Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…he world. We are a big country that is the biggest bully in the world, so we’re in no position to let… but we’re kind of in the position is just you’re like, “Hey, we’d sure love if you don’t do that. You can do it and you can get away with it, but we would sure love it if you don’t.” And so the goal would be to do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. When Vladimir Putin starts talking about like, Hey, if you keep pushing the idea of Ukraine joining your military alliance, I’m going to invade that country. The goal there or the move there would be to be like, “Okay, we’ll stop talking about that. Is there something else that we can agree on?” Is there a way that you will promise you won’t do anything to them and we’ll promise we won’t bring them in our military. That’s the goal. You don’t just go like, “No, fuck you, we’re doing it anyway,” over and over and over again until they do the thing. I think we got to this discussion from the military industrial complex and military intervention, and Ron Paul, before that, if you could rewind a little bit. According to you, and according to various flavors of libertarianism, is there any amount of military intervention that’s justified? That’s okay? Well, I would say, at least to me, in terms of pure libertarian theory or just in terms of what I think is right or wrong, there is such thing as a just war. The most obvious example of that would be you’re invaded by a military and fighting them off. So in that sense, also, even if you want to isolate from everything else- If you want to isolate from everything else, from all of the awful U.S. policy toward Russia, post Soviet Union, to all of the NATO expansion and color coded revolutions and all of these things… If you want to… Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine. I do think the Ukrainians have a right to fight and protect their land. There’s an aggressor there, and you have a right to defend yourself. So certainly in that sense, I think the American Revolution was a just war. I think there can be just wars. In terms of pure libertarian theory, I think I would say that, look, you never have a right to kill innocent people. That’s never morally okay. Now, there could be a scenario, just like this is true in life in general, right? There’s lots of things that you don’t have the right to do, but you could come up with some scenario where you might be in a position where you have to do it because there were all of these extenuating circumstances. You could think of something where… You remember the saw movies? Where they used these crazy horror scenarios, but it’s like, “Okay, so there’s a person, an evil bad guy has buried a key inside this person, and you have to kill that person in order to get the key, in order to unlock these 20 people to let them out of a cage.” Now, look, you still don’t have a right to kill people. It’s horrible and wrong, and what you did there was still evil, but if you were taken to trial over it, you could probably explain to a judge and a jury be like, “I know, but the situation I was in was either these 20 people were going to die, or this one person was going to die, and under that situation, I chose to save the 20.” So in other words, by perfect theory, no, you never have the right to kill innocent people.…

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