects of its members? And what kind of behavior does that particular group adhere to as a group norm? And that is their morals. Now, you note there, that's not a religion. So this is only about conduct. It's not about belief or worship. So it's not a religion here. We're not talking about religion necessarily, though religions I think lend themselves to particular morals.
If you follow a particular God, you're going to adopt their conduct of behavior. In a general sense though, of course we're going to talk about differing groups within those religions will hold to how does their God expect them to behave differently and therefore their standards of conduct will be differently. I come out of the Anabaptist tradition of following Jesus, but not closely adhering to what would modern, most modern Anabaptist would look like. Certainly I'm not a Quaker or anything like that, but other people with other traditions and backgrounds, their view and understanding of how God's morals are required might be a little bit different than mine. So we're going to kind of divorce those two just a little bit. Not divorce them, but distinguish them. I guess that we should say this is a guide to conduct, okay? Which means we're talking about cooperation with others, we're talking about conflict resolution with others, we're talking about community and how I fit in that community and what standards of behavior we should expect for somebody.
And this can be anything from an organized sport. We play basketball together to a community group, whether that's an outlaw motorcycle gang or a gardening group. That's what standard of behavior do we have for each other to a nation and how do we adhere together as a group around shared behavioral standards and that can work towards any of those. So that's what a descriptive understanding of morals looks like. Now, how about a normative standard, a normative standard? What we would say is, is this idea of a universal code that something that all or virtually all rational people who are saying folks who connect, cause and effect would agree upon. Now when you read the philosophers, you will read disagreement as to whether or not that can actually even be discerned that there is a universal code or not. I do think that there are certain commonalities that are so widely considered and accepted that we probably can, and then I'm going to kind of narrow it down for us.
I also want to note that these can be formal or informal. Alright? So sometimes we could say, wait a minute, what is this descriptive code of behavior that we expect of one another and how do we know that? Now, I would argue that there can be an informal or a formal code. Now, when we look at a formal code, I talked about basketball earlier. If you play in a basketball league, a formal code has a codified list of rules and an administrative, a formal person who decides whether a behavior is inside that code, that explicit code or outside it. So if I play a basketball league and we have an umpire and a list of rules, we have a rule book that says, this is how this game is played, and we have a referee who is going to decide if my behavior and if other people's behavior meet that standard or don't meet that standard, we have a formal moral code.
Now you might say, gosh, man, I don't think playing basketball arises to a moral kind of issue. Generally speaking, what I'm trying to do here is establish formality versus informality. In an informal, maybe we play a pickup game of basketball and we all kind of agree, we all kind of know, but self-policing and doesn't have an official judge or maybe even an official list of rules. You might say, oh, okay, wait a minute. In our unofficial basketball league, if somebody misses the basket, you got to clear the ball back to half court. But if they miss the rim, you don't have to. Well, who agrees with that and who doesn't see how it's more informal. So that's just an example. So generally speaking, what we want to talk about here is a publicly known code that people can follow things which we say we hold ourselves to these principles of behavior and that it could be informal or could be formal.
I'm going to argue here that rather than the formality of a legal code in the United States, that here I'm talking about more of an informal code for us to adopt as a community of self defenders. Now I get that. Here's the interesting part here. I actually think when we look at the legal principles of self-defense, there's a pretty strong overlap between what I think the moral code should be and is what the legal code says. There's some instances where it's not quite on par, but I think they're pretty darn close. So we're going to see a lot of overlap. Now, there's an interesting bit about basically I think most moral codes, almost all moral codes that we see throughout society that crosses cultural barriers and those kinds of things is that there's some kind of prohibition on killing in a general sense without strong justification or what we would say kind of a better word, I think is a prohibition on murder or taking life.
There is also a general prohibition on causing harm, particularly unnecessary and unjust harm. There's a prohibition on deception and on making others make decisions to their detriment from bad information you've given them. And then there's some kind of moral turpitude towards breaking of promises that when we make a voluntary commitment, we hold to the standard of keeping that voluntary commitment. So I mean really cross religions, cross societies, you see those kind of adhere. Now how do we build out from those? Which one is most important? What's the hierarchy? Well, that's going to kind of depend on who you are, and that's going to kind of depend on which society you're in. I'll give you a for instance. In American society, we value individual liberty, the right of the individual to make their own choices very, very highly. Whereas some other cultures don't put that as high as collectivist ideas of the betterment of society.
Which one's right, which one's wrong? We got to think through that. But I'm going to come at you from a little bit of an American paradigm, and I'm going to go back to the philosophy of John Locke who really influenced an awful lot of our founding fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson. But Locke is the one who coined the idea that people are born with inalienable rights. And among those rights, not exclusively these rights, but among those rights are the right to life, liberty, and property. Now, I know you're going to go, wait a minute, I've heard something like that before. Yeah, because Thomas Jefferson turned the word property in the end. He says that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and in his words, in the constitution, the pursuit of happiness.
Let's be careful with this, okay? We got to understand what that means. But what we said is as a society was we established this nation and did so on principles of justice, of resistance, of tyranny, that we said all people, we agree that our moral code represents this idea that all people, regardless of anything else about them, have the inalienable right to life, the inalienable right to liberty, and the inalienable right to what Jefferson said, the pursuit of happiness. But we've got to be very careful here, okay? So in Locke's thinking, alright, if you go back to John Locke and you look at some of his writing then in John Locke's writing property was more than just land to own and goods to own. The fundamental property was the ownership of self. Alright? Now of course we can ask in the 17th and 18th centuries, how does that work with the fact that Thomas Jefferson, for instance, owned other human beings and did so his whole life?
That's a very complicated question actually. But in Locke's mind and in his writings, somebody who owned property, the right to property was the first and foremost the ownership of self, which Jefferson again took in the pursuit of happiness. But Locke in his writings, and Jefferson in his writings on this, said that really the idea here is not self gratification. It's not to do whatever I want. It's the pursuit of true happiness, the pursuit of that which is morally best and really truly makes for lasting correct good happiness. So it's really in some sense rooted in the Greek and Roman idea of virtue of courage, of moderation of justice. So the pursuit of happiness is not certainly in the constitutional mode, the idea of I can go do anything I want as long as it makes me happy or it gratifies my desires. But every single person has the right to life, every single person has the right to liberty, and every single person has the right to the pursuit of the highest ideals of true joy and happiness.
Okay, what does that mean? Here's where your assignment starts to come in that I would strongly encourage you to adopt that as an overarching moral code for self-defense. So we say that again, if we go back to this idea that the true idea of morals is how I treat me as part of a community and how I treat other people in that and what the principle-based approach that I'm going to take is going to say. So first, foremost, and always in there, I put myself in the middle of that and I say, okay, wait a minute. I have the right to life, to liberty and to the pursuit of the highest ideals of true joy and happiness, which is this idea of virtue and courage and justice and morality and moderation. I put me in that I have the right to life. I have the right to self-determination.
I have the right to own property first and foremost myself, and secondly, through the fruit of my labor, collect things and those are inalienable rights. They can't be taken away certainly without due process, but other people have them too. I have to recognize then by a moral code that my actions have no right to take that from others. Now, I think there's an interesting bit here in self-defense because of course we talk about using firearms and we talk about the means of lethal force, and we recognize, wait a minute, if somebody else is also endowed with an inalienable right to life and liberty and I shoot them, then I take that away from them. So we always say, wait a minute, I don't have the right to impact someone else without justification that supersedes that which would require it. And therefore what we say is, wait a minute, I don't have the right to use deadly harm against somebody unless it is immediately required to stop their commission of deadly harm against me, that I have the right to life as well, and since it's their behavior that caused that risk to me, then I have the right, because the fundamental right to life and liberty and to the pursuit of true happiness is my right.
Then that is that founding and fundamental principle that allows and accepts the fact that it's their behavior that takes their life, not mine. That's my moral code, which is why I only use deadly force as a tool of last resort. If it's not immediately and acutely necessary to do so, well, then they have the right to life. They have the right to liberty, they have the right to property as well, to themselves and to the pursuit of happiness. So I respect other people. Now in libertarian circles, you might call this the non-aggression principle, or my friend Mark Victor calls it the live and let live principle, which, hey, I'm going to do me, you do. We don't harm each other and we only voluntarily cooperate, which I think actually has a lot of merit. I'm not trying to get into politics, maybe a bit of that whackadoodle kind of lowercase l libertarian.
But here's the moral idea is with, I'm going to confine this to self-defense and really strongly encourage you to start to build a principle-based self-defense paradigm that says, I have the right to life. I have the right to freedom to be master of myself. I have the right to not be coerced, to not be forced to do something else that I don't choose to do. Now. Then I don't have the right to use force against others, either only and accept to the extent that it is required for me to successfully resist their unlawful use of force. Now, that said, I am going to hold my promises because when I make a voluntary commitment, say I sign a contract or I make an agreement, then I hold to that because that's my moral code that says I'm a person of integrity and do what I say they do the same as well.
I'm a person of my word. I don't seek through deception to harm other people because I'm good and sane and sober, and I use force only as a tool of last resort in order to resist the unlawful unmoral immoral use of force against me. So I really think from a self-defense perspective, the non-aggression principle is actually quite good. That if I want somebody else to do something, I convince them that it's in their best interest to do so. Not using deception, but earnestly seeking their best as a member of a just and moral society, and I expect them to do the same. And when force begins to be used, then I have the right and the expectation that I can use that force which is necessary to defend my own life, my own liberty, and my own pursuit of happiness. But that's the extent of it.
I don't get to use force to coerce other people. Let me also encourage you in all this, start that use of force and coercion in your own home, okay? Don't force people to do stuff. Now I know you're going to say, wait a minute, what does that mean for my children? Well, when your child's a little bitty guy when they're two years old and they go, I don't want to go to bed, and you pick 'em up and you put 'em in bed, well, that's a use of force. Okay? So I get that. And I'm not saying that every use of force is immoral sometimes when somebody is irrational, when they are not able to rationally think for themselves. We use the minimum amount of force necessary as somebody who's in a place of authority and a place of responsibility and care to help them to do the right thing, minimum being the operative word.
But certainly we wouldn't ever want to use coercion and force on our spouse. We would want to have them be somebody who we care for their sovereignty, their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of the ultimate good and happiness, and we would use the best of our relationship and the best of our discussion, and we would use words and we would convince them that that is in their best interest rather than coerce or force them. As our children get older, I've got grown kids. I've got three kids that are over 18 and one who's still under 18, and those ones who are over 18, our relationship's completely voluntary. Now, you might say, Hey, wait a minute. I'd like you to do this thing. And if I'm paying for something in your world that's contingent upon you doing the thing I want is that coercion?
Well, maybe, but that's, Hey, I, I'm doing something good. I'd like something back in return. If you're not willing, then maybe I'll hold that boundary, but look at that in your personal relationships and ask yourself from a moral perspective, am I using force here? Or am I a good, sane, sober and moral person in my community? When we start talking about defensive use of force, am I seeking good? Am I willing to protect the rights of others as well as myself? Do I recognize that they have an inalienable right to life, an inalienable right to liberty, and an inalienable right to property IE, the pursuit of happiness on their own? I think when we do that, then we start treating the other people around us in ways that look very good and not only produce a great society that takes care of one another, but puts us in a place that the highest good for ourselves and for others is achieved, which kind of is the definition of being moral and in your defensive mindset.
I want you to really think through that this week and really kind of think about are there areas where I am inappropriately using force rather than being a person of morality? Maybe that's at work with your subordinates or maybe that is in a business deal that you could put the screw to somebody even where it's not right to use that force because you've got better choices in mind. Maybe it's using physical domination or threats of violence against somebody. And if that's the case, that's immoral and you need to change your thinking on that, stop doing that and repent immediately, please. This is a lot, and this is a big one, and I know there's going to be some discussion here. I just have to protect myself and I don't care about anyone else. I don't think that's good morals, and I'd strongly encourage us all to raise the standard to take care of not only ourselves, certainly ourselves, but to the community as well. And I hope you consider and work on that too. Next week we're going to talk about this idea of prudence.
YouTube Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERijdR1GHnM&list=PLkjkKbdZgxVDVyMvzKn27k3rT7dL25j5D&index=6
Credit: John Corriea, Active Self Protection Extra