Freedomain Radio is a philosophical conversation based on empirical logic and the Socratic method, designed to help you bring the maximum freedom and happiness into your life.
In the academic sense, yes. In terms of how you can make sense of your life, and make the kinds of decisions in the here and now that will make you happy in the future, absolutely not! Philosophy is the most extreme sport known to mankind. It is intense, grueling, exciting, challenging, ennobling and occasionally utterly terrifying. Here at Freedomain Radio, we do not focus on philosophy as an abstract science, but as an immediate, personal and tangible methodology. Philosophy will certainly help you understand politics and history, economics and epistemology, but most importantly, it will help you make rational decisions in your life – decisions that you know are correct.
Freedomain Radio takes a simple and common sense approach to philosophy. Clearly, reality exists independent of your mind. You exist independent of me. Truth in your mind is fidelity to reality. Logic and evidence are the only ways of separating truth from opinion, consistency from conformity, fantasy from fact.
Morality is one of the most challenging sciences in human thought. Morality is a concept within the human mind, and as such does not exist in external reality, in the same way that gravity or rocks do. This does not mean that morality is subjective, or imaginary, or arbitrary. Numbers do not exist in external reality either, but that does not mean that mathematics is a subjective discipline.
Any moral theory must pass a number of scientific and rational hurdles in order to be considered potentially valid. It must be universal, logical, consistent, reversible – and it must both explain history and have the capacity to predict the future. Anyone who proposes any form of "preferential behavior" for humanity as a whole must submit that theory to a rational and scientific examination. If you are not interested in proposing any form of preferential behavior, that's no particular problem – however, you are then excluded from any debate about ethics. If you'd like a more in-depth explanation of morality, I've written an article that describes my approach.