Question

A. If I understand your answers correctly in the thread about the metaphysics of Jewish law, it follows that in your view the default is that Jewish law yields to morality in any concrete conflict (since your starting point is that morality is always binding, whereas religious values are at the very least in a state of doubt, if not tending toward the view that they are not binding)?
B. You said in the past that deciding between Jewish law and morality is similar to deciding between two values, and that it constitutes a situation of conflict rather than contradiction. In your book Humanity Is Like the Grass, you argued that since values are always ends and not means, they cannot be justified externally, and therefore it seems that one cannot really decide between values. Accordingly, the conclusion you reached there is that morality as a whole is included within a single unified system—the Idea of the Good—with all values merely ranked within it, as you wrote there: “Contrary to the accepted realist description, which sees the values themselves as existing in some sense, we proposed an alternative picture. The basic values, those located in the core of the onion (and only among them do we construct the scale of values; the other relations are already derived from this scale by purely logical means), are nothing but characteristics, or properties, of the concept of ‘the good,’ which is a kind of ‘being’ that exists in some sense in the world (perhaps in the world of ideas). As we saw above, the specific values are characteristics of this concept. We saw that disputes may indeed arise regarding them, but that is exactly like disputes that take place with respect to the definitions of more tangible objects.” My question is whether religious values or the halakhic system are also included within the concept of the Idea of the Good, and if not, how—and whether it is possible to decide between the different systems without some external grounding that places them on a single continuum?