Asymmetry Between Worldviews (Column 348)
In light of the tremendous success of the previous two columns, I can put you at ease: this column has a different character.
I recently saw a review of a thesis by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who works extensively in moral psychology. His thesis addresses an asymmetry between conservatives and liberals, and it stirred several thoughts in me about similar asymmetries that had already been on my mind and that I wish to share with you. But before that, I will take the opportunity to pour out a few methodological reflections on moral psychology.
A brief critical look at moral psychology
The psychologist Susan Fiske of Princeton, who also studies moral psychology, argues that the field of morality has been flourishing in recent years. Literary works, films, plays, and public debates deal quite a bit with moral questions. She offers various explanations for this, such as events that occur in our global village (terror attacks, disasters, and wars), dilemmas arising from technological developments and social changes (LGBTQ, arms trade, the authority of the state), and more. All this creates in us a strong need to find a moral compass for ourselves and brings us to discuss questions of morality. I think this is especially true in a period when traditional compasses have been lost for many of us due to detachment from religious tradition. In a world without God, people need to feel that they have another compass, that they are not merely random collections of molecules. Such discussions give them a sense of normative meaning. Among other things, she says, this awakening is reflected in very intensive psychological research on morality.
The various manifestos point to the contributions psychological research (on the personal and social planes) can make to our understanding of morality. It can shed light on questions such as where our moral insights come from, how our moral and practical decisions are made, what affects them, and what kinds of distortions can occur for us in these areas. A common trend is to show us that our morality is not as rational and systematic as some of us suppose (or used to suppose). Researchers point out that many irrational factors are involved, such as emotions, social influences, and the like. Among other things, researchers try to hold up a mirror that examines whether, in practice, we are consistent with our beliefs (which typically shows that we are not).
What I wish to say here is that, in my view, this field as a discipline does not truly exist (perhaps one could file it under “Jewish Thought,” another field that doesn’t really exist). The reason is that morality has no connection to psychology in any way—no more than to physics, linguistics, or archaeology. This does not mean that people acting in the moral realm are not influenced by psychology. Of course they are. But they are also influenced by physics and linguistics. My claim is that these influences are not related to morality as such. Psychology, like scientific research in general,[1] is supposed to deal with facts and their explanations (the “is”), whereas morality concerns norms (the “ought”).
Jonathan Haidt, who has been mentioned here before (see, for example, columns 86, 154, 201), conducts quite a few interesting discussions in the field of morality, except that to the best of my understanding they are not related to psychology in any way. Alternatively, one can find in his work interesting psychological discussions, but they are not truly related to morality. Many people—including researchers in these fields—tend not to notice the sharp distinction that exists between them. In the columns mentioned above I noted the examples Haidt offers of allegedly “moral” values, which I called “aesthetic values.” He points out that people treat various acts as immoral, even though on second thought there seems to be no moral flaw in them at all. Think, for example, of a person who copulates with a frozen chicken purchased in a supermarket before eating it, or a person who cooks his dog that was run over and eats it. One can even imagine a person who has fully consensual sexual relations with his adult sister (or his mother), and so forth. All these are actions that harm no one, and yet most people regard them as immoral. I bring this only as an example of a discussion that certainly pertains to psychology, but not at all to morality.
A researcher can examine what feelings we have regarding such acts, perhaps wonder why, and study what causes this. But the question of whether those feelings pertain to morality is, of course, a normative question, and as such the psychologist has no added value regarding it. The fact that such situations arouse feelings of revulsion in people belongs to the factual plane, and that is certainly an interesting topic for psychological research. But precisely for that reason, such questions do not belong to the field of morality. Moreover, even the feelings of revulsion we experience toward blatantly immoral actions (such as murder, theft, abuse, etc.) do not belong to morality but to psychology. Morality deals with the normative question of whether such acts are worthy, irrespective of our feelings about them.
Even if one of you thinks that the feelings Haidt described are not instincts that arise in us but rather signals of our conscience (that is, our moral recognition and decision that have emotional expressions), that may indeed, from his perspective, bring the discussion back into morality, but it simultaneously removes it from the realm of psychology. One who sees morality as a psychological category in effect conceives it as a kind of feeling implanted in us, not as values that a person adjudicates and adopts through deliberation. In that case, such a researcher is not dealing with morality but with morality-like psychological phenomena. A person can argue that morality in the essential sense I am speaking of does not exist, and that it is actually an illusion. Personally, I do not agree with that claim (see, for example, columns 119–120 and 122), but I will not argue it here, because even the one who makes it agrees with my point that psychology has nothing to do with morality in its essential sense (rather, in his opinion, there is no such thing as essential morality; there are only psychological phenomena that we treat as morality).
Research in moral psychology can deal with non-moral phenomena mistakenly classified as moral phenomena. This is descriptive research, since it deals with the question of what people feel (whether or not they think it belongs to morality), what motivates them, and how this happens. But even such research assumes assumptions about what belongs to morality and what does not, and these assumptions are not facts but norms; therefore the psychologist necessarily employs his own worldview here, unrelated to scientific tools. Such a researcher may examine our consistency regarding morality (the fit between outlook and actual conduct), since that is a factual question. He may also ask how our moral conceptions are shaped (psychologically). But all these are descriptive questions that touch on matters of fact. Substantive research that addresses what is a moral action and what is not, and how I ought to decide in a given situation, belongs to ethics, a subfield of philosophy. There we are not dealing with empirical research but with philosophical-conceptual deliberation.[2] In that context we are not dealing with the descriptive question of what people think, but with the normative question of what it is correct and proper for them to think.
Even the claim—so popular among researchers—that morality is not rational does not always reflect findings of empirical research. In many cases it mirrors the researcher’s set of assumptions and values. In many cases it is even based on a philosophical conception whereby morality is a kind of emotion embedded in us, not rational decisions. Researchers are not supposed to deal with questions that hinge on a worldview—unless their intention is only to describe people’s views.[3]
For example, there are quite a few psychological studies dealing with the trolley problem and its ilk, examining how people decide in moral dilemmas. This is, of course, a factual question, since we are not discussing what is right to do but what people actually do. Such research indeed belongs to descriptive psychology, but it has nothing to do with the normative question of what ought to be done in such situations. In these contexts, many researchers point to the irrationality of our moral conduct when many of us prefer to let a train run over five people rather than divert it with our own hands onto another track where it will kill one person. Many researchers (including Dawkins, whom I criticized for this in my book God Plays Dice) claim that this is an irrational decision since in doing so we lose more lives, and therefore clearly it is not a moral decision. But one who considers the act of killing not only in the consequentialist dimension—that is, for whom it matters whether lives were lost or whether I myself played a role—can certainly see such a decision as a rational moral choice.
Well, I have poured out my bitterness upon you (and upon them), and now we can turn to our topic: asymmetry between worldviews.
Asymmetry between religious and secular people
I have often said and written in the past that there is an asymmetry between religious and secular people. The religious are far more familiar with the secular and with secularism than secular people are with the religious and religiosity. The reason is not only that the religious are generally more open (and I don’t write that entirely in jest), but because of a very simple logical principle, though for some reason it strikes people as offensive and condescending: secularism is an empty cart and religiosity is a full cart.[4]
I do not mean to claim here that the secular person is an empty cart, but that secularism is an empty cart. That is, a secular person can behave in a fully moral way and be full of values and cultural and human content—but none of this is connected to his secularism. Secularism means the absence of belief in God (for the purposes of the discussion; one could also define it as: the absence of religious commitment). That’s it. Anything beyond that is not related to secularism and does not derive from it. A secular person can be a socialist or a capitalist, liberal or not, conservative or not, a lover of literature or of mathematics, devote his life to the environment, to helping the needy, to caring for the suffering throughout the universe, to saving animals, and many other blessed pursuits. But all these can appear in exactly the same form in his religious counterpart. They have no connection to his being secular. Religiosity, by contrast, is a full cart in that sense. Its fullness is expressed in the fact that religious commitment obligates certain values (which may be moral or religious in character). They are a corollary of a person’s religiosity and therefore cannot appear in a secular person. Again, a secular person can be committed to moral values (though not to religious values), but these are not connected to his secularism. A religious Jew is obligated to 613 Torah values and quite a few rabbinic values as well, all of which are tied by the navel to his religiosity. As such, they cannot appear in a secular person.[5] Thus, in the simple logical sense, the religious person is a secular person with additions. In fact, the secular person himself is only the additions, since secularism as such has no content of its own.[6]
Of course, one can rightly argue that there are values and insights that usually appear against a secular background. Values such as equality, various rights, treatment of animals and the environment were probably not invented by secular people, but there is no doubt that secularism promotes them much more than religious conceptions and groups do (to my regret). But my claim here is not on the descriptive plane (the scientific, psychological-sociological one), but on the theoretical-essential plane. On the essential plane, none of these is connected to secularism and none contradicts religiosity, and therefore there is no impediment for a religious person to embrace them as well.[7]
We can summarize by saying that the religious person’s basket of values includes the general values (I am careful not to call them “secular”) and, in addition, religious values.[8] The conclusion that follows is that, contrary to the common perception, the secular person—who ostensibly (but in many cases not in practice) is more open—actually knows less about religiosity and religious people than the other way around. The religious person need not read literature in order to know the value content (and usually also the cultural content) of secularism. He simply needs to apply a negation operator to his own world, and that’s it.[9] Anything beyond that is not connected to secularism. There is no doubt that a religious person, just like his secular counterpart, must read and study to understand value, ideological, artistic, philosophical, and other conceptions—but that is not acquaintance with secularism; it is acquaintance with neutral contents. The medicine produced by Maimonides is not “religious medicine,” but medicine produced by a religious person. Similarly, the philosophy produced by sons of a Jewish mother is not “Jewish Thought” in any essential sense, but philosophy produced by a Jewish person (even if religious, even a Torah scholar). Likewise, the communism created by Marx and Lenin is not secular ideas (even if sometimes presented as such) but ideas created by secular people.[10]
Why is all evil in the world created out of religious motives?
Dawkins, in his book Is There a God?, writes that in every society there are good people who behave well and bad people who behave badly, but only in a religious society will you find evil among good people. This is, of course, a very tendentious and somewhat demagogic description, but at first glance it still seems to contain something. I note that Dawkins himself points there to various crimes committed by secular people. We have even been “blessed” with secular mass murderers like Stalin or Pol Pot. But then he launches into an impressive pilpul over whether those criminals were really secular or not (there are arguments there that would not shame the finest casuistry of Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz), and afterward he raises the knockout claim: in any case, their crimes were not committed in the name of secularism. They were simply bad people, that’s all. By contrast, a religious society, in his view, is governed by wicked values, and therefore within it good people find themselves obliged to act in wicked ways (see ISIS and al-Qaeda, but also less extreme phenomena in Christianity and among us).
In the sixth chapter of my book God Plays Dice, I argued that this thesis is entirely correct, simply because it is a tautology. If secularism is merely an absence, then what wonder that one cannot find murder “in the name of secularism.” Can any of you imagine someone murdering in the name of a vacuum?! A secular person might murder religious people, but usually he will not do so in the name of his secular values,[11] but by virtue of some values he has adopted (and not by virtue of his being secular), or simply out of hatred of religious people. I suppose we would all agree that hatred of religious people is not a secular value (and certainly does not follow from secularism). Dawkins himself explains there that Stalin did not murder in the name of secularism. So why did he do it? Not necessarily only because of his personal wickedness. His values likely contributed (communism, which sees the individual as grease on the wheels of the revolution, sanctified the means in his eyes). That is, Dawkins himself admits—an admission against interest—that communism is not a secular value, and that if a person adopts communism he does not do so as a secular person. A broader claim lies here: secularism is not related to a person’s values but to the absence of belief (or commitment), and that’s it. A secular person’s values, whether communism or any other value, are the filling that a person chooses to add to his empty secular cart to fill it. But that content is not secular content. Hence a secular person will not murder because of his secularism, but just like his religious counterpart, he can certainly murder in the name of values he adopts—and this has indeed happened quite a bit throughout history.[12]
In short, what Dawkins claims is that murder in the name of values (as opposed to murder due to sheer wickedness) is done only in the name of values, not in the name of their absence. This may be an interesting thesis, but in my humble view I fail to see what is novel about it. I do not intend to enter here into the hackneyed, tedious, and meaningless debates about “religious evil.” Many secular people greatly enjoy conducting them, and they are rife with not a few logical and factual fallacies. I brought this only as an admission against interest by a proud secularist that corroborates the (trivial) thesis that secularism is an empty cart. If Dawkins admits it, who am I to argue with him.
As noted, Haidt presented a thesis that claims an asymmetry between conservatives and liberals, and here you can see a review of his claims (written to understand the left’s reactions to election results in Israel and the U.S.). I wish now to touch on that thesis in light of the discussion thus far.
Haidt’s thesis
Haidt’s basic claim is that the conservative set of values contains the liberal set. The liberal value arsenal is very thin, consisting mainly of values of equality and justice (fairness), the protection of life and property, and that’s it. The conservative, by contrast, also espouses additional values, such as loyalty, family and family values, patriotism, nationalism, modesty, conservatism of course, and the like (he divides them into three types: loyalty, authority, and purity). But one must note that the conservative espouses all these in addition to liberal moral values, since he too believes in equality and justice, even if in different doses than his liberal counterpart. At times the conservative harms liberal values, and therefore the liberal sees him as immoral, but the conservative does so to promote other values of his (which the liberal does not recognize or accept). Haidt argues that the conclusion of many liberals that the conservative is immoral is mistaken. It stems from the liberal’s ignorance or lack of understanding, as he looks at the picture through his own (quite literally) narrow prism.
From this Haidt derives several conclusions. First, he argues that for this reason the conservative will always know the liberal better than the reverse. After all, within every conservative there is a small liberal (just as within every believer there is a small secular person, and within every Jew a small human being). Therefore, to know the liberal he needs only the familiarity he already has with what is within himself. Second, this also explains why liberals always see themselves as moral and enlightened and the others as morally backward. As noted, conservatives are sometimes required to harm liberal values when justified in terms of their other values (see examples below). Third, he thus explains liberals’ failure to understand voting behavior and election outcomes. In the U.S., as in Israel, liberals are repeatedly surprised to discover how many voters cast their ballots for an “immoral” (conservative) candidate. They do not understand how the public repeatedly chooses conservative candidates who are immoral and who ultimately also harm it. The liberal left is certain that a center-left government will benefit the people and cannot understand why the people repeatedly vote for conservative candidates and parties. For the liberal it is self-evident that this stems from stupidity and moral indifference (why else would they do this?!). He is unwilling to accept (or unaware of) the fact that the conservative candidate simply realizes the conservative values that they believe in, even if in doing so he harms liberal (moral) values. He spoke about the U.S., but I am sure this is very familiar to my readers here as well.[13]
According to Haidt, research in moral psychology also often suffers from this fallacy. Most of it focuses on liberal moral values and ignores the dispute and the fact that conservatives have additional values in their world. Hence there is a tendency among researchers (most of whom lean liberal, or at least do not notice this bias due to the liberal atmosphere in academia) to address only those values and to issue evaluative judgments about the morality of the different groups on that basis.
Two examples
I have already dealt in the past with secular moral criticism of Halakhah. In columns 14–15 I discussed examples of this and explained why that criticism is mistaken. Thus, for example, there is secular criticism of not saving a non-Jew’s life on Shabbat. The claim is that Halakhah or religious people disparage the value of life, particularly the life of a non-Jew. But this is a mistake. In Halakhah there is another value that outweighs the value of life, and that forces us to forgo the value of human life. There is no indifference to human life here but another value (Shabbat) that overrides it. To sharpen the matter, I will add that according to one opinion in the Talmud, even what was permitted—desecrating Shabbat to save a Jewish life—is because of the consideration “desecrate one Shabbat on his account so that he may observe many Sabbaths.” This rationale holds that what permits desecration of Shabbat are the mitzvot he will be able to keep, not the value of the Jew’s life as such. There were indeed decisors who claimed that there is no permission to desecrate Shabbat to save the life of a secular Jew (who will not keep mitzvot), but even most decisors who oppose this base themselves on the fact that even a secular Jew is supposed to keep mitzvot (we must present him with the possibility to keep mitzvot; what he chooses to do is his business). There is no indifference to the value of life here, but the value of Shabbat outweighs the value of life, whether of a Jew or a non-Jew. I do not say there is no indifference to a non-Jew’s life in the religious world—alas, there is, and it appears for various reasons. Here I only claim that this is not the approach of Halakhah, and that such a conclusion does not follow from the very halakhic treatment that forbids saving the life of a non-Jew.[14]
In the secular perspective, the basket of values does not include observance of Shabbat, and therefore, to a secular person, such conduct expresses moral indifference. But in the basket of values of a Jew committed to Halakhah there is a most important value of Shabbat observance, and at times it overrides the value of life. This is a salient example of mistaken criticism that assumes the critic’s premises and judges the criticized accordingly. I emphasize: I am not arguing here for moral relativism or pluralism. From the secular person’s perspective, if Shabbat has no value, then anyone who does not desecrate Shabbat to save life is mistaken. But when he comes to judge the believing person (not his values but his conduct), he must take into account the judged party’s values. A moral evaluation of a person must be done according to his own terms. That is precisely what Haidt argues here regarding liberalism and conservatism. There is definitely room to criticize a person’s or a group’s values, and that debate is very important. But that is a debate about values, not a moral judgment of conduct. It is not right to judge the other morally by my own yardsticks.
Another example is the halakhic obligation that a priest’s wife who was raped must separate from her husband. Here too there have often been claims about the indifference of Halakhah and decisors to the fate of that unfortunate woman (and of the husband, of course). Not only has she undergone terrible trauma; we now demand that they dismantle the family and thereby bring suffering to a couple and children who wish to remain together. And again, this is the same ethical-logical fallacy: moral criticism must be conducted on the criticized party’s terms. In the world of a person committed to Halakhah there is a value of the sanctity of the priesthood, and it overrides the harm and suffering of this unfortunate family. The obligation that they divorce does not stem from moral indifference to their fate, but from commitment to another value that forces us to demand this of them. Secular criticism assumes the secular, narrow basket of values (the moral-liberal basket), which of course does not include the sanctity of the priesthood, and ignores the fact that the religious basket is broader. As I explained above, I do not mean to argue for moral relativism or that there is no room for a debate over values, but only to point out that the moral judgment here is mistaken.
Note that in both of these examples the values in question are not moral values: the sanctity of the priesthood and Shabbat observance. From the secular (or liberal) perspective, these values are not included in the basket of values, and it is no wonder that, from his perspective, such conduct expresses moral indifference. But in the basket of values of a Jew committed to Halakhah there are additional values (usually not moral values), and these force him to harm the value of life (which, as is known, also receives a very important status in Halakhah). The liberal or secular person who is unaware of this—even if he were right in his principled conception (and in my opinion he is not)—errs in judgment.
I will conclude by rejecting expected claims about Hitler, suicide bombers, and the like. In my opinion, there is indeed no place to judge a person if he truly and sincerely believes in his path. There is room to judge his values, but not the person himself. This applies also to Hitler, to ISIS terrorists, and to any other party, however extreme. Assuming they truly and sincerely believe in their path, there is no room for moral judgment of them.
Two methodological remarks
It seems to me that the neglect by liberal researchers of conservative values stems from a correct distinction that Haidt himself did not note: the additional conservative values are not moral values but values that belong to another category. One might perhaps debate values such as loyalty or patriotism, which border on the (conservative) moral category. But values such as modesty and purity, which are also included in the conservative basket, are not related to morality. They resemble what I have elsewhere called “aesthetic values,” or “human values,” and perhaps “religious values”—that is, values aimed at achieving spiritual or human ends, not necessarily moral ends. Therefore, prima facie, moral researchers who do not address these values are right, and there is no place for Haidt’s criticism.
Nevertheless, Haidt is right in his criticism. Even if these values are not moral values, it is not correct to see someone who harms liberal values in the name of conservative values as acting immorally. He acts in the name of other values that force him to do so, and therefore it is incorrect to conclude that he is indifferent (or even less sensitive) to moral values. Even if the other values are not moral values, still, by the conservative’s lights, commitment to them can justify, in certain cases, harming moral values.
In any case, this is a good example of the influence of a failure of theoretical distinction on empirical research. If the researcher ignores the other values—whether he does so because in his view they are not moral values (and on that I agree, though this is not a scientific determination but a normative–axiological–philosophical one), or because he is simply unaware of their existence (which is a research failure)—it is clear that he errs when he defines the conservative as less moral merely because he engages less with liberal values. This interface, in which worldview and ethical and ideological assumptions underlie the “scientific” (psychological) research findings, demonstrates the problem I pointed to at the beginning of this column.
Does Haidt’s claim of asymmetry between liberals and conservatives itself belong to psychological (moral psychology) research? That is an interesting question, and I have no simple answer. On one hand, there is a factual description: conservatives have a broader set of values. And another factual description: researchers tend to ignore this (this is research on the psychology of the researchers and their assumptions). On the other hand, it is clear that there are axiological determinations in the background that belong to the normative and ideological plane, and therefore they should be examined on the normative–ethical plane and not on the factual–empirical plane. Haidt’s claim is important for shaping the methodology of psychological research, but it itself does not belong to the field of psychology.
A final note: between logical inclusion and acquaintance
I will conclude with a note about Haidt’s conclusion that the conservative knows the liberal better than the reverse. It is true that there is a logical relation of inclusion between these two baskets of values, but this does not necessarily mean the existence of the ability to know. Good, deep acquaintance with a value and ideological conception—and certainly with a society that holds such conceptions—requires not only intellectual familiarity but also immediate, first-hand experience. To know secularism requires acquaintance with the feeling of freedom and lack of commitment; an intellectual understanding of freedom alone is not enough. Therefore, there is room to claim that religious people do not know the secular experience either (and secular people, of course, know even less the religious world and experience).[15] To know and understand the set of values on the cognitive–intellectual level poses no problem, due to the logical inclusion. But acquaintance includes something beyond inclusion and cognitive understanding, and that the religious person may not be able fully to grasp. It is important to note, however, that here we are speaking about a cultural and psychological atmosphere, not about values. The liberal (and secular) person’s values indeed pose no problem to understand and know—unlike the reverse.
[1] I am ignoring here the question of whether psychology is a science. As such, it at least purports to deal with facts and not with philosophies and opinions.
[2] In my series of columns on philosophy (155 and on) I pointed out that philosophy, too, is an empirical field—but the “observations” are not sensory observations but intuitive apprehensions (synthetic observations), the kind made with what Maimonides calls “the eyes of the mind.”
[3] I am speaking of their stance in their capacity as psychologists. Of course a psychologist may also engage in philosophy.
[4] Do not tell Aviad Kleinberg, who wrote the book A Guide for the Secular, in order to show that this is not so (thus joining many others). All of these fail at the same point (to be explained immediately): they identify various values as secular values, and that is not the case. As we shall see below, the book on the content and values of secularism ought to contain one blank page. Anything beyond that—including the date and the publisher’s name—has nothing to do with secularism. One can discuss the sociology and psychology of secularism, but not its value conceptions and contents, for there are none.
[5] This is connected to my view that Halakhah—including the “moral” commandments in it—has nothing to do with morality.
[6] At first I phrased it that religiosity contains secularism, because it includes, in addition to secularism, the religious dimensions. But then I understood that this is too weak a formulation. There is nothing to contain, since secularism has no content of its own. Every set, of course, contains the empty set, but that is trivial. Below I will speak of inclusion that does exist between sets of religious and moral values—that religious values include moral values as well as particular religious values (Halakhah).
[7] The reason these values are promoted mainly by secular people is also connected to the distinction I made here. The secular person has no other values in his world besides moral values, and therefore, naturally, he focuses on them. The religious individual and society attempt to promote additional values (religious values), and therefore naturally they are less engaged in promoting moral values.
[8] This connects, of course, to my thesis that the commandments and Halakhah do not deal with moral values at all but with religious values. See column 15 and, in greater detail, the lecture series on Halakhah and morality, and also at the beginning of the third book in my trilogy, Walking Among the Standers.
[9] The negation here is not symmetric, since this is nullifying negation (as between 1 and 0) and not contrary negation (as between −1 and 1). Applying the negation operator to 1 gives 0, but applying it to 0 does not yield 1. A vacuum cannot arrive at any specific content by negating itself.
[10] In the fourth conversation of the first book of the trilogy, The First Being, I argued even more: that values have no validity unless founded on belief in a commanding, legislating agent who grants them validity (the “God from the argument from morality”). That is, not only are there no secular values; in a secular world there is no possibility of adopting values at all. A moral behavior by an atheist is an instinct devoid of ethical significance (or an expression of a hidden faith).
[11] Unless the murder serves him in promoting secularism—but that, thankfully, is rather rare.
[12] One must remember, as I wrote there, that until a few centuries ago the whole world was religious; therefore it is no wonder that all the crimes we knew from that period were committed by religious people. But in the period after secularization, it does not seem that the number of crimes has decreased (and I am being very restrained here). With admirable intellectual honesty, Dawkins explains every crime by religious people as something that came by virtue of religion, but a crime by secular people is never “in the name of secularism.” I agree with the latter (being a tautology), but in the former he again resorts to laughable pilpul.
[13] I recall bringing here in the past (I cannot find it now) words by a left-wing writer who pointed to a surprising phenomenon: weaker strata vote more for parties that do not benefit them (right) instead of voting for left-wing parties that espouse equality and therefore would ostensibly benefit them more. He blamed them for irrationality and failed to notice two essential points. Does the left really benefit the weak? In my eyes, very doubtful. If there is a failed economic system, then even if it espouses equality for all, it will not necessarily improve anyone’s lot. Just as a party that espouses peace will not necessarily bring peace (oops, once again a problem with left-wing parties: splendid values, but execution—or practical feasibility—not so much). At least in the judgment of right-wing voters, if they think left-wing parties will not benefit them, why should they vote for them?! But that is a side remark. What is more important for us here is that a similar accusation could be directed toward affluent left-wing voters who vote for parties that do not benefit them. I argued there that both accusations are mistaken, since people do not necessarily vote for the party that will benefit them. No less important to them are the party’s policies and values. In any case, it is clear that these accusers are blind to themselves.
[14] By the way, in my opinion it is permitted and even obligatory to desecrate Shabbat to save a non-Jew’s life—but that is not our topic here.
[15] I have just finished Asher Kravitz’s book Kalman Kimmerling, Private Investigator with God’s Help, which challenges this claim of mine. His familiarity with the Haredi world is surprising. I was convinced he came from a Haredi background, but from reading Wikipedia I understood that he did not.
Discussion
And one could argue that with conservatives and liberals it is similar, since society is mostly liberal, and conservatives are the minority, and so on.
Hello Rabbi,
In your opinion, what is the relationship between conservatism and religion?
In practice, there is no overlap between them (there are liberal religious people and secular conservatives). But when both are present, do you think people are conservative because they are religious (and they want a static world that preserves the religious faith to which they are emotionally attached)? Or the opposite (because they are fundamentally repelled by social change, they also remain loyal to their religion)? Or is there some other connection?
And thank you for the interesting remarks.
Precisely here I’m not sure. In society at large there is actually a majority for conservatives (that of course depends on where you draw the line. There are different degrees of conservatism). But in the media and public discourse there is a majority for liberals, and in that sense it is indeed easier to get to know them. Beyond that, liberalism is the default (why hassle someone if there’s no reason?! Whoever wants to hassle someone bears the burden of proof).
That really is an undefined question. How can one answer that in general about all people? Each person has his own makeup.
All through the post I was waiting for a mention of what Macron said only recently, בעקבות the attacks in France, that "secularism has not killed anyone," but it never came… ?
I hadn’t heard about that. But it is said quite often by many people.
Right. What’s your makeup?
Ah, that’s easy. In my case, faith is a combination of special genetics, a love of conservatism for its own sake with a pinch of greed.
And my dreadful conservatism is due to faith together with just typical boorishness.
“The reason for this is not only that religious people are generally more open-minded (and this was not written entirely in jest), but because of a very simple logical principle, though for some reason it seems outrageous and patronizing to people: secularity is an empty wagon and religiosity is a full wagon.[4]”
This unconscious juxtaposition alone is enough to explain the stupidity running through the entire tedious post.
Hello Rabbi.
How would the Rabbi define a wicked person—not in the halakhic sense? Is it impossible for a person who believes in his path not to be considered wicked even though objectively his actions are evil? And if that is indeed the case, why not argue that a devout terrorist who sacrifices of himself and overcomes his inclinations for the sake of the lofty goal—terror, in this case—not only would not be considered wicked, but would be considered righteous? Or in other words, does the definition of a righteous person also depend on intention and not on the act?
I’m relatively new to the site, so it may be that a similar question has already been answered in one of the other posts (in any case, in a quick search I conducted I didn’t find an answer). If that is indeed the case, I’d be happy in any event to be directed to the relevant post.
Indeed, it has been answered more than once. In my view, such a person can definitely be considered righteous, in the sense that he acts according to his moral understanding. At the same time, I of course disagree with his understanding and think his actions ought to be prevented (and even that he should be killed if necessary).
If so, I’d be happy to know the Rabbi’s view about punishment (in the senses of justice or revenge, not deterrence). For example, does the Rabbi think it is right to kill a Nazi officer after the end of the war, when he poses no danger, and to do so secretly without it ever becoming known that he is a Nazi (if there is no other way), so that advantages such as deterrence or restoring national honor do not exist? That is, to kill him simply because he committed evil acts, even though he is—according to the definition above—not evil?
“It is not right to judge the other morally by my standards.” Why not?
It seems to me that what Dawkins argues is that religious people are very value-driven, but committed to a problematic set of values—one that causes them not to save a human life simply because of a combination of a date and the mother’s genes.
There is no doubt that religious people are very committed to their values, but the problem is with those values. And that is what stands moral judgment.
The secular person has a much smaller set of values—only the moral consideration.
And therefore there, a value-driven person who keeps those values will necessarily also be moral. Unlike the value-driven religious person, who often will not be moral.
Maybe I’m missing something, but what exactly counts as a moral value according to the secular worldview? It would seem that aside from evolutionary gut feelings there is really nothing to rely on (especially according to Dawkins, who is the father of fathers of materialism and of the depressing quotations about the meaning of life). Therefore it doesn’t seem right to me to say, “there, a value-driven person who keeps those values will necessarily also be moral, unlike the value-driven religious person, who often will not be moral,” simply because it is not clear what exactly counts as a moral consideration for the secular person, and especially what counts as a binding moral consideration.
To write an article about psychology and morality without bringing in Freud is a bit unserious.
And to be fair, religiosity should be contrasted with culturedness, not with secularity.
Then one discovers that there is no difference at all and all the wagons are empty.
Except for one small detail: the Jews have the Torah, which was given by God. And that is what makes all the difference.
But I doubt that this detail carries any weight for you, since from the Torah one learns nothing. In that case you too are left with an empty wagon.
If one understands that the basis of morality is each person’s individual feeling, then surely all morality is founded on psychology, no?
The question should be what the Rabbi asks in his book—how can there be morality without God? Kant wrote about this in his book and many elaborated on it, even if they came up empty-handed. [And perhaps there is an answer to this—I’d be glad to hear it.]
Do you think moral values are only interpersonal? That is, are they exhausted by not harming another person or dealing with him only with his consent?
Excellent post, thank you very much! Two short questions:
1. Nassim Taleb argues that in cases of an encounter between the group with more values and the one with fewer, the secular bend toward the religious (for the opposite is impossible), and this creates an asymmetry in the power given to each group. For example, if there is one child allergic to peanuts, then all the children in the school must be forbidden to bring peanuts. You can read a passage by him here: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15. Does this seem to you to be a correct claim/observation?
2. In the psychology of morality there is a concept called the emotion of “elevation,” and it describes something psychological that people experience when they see / participate in moral / religious acts. Here too, apparently, there is a difference between conservatives and liberals (or perhaps religious and secular people), where the former are capable of feeling the full range of emotions and the latter do not feel this emotion (or feel only a narrower range). Do you think this also explains why conservatives contain liberals? And here we are really talking about containing a closed segment and not just an empty group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevation_(emotion)
Absolutely not!
But anyone who does not believe in God, [unlike me,] cannot provide a basis for the prohibition against doing something immoral. There is some explanation for why one should be moral—the categorical imperative of Kant [and many others who, I assume, wrestled with this issue]—according to the philosophical explanation of morality without the existence of God, all morality is psychology.
It may also be that they failed in their explanations and there is no morality without God.
I asked seriously in order to understand. I don’t understand the mockery and emotionalism.
I’m asking what, in your view, the relationship is between conservatism and religiosity. I don’t think that’s a stupid question.
Could I get a serious answer?
A religious society is not founded on moral values, not universal ones and not even those required by the religious code.
A religious society is based on tribalism of us versus the others, and on a collection of real and imaginary injuries inflicted on us by the others.
Donald (grab them by the p***y) Trump, for example, is not an example of behavior that secular morality would not understand (like the wife of a priest who was raped), but the exact opposite model of all the religious moral values of his voters. Trump is a living model of the seven Christian sins—lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.
And still, over 80 percent of religious voters in the US voted for him.
And here among us small fry as well—Haredi communities are not an example of moral behavior by any measure whatsoever.
Haredi towns are infected with nepotism, plunder of the public coffers, persecution of competing (religious) groups, and abuse of the weak.
And still, that same council head who plundered the public coffers will study with great devotion how one tithes straw, because the important principle in Haredi society is appearance, not inwardness.
A yeshiva director will passionately deliver speeches of “Be careful with the children of the poor, for from them Torah shall come forth,” and then flatly reject talented students because of the color of their skin.
And of course sexual abuse there tends to be blamed on the victim (in the State Attorney’s Office they call Modi’in Illit “Sodom Illit”).
Religiosity is, more than anything else, the sanctification of the mechanism even at the price of violating the entire Torah (some Torah scholar will always come along and declare the creeping thing pure with a hundred arguments).
I didn’t manage to read the whole post, but in my humble opinion it is not correct to say that conservatives are the “minority”; we all see that in many Western countries they are דווקא the ones winning elections (even Trump seemingly failed only because of his outrageous handling of the coronavirus).
It seems there may be some built-in inferiority for conservatives for some reason vis-à-vis progressives, but that is not related to majority and minority.
Yinon, absolutely not. Halakhically there is the rule “so shall you purge the evil from your midst,” but morally certainly not. And even halakhically there is still room for dialectical debate here.
Dawkins, I distinguished between judging the values and judging the person. Beyond that, the claim is that one cannot judge the religious person or the halakha for moral insensitivity. It has moral sensitivity no less than the secular person’s; it simply has other values that override morality in certain cases.
See my fourth notebook, in volume 3. I completely agree that there is no valid basis for morality in a world devoid of God.
Eliyahu, I think so. The rest are non-moral values.
1. I haven’t read it, but I really do not agree with the logic you described. There is no connection at all between the scope and quantity of values and the question of who bends before whom. What is the connection at all?!
2. But this is emotional containment, not value-based containment. It relates to my remark at the end of the post.
Is this collection of nonsense trying to argue something, or is it satisfied with hollow declarations? The number of errors and misunderstandings per word in this passage reaches unimaginable heights.
A side terminological question:
Values like striving for truth, devotion to a goal, humility, diligence, not getting bogged down in pettiness, a general love of humanity (not necessarily in the sense of not harming another, but as an emotional stance in itself), not being enslaved to materiality, the value of striving for freedom of thought and for a person to be educated and pursue knowledge—would you define these as “aesthetic values”?
(I know this is a semantic matter, but synchronizing terms can help understanding.)
I would say these are “human values.” Aesthetic values are the examples I gave (from the hen and the dog).
The basic claim is that you are confusing theory with reality—theoretically, a religious society is committed to a set of religious values; in reality, a religious society is a tribal society mainly occupied with preserving power mechanisms, and it displays surprising flexibility in its ability to ignore theoretical values at the moment of truth.
Strange. In this post and elsewhere in the past I was very careful to make the distinction between secularity and secular people, and between religiosity and religious people. And precisely in your baseless criticism of me on this point, you yourself fell into it.
In your remarks, two words above all should be deleted: “religious” and “mainly.” Every society, religious or secular, is also occupied with preserving power mechanisms, but not only with that. But as stated, this of course does not in any way touch on what I said.
I would call this loyalty to oneself, not righteousness.
You did not describe the criticism of not saving a gentile correctly. The criticism is about racism. If they did not save anyone on Shabbat, then not saving a gentile would also be logical. But apparently they save a Jew and not a gentile.
Yishai, apparently this is not really racism in the simple sense of the word.
After all, in the case of a righteous convert, one violates Shabbat for him according to all opinions because he is commanded regarding it. And for an apostate who sins defiantly and deliberately, in principle one does not—even though he was born a Jew and will die a Jew according to all opinions (and although today, according to most decisors, such a category does not really apply to secular people and transgressors in general).
So I would not say that not violating Shabbat for a gentile is racism. Rather, this is exactly an example of what Michi says: there is value to the life of the gentile. And at the same time there is a religious value of keeping Shabbat. And the religious value of keeping Shabbat is higher than the life of the gentile (and even for resident aliens one does not violate Shabbat, although the attitude toward them is positive and on a weekday one must save them and treat them with respect and so on, which in my opinion indicates that this specific halakha does not stem from racism or hostility toward gentiles but quite simply—the value of keeping Shabbat is higher and more exalted than the value of the life of a gentile who is not commanded to keep Shabbat).
And in my opinion this is an excellent example of the cheap way in which the concept of racism is often used.
1. “Secularity is an empty wagon and religiosity is a full wagon.” “First, he claims that because of this the conservative will always know the liberal better than vice versa. After all, inside every conservative there is a little liberal (just as inside every believer there is a little secular person, and inside every Jew there is a little human being).” According to this logic one can generate an absurd hierarchy. Take, for example, polytheistic religions (of the sort that Abram in the legend smashed), Christianity with its Holy Trinity, and Judaism (which believes more or less in the Father of the Trinity). If so, each of them is contained, according to the logic, in those that come before it, and it is a “more empty wagon” than they are. The upshot is, let us say, that there is no positive innovation at all in the deeds of the mythological figure Abram; rather, it is simply a choice of a singleton out of the set that contains it. (I, by contrast, think there is a positive innovation here, in that it is something not essentially contained in what came before, though not positive in the sense of being something truer or wiser.) This, to put it mildly, does not fit the poverty into which Jewish believers obligate themselves while marveling at the claim (mistaken, by the way) about Judaism as the originator of monotheism. Likewise Judaism, according to the same logic, is nothing but belief in a subset of Christianity. According to the logic, Christians know Judaism better (“inside every Christian there is a Jew”), monolatrists know monotheists better, and polytheists know all the rest better. This is nonsense. Is there, for example, anything in Christianity that enables it to understand the unique (and to my taste ridiculous) mode of thought of the discussions in the Oral Torah of Rabbinic Judaism, which in practice is what has characterized Judaism over the last two thousand years? This is a flattening devoid of meaning.
2. “Haidt’s basic claim is that the set of conservative values contains the liberal set. The liberal arsenal of values is very thin, and it contains mainly values of equality and justice (fairness), protection of life and property, and no more. The conservative, by contrast, also advocates additional values, such as loyalty, familism and family values, patriotism, nationalism, modesty, conservatism… From this Haidt derives several conclusions. First, he claims that because of this the conservative will always know the liberal better than vice versa. After all, inside every conservative there is a little liberal (just as inside every believer there is a little secular person, and inside every Jew there is a little human being).”
A. The first part, “The conservative, by contrast (to the liberal), also advocates additional values, such as loyalty, familism and family values, patriotism, nationalism, modesty, conservatism,” is a sentence for which it is hard (and not very interesting) to decide whether it is more outrageous in its demagoguery or more embarrassing in its stupidity. In the main streams of both groups, these are values where the question is what their relative weight is, and more than that, what to do when they clash with one another. In principle this could be refuted with facts showing that liberals reject the value of loyalty more, for example, than non-liberals reject the value of equality and justice, and if such facts exist I would be glad to see and address them. From the little I have seen (and admittedly it is not much), perhaps you have confused liberalism with libertinism (or you do not understand the concepts).
B. In principle, indeed there are super-groups of concepts that liberals do not accept. I, for example, do not accept the principle of the superiority of the white race, or the importance of maintaining the purity of distinctions between ethnic communities and people of different skin colors. Now according to the logic mentioned here, in every redneck from Mississippi with sympathy for the KKK there is also a little liberal who simply does not accept (or know/understand?) this value, and therefore he in fact understands liberals better than they understand him. I assume it is intuitively obvious that this is nonsense, except that here there are even studies showing that what is more correct is that inside every liberal there is a little racist. The racist redneck does not understand liberals better than they understand him; he has simply reached a different decision about the weight of loyalty to a tribal group versus values of equality, often while also making factual errors and false claims. In the same way, I do not see religiosity as in any way containing secularity, but rather as a mistaken conclusion one arrives at due to the inability to follow the correct arguments that lead to secularity (which is reinforced, by the way, by posts such as the one above).
3. “that values have no validity whatsoever unless at their foundation stands belief in a commanding and legislating factor that gives them validity (the God of the moral argument). In other words, not only are there no secular values, but in a secular world there is no possibility at all of adopting values. The ethical behavior of an atheist is a meaningless instinct devoid of ethical significance (or an expression of hidden faith).”
A. Quite the opposite: there is no moral validity at all to values whose source is an omnipotent entity that is the commanding and legislating factor giving them validity. Let us take, for example, something commonly accepted today as morally effective in a broad sense: it is immoral for a parent to slaughter his child. If today a parent were to hear voices instructing him to slaughter his child with a knife and began acting accordingly, even if afterward he had another episode instructing him to desist, that initial willingness would be considered so immoral that in practice it would be rejected outright with the assessment that this is a mentally ill person who must at the very least be removed while involving welfare authorities, the law, and medicine. In the Torah, of course, the story appears plainly as praise for the deranged father. In a slight variation on the dilemma (the attack!) of Epicurus, it is ridiculous to believe in an entity that is: A. the commanding and first cause of all, who can decide whatever it wants; B. an entity that one must obey in any case; and C. obedience to it will be ethical, while whatever is not obedience to it will lack ethical validity (that is, your claim). Beyond an impressive cholent of logical fallacy and moral fallacy, there is nothing in this.
B. In practice, there is not necessarily validity to values founded on belief in a commanding and legislating factor. After all, a reading of the Torah clearly shows moral directives that are not valid today, under the most ridiculous and pathetic rationales. The value-history of believers is an expression of more or less hidden heresy, usually accompanied by self-deception obvious to everyone who looks at the group to his right and left (but never his own).
4. On morality and lethality in secular cultures
Here Dawkins is indeed mistaken, in my opinion, and Sam Harris is more correct. Dogmatism, and obedience to principles that do not fit reality and reason, are the problem. North Korea, for example, is a state with religious characteristics, such as a leader with supernatural effects on the weather. But its main problem is the dogmatism that does not permit questioning the leader’s views, and in that it resembles societies like Maoist China or Stalinist Russia, where the dogmatism conflicting with the facts was indeed not accompanied by supernatural interpretations but by lies of a different kind. (As Harris pointed out: Is the problem with North Korea really an over abundance of intellectual curiosity?) Therefore every dogmatic system that does not accord with facts and reason should be rejected, not only religious ones, but certainly all religious ones.
5. “What I claim is that these influences are not related to morality as such. Psychology, like scientific research in general,[1] is supposed to deal with facts and explanations for them (what is), whereas morality concerns norms (what ought to be).”
The problem is that effectively this is meaningless. Do you know what really ought to be? 3. 3 is what ought to be. 3 what? It simply says nothing, but so it is with the overwhelming majority of morality. Some version of Kant’s categorical imperative exists in every society, and every society more or less says stealing is forbidden. The problem is that in communism (of some sort) stealing means taking from someone who has some objective need, in various kinds of capitalism or profit-faith stealing means taking from someone who earned it under the economic rules of that period, in Nazism stealing is taking from whoever has been shown—quite universally—to be the superior race, and so on and so on.
Therefore here too Harris (and Dawkins) offer something more positive: something concrete with some chance of progress. There is a feeling of well-being that exists in almost everyone. Evolutionarily, it makes very good sense that there should be such a thing, and morality as well (and the fact is that religions, despite being false inventions, are also accompanied by some kind of morality, albeit of lower quality and not at all stable). It is also quite clear that today we do not understand this nearly well enough (just as with any other physical or physiological phenomenon). If we could increase everyone’s sense of well-being, surely it would be moral to do so. Beyond that, the unknown outweighs the known, and this should be investigated, mainly through empirical psychology, but one should also avoid wasting time on things like Freud’s stupid religion, or an obsession with philosophy.
The charm of philosophy is obvious. Unlike psychology, which requires budgets and investment that one can find in the academic faculty buildings on campus, philosophy can be babbled about from one’s synagogue. Kant is just fine in the sense that a religious high school (or Haredi cheder) education is apparently enough to talk about him. But really, it would be better to waste time on something more fun, like Angry Birds, and do something useful most of the time. It is not only more fun, it also hides the time-wasting involved less.
“There is no indifference here to the value of human life, but rather another value that overrides it.” Therefore there is no room here for principled moral criticism.
1. There are values where the disagreement about them is really a factual disagreement and not a moral one at all.
That is, regarding religious values one may assume with high probability that almost all people, if they were convinced of the religious facts (there is a God who revealed Himself and commands, etc.), would accept the religious value upon themselves. Therefore the whole dispute is not on the moral plane at all (but on the factual one), and so it is understandable that there is no room here for moral criticism.
But perhaps it is different when the dispute is about the value itself. For example, someone who thinks that one ought not obey the Holy One, blessed be He, where that conflicts with “morality”—then according to his view there definitely is “moral criticism.” Or is there no criticism here either because the person acts according to his own view, and the criticism should be of the actions and not of the view itself?
Does the claim about moral criticism apply to every value, or only to values where the dispute about them is factual?
2. Assuming the claim is not only about values where the disagreement about them is factual, then I understand the claim to be that principled moral criticism applies only to attaching a “too low” importance-number tag, and not to an error in the ranked ordering of values.
That is, each person attaches to every value a numerical tag representing its degree of importance, and principled moral criticism concerns only assigning a number that is “too low.” Toward someone who assigns correct numbers to values, but in addition assigns some number to some value (for example, the value of seeing to his own pleasures), there is no moral criticism, because he has fully met every condition of morality.
If indeed so, then a possible alternative is that there is no assigning of numbers at all, but only an order relation. One must identify something as a value, and determine what is above it and what below it and in which situations. Principled moral criticism concerns an “incorrect” ordering of values. Toward someone for whom the consequentialist value ‘act so that there will be minimum harm to people’ is lower than the deontological value ‘do not act to harm people,’ I can certainly have valid moral criticism, for example (and he in turn has the same criticism of me regarding my value-error).
Is this indeed a correct representation of your view—that criticism can exist only regarding the assignment of an incorrect number and not regarding the order relation?
What an impressive cholent! [-to use your term]
1. What does that have to do with anything? Inside every believer there is the feeling of lack of commitment; a Christian who never studied Judaism would not know it!
3. Obedience to the categorical imperative is not equivalent to obedience to commandments that are not moral, [as I understand it]. If God says something immoral [-in my eyes], then the consideration of obeying God will override the desire to be moral, and as the Rabbi wrote, that does not mean I am not moral.
And on the contrary—explain how without God there is an obligation to be moral; or to take your example—someone who feels that right now he “feels like” murdering, why shouldn’t he do it? Because yesterday he “felt” differently?!?!
4. If you agree that theft is different in every place, and you accept that, then you are in effect smuggling in the claim that there was no immorality in Nazism—or did I not understand what you said?
First of all, you should read and understand before you speak.
1. You did not understand the claim. Christianity does not contain Judaism. I recommend that you look at the words of Yehezkel Kaufmann in order to understand monotheism. The definition of secularity is only the negation of religion. Any value a secular person has is not included in secularity. Therefore every religious person knows secularity better than the secular person knows the religious person.
3. Again, you did not understand the claim. He says there is no obligation whatsoever to be moral without God giving validity to it. For if all morality is merely subjective, why do I have to listen to it? Why should I care about a good feeling?
5. In short, you said there is no such thing as morality and ideal.
1. It may very well be that every believer has (the original contains an error) the feeling of lack of commitment, but not every believer has the feeling of independence and the power to cope with life without an imaginary being that is terribly, terribly interested in him. In exactly the same way, not every racist redneck has a hidden liberal + recognition of white supremacy. The redneck has difficulty recognizing that he does not belong to a category with inherent meaning, and so do most religious people. Apparently you think the opposite, but I hope it is clear that the post completely collapses into this first question and adds nothing to it.
2. Somehow disappeared. Maybe God decided it moves to 3 and we merely obey. Since it has been raised, then:
3. “If God says something immoral [-in my eyes], then the consideration of obeying God will override the desire to be moral, and as the Rabbi wrote, that does not mean I am not moral.” Or, in other words: I was only following orders. The quote from “the Rabbi” (who is that anyway? Probably Kook?) answers nothing, except for the fact that in this insoluble mess he decided that he is essentially not moral (and not, say, in the other direction, denying that God is not in fact omnipotent).
And regarding your demand “explain to me etc.”, obviously I do not know how to explain this, as I wrote originally. To some degree or another, it is very likely that evolutionarily, whoever was badly mismatched to what he calls “moral” is simply not with us today. And the continuation is pretty much the same. Just as any gap in evolution is not solved by inventing a supernatural being to fill that hole, whether people invented morality directly, or invented some morality and some supernatural being to pin the morality on, the question arises why that should not also change (apart from the built-in and logical inferiority I raised earlier). Factually, it does not change all the time.
4. My claim is that discussions of morality have added no significant insight whatsoever. Nobody needs Kant to understand that the Nazis are immoral, and even after Kant it is still not clear at all where on the capitalist-socialist spectrum morality is supposed to be, how it is right and proper to balance the needs of farmers in the Amazon against global warming, or any question that is not trivial.
1. Rabbi Michi addressed your claim: even if every believer has a hidden heretic in him, it is not certain that he experiences that.
2. I don’t know whether God made me stupid so that I didn’t understand, or whether your explanation is lacking. Within the basket of values of the conservative are the values of the liberal; when they meet, the conservative will sometimes prefer values that are not important to the liberal. What is your claim?!
3. A. In this holy place, “the Rabbi” simply means Rabbi Michael Abraham, [although he advocates looking at the substance of the argument without regard to the speaker…]. If an act seems immoral to me and God tells me to do it, then if it is clear to me that God says so, apparently there is something hidden from my eyes [-see the parable in the post about the man who was torn between helping his mother or fighting the Nazis]. Of course this is a personal decision, and you can decide that God is corrupt. Or if it is not certainly from God, I will attribute it to human error.
B. So basically you agree with Yishai that there is no such thing as morality and ideal, except that it is advisable not to suppress the feelings that tell us to be moral, because this ‘stupidity and lie’ that evolution caused us to feel as moral feelings benefits society. And what about a private act?! Food for thought…
4. I am amazed at you in two ways—1. What does it mean that the Nazis were “immoral”? In the morality they established, that is morality! Likewise in Sodom, etc. If you have a feeling of morality, I am astonished at how you judge people in a false way… 2. If morality is a lie or an “opium of the masses” in order to ensure evolutionary survival and not because of truly binding morality, then the Nazis are right in their racial doctrine, no?
“If God says something immoral [-in my eyes], then the consideration of obeying God will override the desire to be moral, and as the Rabbi wrote, that does not mean I am not moral.”
I just want to emphasize this point, because it illustrates exactly the folly of defining morality through religion. It is something that is:
1. Completely non-invariant by definition (for the entity can command tomorrow whatever it feels like)
2. In the final analysis, completely non-binding as regards moral behavior
3. Providing a canopy of hypocrisy (for “the Rabbi” said “that does not mean I am not moral,” and he is presumably moral precisely in his determination of whether he is moral or not, although he is willing to commit himself to immoral behavior in the appropriate cases)
There is no racism here. Also in light of what I explained in the post (that even a Jew is saved only because he will keep commandments and a gentile will not keep them. A man also takes precedence over a woman). But also because a person is more obligated toward members of his own people than toward strangers, just as he is obligated toward his family before strangers. That is not racism.
Ami, if you’ll pardon me, it is hard for me to respond to something this long, but none of your arguments holds water. If you want to discuss in greater detail, I’d be happy for you to raise your arguments one by one and we can discuss them.
1. Again, according to Michi, it is easier for a redneck to understand a liberal’s value system, since he believes in those same values + the value of white supremacy. Not only is this nonsense, it is nonsense that in a rare way is testable, and it is known to be such (it is easier for the liberal to understand the redneck). Michi did not address this.
2. As I said earlier. In general, the liberal and the conservative have more or less the same values, with different considerations regarding the relations among them (for example, the nonsense that liberals do not have the value of “loyalty” or “patriotism”). There are indeed cases where one group has values that the other lacks, and there are indications that it is easier for the second group to understand the first (see point A). This really is not that complicated, is it?
3. A. In case it was not clear to you, this is absolutely not what you said earlier.
B. Your current claim is that God is not capable of giving you an instruction that is immoral. If there is an instruction that in your eyes is immoral, there must (not probably—must) be something behind it. The difference between this and a person who says he is only following orders and has not the faintest idea what is moral and what is not—does not exist. In addition, you believe in an entity that is subject to nothing, except the necessity of actually acting according to the considerations that in your eyes are moral (although you allow it to do this in a way you do not understand), and not only does that entity obligate you to do everything it says (except for what you force it not to be able to tell you), but apart from such an entity, no value-system whatsoever could exist. To me this is ridiculous. Beyond that, I think this is an excellent demonstration of how religious people cannot understand secular logic.
4. A. The Nazis are immoral according to my decision, which apparently does not bind them. As a factual claim (and a factual claim only), most of the world decided that Nazism is not moral, and the babble of philosophy changed that not one whit. I do not understand the connection even to what I said.
B. You do not understand the logic of evolution at all. Morality does not operate in order to ensure evolutionary survival. Evolutionary survival produces creatures with certain traits. I do not breathe oxygen in the air and not in water in order to try to cause the continuation of terrestrial humanity. Evolution produced me with this trait, and to some extent it defines this aspect in me. What we perceive as morality likely works in a fairly similar way. Indeed, there is a very great abstraction here, and also many unknowns (to me, at any rate).
1. You are begging the question that the divine entity is corrupt, and therefore religion is corrupt. What folly.
2. In the final analysis, who does more moral things is not the issue, although it is an interesting issue, and you may be right that religious people do more corrupt acts. According to your view, every ideal is bad because ideals brought wars. There is also another side, that religion brought morality -[!!!!!] and in practice it may also be that religious people committed fewer corruptions. It is an argument with no end; I will bring only a cute proof I heard, [I won’t say in whose name, since it seems something bothers you when I quote in someone’s name?…] when a religious person goes to jail, the media adds the fact that he is religious as proof that religiosity does not help… [and it is true that religious people do not always overcome their inclinations…]
3. It seems you did not read the post?! And it bothers you when I quote?!?!?!
1. Right? What doesn’t make sense to you?
2. Aside from obedience to God, which includes a great deal within it.
3. Right. But both things are true.
B. If you do not understand someone who relies on God, that is proof that secular logic is unable to understand the religious person. Interesting that you cannot explain what I do not understand, but that shows that I do not understand.
4. “What we perceive as morality likely works in a fairly similar way.”
This is really a riddle! You agree that there is in fact no morality, and everything is changing gut feelings that whoever did not have them died {?!?!?!?!}, and then you speak of morality which apparently works according to what we perceive it to be?!
I’m curious for the solution to the riddle!…
It’s not that the two previous posts were especially successful in the sarcasm the Rabbi wrote; it’s simply that they were written in a format that made them almost unreadable, unlike the usual posts.
(I’m asking hesitantly whether I wasn’t answered on purpose and I’m supposed to understand on my own why, or whether the message was simply missed in the torrent here.
At the end of each of the two sections I tried to ask a focused question.)
With God’s help, 8 Kislev 5781
Religious people know secularity more than secular people know religion, not necessarily for the reasons mentioned by the author, but for the simple reason that the secular worldview is expressed abundantly and in detail, whereas in order to grasp the depth of the religious worldview one must study its sources carefully—and their language, style, and a considerable portion of their ideas are unfamiliar to the average secular person.
Regards, Fishel Gurion
I didn’t understand a word.
To Shmuel, when reading his name—
And it may be said that the measure of the “common denominator” explains why religious people know the secular outlook more than the reverse, for moral and social values exist both among religious and among secular people, whereas religious values exist only among the “religious” and are unfamiliar to secular people.
Regards, Meir Zuta Warkaheimer
Nur, in your last message you already completely lost all contact with what I wrote in the first place, and in the last point you started to lose contact with the Hebrew language. All the best.
That is, all those doctrines of “virtue,” in your view, were not morality at all? Even though they can be subsumed under the deontological approach, but with a different command/content.
Miki, if you’ll pardon me, neither the post nor your response holds water. It is your right to answer or not, except that your post is longer, and unlike my response it is not divided into points. So if you want to address it, you can easily choose a subset and address that. And if not, that is also fine, and presumably you will go on to write another post that is a sprawling stream of consciousness to which, according to your response here, there is no real way to respond. Of course, that is your right.
Ami,
It is difficult to choose among the points (I also do not see among them even one worth addressing). I will only comment regarding the length, which you mentioned. I write a post and whoever wants reads and comments, but I respond to all the commenters. So there is no symmetry between the length of my post and the length of your comment. But of course it is your right to write at length just as it is my right not to respond to a long talkback. So if you do not want to choose and raise here again one of your arguments for a more specific discussion, I will allow myself to stop here.
Yishai, it turns out you understood nothing:
1. Of course Christianity does not contain Judaism. But according to the mistaken logic in the post, it follows. I bring this as an absurdity, and you note that it is an absurdity. Brilliant. Thanks for the reference to Kaufmann, by the way—what would I do without you.
3. Again, as I wrote, if this is a primary entity that has no first cause, and it is what makes morality binding, then either it can bind you to do immoral things, as in the binding of Isaac, or it is bound to do only what in your eyes is moral. Therefore it has a first cause—what you think of as moral—and it is unnecessary as a moral source.
5. As before, you did not understand. There is such a thing, except that we understand it only very partially at present. The way to understand it better is exactly what Miki rejects.
And all the same, I would like to praise you for one thing. The irony of calling on someone to understand before responding doubles the irony of a post that claims secularity is conceptually contained within religion. You are intellectually limited in that you are incapable of following the logic that leads to secularity.
Ami, I’m already sick of megalomaniacs like you. You spew one nonsense after another and still think you’re intelligent. It’s simply embarrassing.
I’ll just point out something a bit strange about you. You relate to evolution not as a system of laws but as an independent entity that manages the world. A bit puzzling, no?
Miki, your post(s) are characterized by the fact that there is nothing interesting in them to think about, and still, as I demonstrated, it is not very hard to choose some subset and refute it.
Regarding the asymmetry arising from this being your blog, as I mentioned, this is certainly your right. I think that in fairness you should note that in the past you tried to debate on platforms where you did not have a built-in advantage, which led mainly to frustrated outbursts on your part.
There is also an inherent unfairness in pitting your views against those of Dawkins or Harris, since they are not aware of your existence (for reasons that you also can guess), and naturally this will always be on your home turf.
So within a religion rather negligible in size and importance, it is your choice to curl up inside an even smaller niche of your tiny echo chamber. I do not deny your right to do so, only the lack of patheticness in it.
Besides the unique language and style of Torah literature, the mode of thinking is also more complex than the common secular conceptions, where there is a tendency to see in black and white—for example, someone inclined toward socialism will go with it all the way, and someone inclined toward capitalism will go with it all the way. In Judaism, by contrast, there is sanctification of property rights in which a person invested his labor, while on the other hand the rich man is obligated to help the needy—what I have called “solidary capitalism.”
Regards, Yaron Fishel Warkaheimer-Gurion
1. It seems for some reason you still did not understand. You claimed that every Christian knows Judaism better than the Jew knows Christianity because of Rabbi Michi’s logic regarding religious and secular people. But you did not understand what I was trying to say. I argued that even if we go according to Rabbi Michi’s logic, your claim does not hold. Rabbi Michi’s claim was that if X contains Y, then one can say that X knows Y better than Y knows X. But I challenged the very premise that Christianity contains Judaism. By the way, the reference to Kaufmann was meant to show that monotheism did not contain polytheism.
3. This really is an interesting claim and I will take a little time to think about it. Although it does not negate the claim that without God morality has no validity because it is merely subjective; it only means that even with God morality has no validity.
5. How exactly does psychology teach about morality? What people feel is morality? According to what you say, what the Nazis did was moral, since they felt good about it.
A question for the readers
As I have already noted, the post is full of errors (in fact there is hardly anything in it but errors), except that most of them stem from logical errors, which is, how shall I put it, not exactly the cup of your second vessel (or whatever the devil the expression is), and in addition, the author of the post does not even have minimal integrity. So I thought to ask about a factual point. I am no great expert in the babble of morality and philosophy, and blessed be the noodle, I also have a job that does not allow me to idle all day in the shtibl of Bar-Ilan, and therefore I only skimmed Haidt. Miki writes the following about him:
“Haidt’s basic claim is that the set of conservative values contains the liberal set. The liberal arsenal of values is very thin, and it contains mainly values of equality and justice (fairness), protection of life and property, and no more. The conservative, by contrast, also advocates additional values, such as loyalty, familism and family values, patriotism, nationalism, modesty, conservatism of course, and the like (he divides them into three kinds: loyalty, authority, and purity). But one should note that the conservative supports all these in addition to the liberal moral values, for he too believes in equality and justice, even if in different measures from his liberal colleague.”
And here are a few questions.
1. Do you agree that from “The conservative, by contrast, also advocates additional values, such as loyalty, familism and family values, patriotism, nationalism, modesty, conservatism,” it follows that Miki understood liberals to reject values such as loyalty, familism, and patriotism? Do you agree that this is an essential point of the post?
2. Where exactly does Haidt say this? From skimming his words, it seems to me he said this about libertarians. Do you understand that this is not at all the same thing? Did you understand from the continuation that Miki explicitly speaks about liberals later on in an essential way?
3. In Understanding Libertarian Morality, regarding the left and right it is written: On the right, the conservative side has insisted that there is an objective moral truth. Traditional institutions are seen as embodying the wisdom of the ages, and therefore closely reflecting this moral truth. On the left, the liberal side has insisted that moral truth is not fixed for all time, but is a work in progress, to be reinterpreted toward the goal of promoting greater well-being for all [11]–[13]. Psychologists have been able to measure these differences in moral judgment [3] along with their underlying personality correlates. For example, political conservativism has been found to be associated with greater tolerance of inequality, and lesser tolerance of change [4], greater conscientiousness [1], and greater sensitivity to disgust [14]. Political liberals, on the other hand, tend to be more open than conservatives to new experiences [1] and more empathic [15]. This research has been an important first step in understanding the ideology-personality relation, and the psychological organization of political attitudes
Where exactly do you see here one set of values that is a subset of another value system?
Again, I may be mistaken here, but the writer of the original article is right at most twice a day, so I am directing this to you.
Although I agree with the asymmetry you described between religiosity and secularity (which follows from the definitions), the analogy to the asymmetry between liberalism and conservatism does not seem correct to me.
My problem with Haidt’s thesis is that he constructs a straw man of purist liberalism while ignoring the distinction you made between moral values and “aesthetic” values. The asymmetry in the conclusion follows from an asymmetry in the assumptions. The conservative is described as someone whose set of values includes both the liberal values of equality and freedom and the “aesthetic” values of respect for tradition, family values, loyalty, etc. The liberal is described as someone whose value-system includes only 2 of the 6 values the conservative has (care and liberty). But is it correct to depict the liberal as someone who lacks the additional values? Do liberals not see value in fairness, in loyalty to the state, in family (the LGBT struggle for recognition of same-sex familyhood attests to this), in preserving traditions? The dispute between a liberal and a conservative is mainly about degree, about the order of priority among the values, and about what to do when values are in conflict (that is, whether, to what extent, and in what situation moral values are set aside for aesthetic values). Therefore there is symmetry and there is common ground, and the criticism does not stem from lack of familiarity with or appreciation of the parallel value system. The liberal’s criticism will be directed against the considerations that lead the conservative, or the religious person, to prefer in certain situations aesthetic/religious values over moral values (and of course vice versa). The secular person certainly understands that the religious person has an additional value-system; he thinks the choice to give it priority is immoral, something with which the religious person can certainly agree, since he contains the moral value-system and chooses not to act according to it in situations of conflict.
And regarding the asymmetry of acquaintance—I assume religious people know the secular world better than the reverse, perhaps because we are a minority group. But I sit within religious Zionism, and I read the writings of its leaders, educators, and opinion-shapers, and the lack of understanding and the contempt for the value-priorities of the liberal left are no different from those of the liberal left toward the conservative right.
A. It is your right to think so; to say it is mutual would be an understatement.
B. If you think I claimed that evolution is some sort of entity, let alone an independent entity, then as usual you are mistaken.
Ofer, you are mixing levels. You are right that people are not pure conservatives and pure liberals, but the discussion here is about the principle. Whenever you move from theory to practice you encounter intermediate types. And still, his analysis is correct.
Beyond that, Haidt points out that in practice these values are not examined in discussions of morality. So the facts are that there is indeed a focus on the consensual (liberal) values.
And there are other errors in your remarks. For example, the LGBT struggle is not about family values but about the right to behave as you wish. Not only is that not the same thing, it is the exact opposite.
As for the rabbis’ lack of understanding of the values of the liberal left, in my opinion this is not a lack of acquaintance but an unwillingness to grant recognition (“to acknowledge_,” not “to know_”). By the way, in many cases this stems precisely from an understanding that they are better than us in these areas, and the insecurity, frustration, and inability to cope with that are what produce the expressions of contempt you described. Mark this well.
Thank you for the response.
I understand very well the distinction between theory and practice. But Haidt’s claim is not only philosophical; it also seeks to explain human behavior (most of which is the intermediate types). It is not a pure conceptual analysis, but empirical. His claim that liberals do not understand conservatives (not that the liberal ideal does not understand the conservative ideal) because their moral framework does not contain conservative values—in my view is not an accurate description of reality. The liberal understands them and gives them value, only prioritizes them differently. The dispute is not about the value-framework but about the rules of decision in conflict situations.
Regarding LGBT people—the very fact of their struggle for recognition of a same-sex family unit indicates, in my view, the value they give to family. A struggle merely for freedom in the negative sense (freedom from…) does not require recognition of a family unit. The criticism of them as people acting against family values stems from a conservative definition of “family”—the reverse of Haidt’s claim.
As for the rabbis (I was not referring only to rabbis; it is almost sweeping among opinion-shapers in religious Zionism)—it is nice that you judge them favorably, but my impression is that alongside the unwillingness to acknowledge… there is also a great deal of ignorance and unfamiliarity with… and in any case, unwillingness to acknowledge… is exactly Haidt’s claim against liberals.
I really do not agree. Clearly the point is not that liberalism does not understand conservatism. We are talking about people. But with people too it is so because of the difference in ideals. And the difference is unequivocal and clear even if there are people on the spectrum. The LGBT struggle is not a struggle for family values. That is baseless hair-splitting. Let the reader choose.
Michi, do these values also “need” God, like moral ones?
Where did I claim that the LGBT struggle is about family values? I claimed that their insistence on being recognized as a family indicates the value they assign to family. Mark that well. As for Haidt, again, obviously there is a difference. The question is whether Haidt’s theory gives a good explanation of its causes and describes reality correctly. We will probably remain in disagreement.
I marked it well, and I disagree. From their perspective family is an interest, not a value. They are fighting for their right to realize their desire, not for family values.
Yishai,
1. “But I challenged the premise that Christianity contains Judaism.” I will repeat once again. There is no need for you to challenge that, because I also think that is not so. But, as I explained and you for some reason find it hard to address, according to Miki’s logic, belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is a superset of belief in the Father, which is Judaism. That is the absurdity. There is really no point in your repeating that Christianity does not contain Judaism. Jesus.
2. Thank you.
3. “What people feel is morality?” Not exactly, certainly not according to some simplistic pleasure-meter like that. Why? Because “according to what you say, what the Nazis did was moral, since they felt good about it,” with which again I agree that this is nonsense. If the Nazis had increased the well-being of the whole world, that would have been moral. In practice, what they believed in was a drastic lowering of the well-being of many groups in order to raise their own. As for why that is not moral, I have no definitive answer (and in this I am no different from philosophy/morality babblers, who also have none). It is my decision. Factually, there is an almost absolute consensus that it is not moral. To what extent is it right to increase one being’s well-being at the expense of another? I don’t know (and neither do you). What is the way to work to increase everyone’s? Exactly what Miki suggests not to do.
There is both. If the LGBT person is religious—he sees family as a “value,” as it is written: “He did not create it a waste; He formed it to be inhabited” 🙂
Regards, Oxy Moron
A:
There is one thing (well, more than one thing) I don’t understand regarding all these Harrisian and Dawkinsian well-being conceptions (although I’m not sure the latter is considered an authority in the field of well-being reasoning).
I understand that I have a desire to flourish, and I understand that another person has a desire to flourish—touching a boiling kettle and all that—I find it hard to understand why, even if I agree that the other person also feels the same sensations that I feel, I should take those into account when I calculate my actions regarding my well-being.
A question to all the worshipers of the noodle god wandering around here unsupervised: according to the well-being approach (roughly Harris’s, I’m not expert in every sub-clause and sub-concept), assuming today I’m offered the possibility of experiencing tremendous, uninterrupted pleasure together with my close family over the next 120 good years. In return, by the simple push of a button, I must exterminate the population of Vietnam in agony—what should I do? And if I should choose not to exterminate anyone, why?
Or in other words, for what reason should I take into account the well-being of living creatures not directly or indirectly connected to me?
Full disclosure: I’m not asking in order to attack or belittle anyone. To tell the truth, I would be happy to ask Sam Harris himself exactly the same question, but since he probably won’t answer my phone calls in the near future, I’m putting the question here.
P.S.: Answers involving evolutionary feelings of guilty sorrow that would arise in me because of such a criminal act (would it indeed be criminal?) will not be accepted by the system, for two reasons:
1) In my humble opinion, from the moment a person knows that his feelings are no more than evolutionary chemical reactions in the brain, it becomes much easier to ignore them.
2) For those who insist, let us assume I take a pill that will prevent such feelings / I am a psychopath / any other reason that makes such feelings irrelevant.
B:
Thank you for the answer, Rabbi Michi. Although I must say that it is frighteningly counterintuitive (at least for me).
I am still fascinated to hear your opinion on the subject of morality: whether there is such a thing, or whether these are only feelings.
I assume that if we continue with your distinction between religiosity and religious people, we can go to the favorite argument that communism is a wonderful system, only unfortunately the communists do not implement the principles correctly…
I, unlike you, insist on living in the real world and judging value-systems by the results on the ground.
So if communist regimes lead to oppression, there is probably something inherent in the regime.
If a religious system leads to admiration for forceful people like Trump and Bibi despite, and perhaps because of, their disregard for every scale of values, I would suspect that something in the religious system leads to worship of absolute power—perhaps the worship of God and of halakhic authorities?
When I see that religious groups tend to discriminate against weak sectors such as Mizrahim, I will consider whether the tribalism inherent in religion may be encouraging the behavior.
The Rabbi will of course explain that the scale of values in religion is perfect and the problem is only in faulty implementation—and soon a communist state that will not oppress its citizens will also arise.
1. He is speaking about conservatism and liberalism, not about a specific conservative or liberal.
2-3. I don’t know what Rabbi Michi’s source in Haidt is. I assume he wrote more than one paragraph.
A. I’m not a megalomaniac. (Mainly because I’m still a young hothead these days.) That’s the difference.
1. To the best of my knowledge (I don’t have much knowledge of Christianity), in the Christian Trinity we are talking about identity, that is, it is not at all the same God. (The Father and the God of Israel.) Besides, in Judaism there are other things besides monotheism. Therefore Christianity in any case does not contain Judaism even according to your understanding of Rabbi Michi.
2. I still haven’t decided anything about that.
3. This nonsense of well-being convinces nobody, including you, judging by the way you write. There is no reason at all that this feeling should obligate me.
I return to your original comment.
3. There is a premise here that there is no God. Besides, why is there no moral validity to values whose source is an omnipotent entity? Who said moral values have to be subjective?
5. You definitely did say there is no such thing as morality. “Do you know what really ought to be? 3. 3 is what ought to be. 3 what? It simply says nothing, but so it is with the overwhelming majority of morality” meaning there is no such thing as proper behavior. Meaning there is no morality.
Okay, here this distinction seems to me like hair-splitting, so apparently on this too we will remain divided. In any case, both on this issue and regarding Haidt, the dispute is empirical, not conceptual (unlike the asymmetry between religiosity and secularity).
With God’s help, 9 Heshvan 5781
To Ami—greetings,
Without entering into the discussion of Haidt’s and R. M. A.’s words, I would note that conservatism and liberalism are not necessarily opposites. Liberalism deals with the framework—with the demand that society not interfere with the individual in determining his own world of values. But the liberal in terms of framework may be conservative in terms of content.
He may recommend to his audience that they adhere to “conservative” values that emphasize nation and tradition and the like, yet oppose inculcating these values through legal coercion or social pressure, believing that it is preferable for each person to arrive at the truth through inner conviction rather than external pressure.
So one can say that there is no symmetry between conservatism and liberalism, because they are not on the same plane. Liberalism demands freedom of choice מצד the social framework, whereas conservatism recommends that the free person take upon himself value-based limitations and national and religious-ideological commitment, in the spirit of “and they willingly accepted His kingship upon themselves.”
Regards, Yaron Fishel Gurion-Warkaheimer, Congregation of Haidt Supporters ::)
Don’t try to build on Michi’s argument the inference that Christianity knows Judaism, because according to Michi the essence of Judaism is the halakha—Talmud, Mishnah, Rishonim and Acharonim—and not the Tanakh. Christianity is based on, or rests on depending on how you look at it, the Tanakh. To the best of my knowledge Christianity is not based on Jewish halakha. (And indeed there are many Christian thinkers who study and know the Tanakh better than the average yeshiva student or kollel fellow. But moral lessons from the Tanakh can be interpreted in a thousand different ways, and it certainly does not define halakhic Judaism.)
With God’s abundant help, 25 Thermidor 2020
The president of France cannot say that “secularism has not killed.” During the French Revolution the guillotine worked “non-stop” in order to impose “liberty, equality, fraternity.”
About the tens of millions killed by Stalin in the struggle against the “opium of the masses,” and about the tens of millions killed by Hitler in his struggle against the Jewish “slave morality,” which emasculated the “freedom of action” of the “master morality” of the “blond beast of prey”—we shall not speak, out of respect for Mr. Godwin 🙂
Regards, Ana Avda
Christianity was the natural continuation of Roman civilization, in which the “entertainments” of the gladiators held a central place. When the Jewish holy scriptures were draped over that, the tendency toward violence received religious justifications, and instead of gladiators, the audience was entertained by the pyres of the “auto-da-fé.”
Modernity, which brought Christianity down from its greatness, did not stop Esau’s love of war and violence, but gave it other ideological justifications. Sometimes the need to bring the savages of Africa under the wings of Western enlightenment, and sometimes the struggle for liberty and equality 🙂
That “entity” you speak of stamped the moral sense into you.
You will never be more moral than He is—He decides what is moral and what is not.
Without Him all morality is mere whims of the gut.
If it doesn’t interest you, why are you making such an effort to write long comments here?
And if you do make the effort despite the boredom engulfing you, then what does it matter whether it interests you or not? (To each his own interests.)
I’ll speak for Ami even though I don’t agree with his content: even if the content itself is not interesting, it can still be interesting to classify the content itself; those are two completely different things. As for the question why that matters, the claim about interest is not a psychological description but an objective claim that whoever looks will understand that there is nothing correct here worthy of thought (as was explained here in the post regarding morality itself).
I don’t know where this image of a little lady adorned with a wreath of flowers around her sprang from here.
Hello Nur,
First, sorry for the tone last time. I apologize.
Honestly, I do not know. In my humble opinion, it is similar to the question whether babies are cute. At a very high level of abstraction, according to evolution, whoever thought babies were not cute simply is not here today. Does “cuteness” as an independent concept exist? I have no way of knowing, since (again at a high level of abstraction) we are built in hardware to think that the property exists.
What do you think? To some degree, it seems to me that you have exactly the same problem, with “God” substituting for “evolution” (not coincidentally, since evolution is not an entity, but to a large extent its results are very similar as if it were).
Hello Yaron,
I agree with what you wrote. More precisely, I would say that conservatism and liberalism are indeed opposites, except that they can be applied to different things (for example, personal norms versus laws, as you wrote, or perhaps economic issues versus sexual behavior). To the best of my understanding, the difference is at most a minor matter of formulation.
What exactly does Moral Foundation Theory say?
I read (by skimming) several articles by and about Haidt, and in my humble opinion there really is something interesting and non-trivial here. The topic also contains fairly subtle points (beyond Miki’s capacity for understanding/engaging with them, as I have formed the impression, though in this case I do thank him for raising the subject).
Factually, the subject is roughly this. There is a self-assessment questionnaire in which people fill out several things:
1. Self-categorization (by liberalism/conservatism, secularity/religion, skin color, and so on, depending on the specific topic being examined)
2. Self-assessment questions that map onto 5–6 categories
3. The same assessment questions from 2, except that now they must be filled out according to how the person thinks someone from another group would answer them.
Two things emerged:
1. The entropy in the distribution of each person’s weighting among the categories correlates with conservatism. Here, by the way, Haidt plays a nice trick: in peer-reviewed articles, one sees that these are the data, and that is also the more modest claim he makes. In his synagogue books he is much more provocative, and tells anecdotes about liberals whose weight is concentrated in only two categories, which really is a subset.
2. Conservatives tend more to hit upon the answers liberals would give than vice versa. This is indeed food for thought, and when there is any empirical skill involved, I personally appreciate that.
As usual, it becomes more complex and interesting when one sees the data. For example, there is a clear correlation between questions related to preserving the environment—such as global warming—and conservatism and religion (as an anecdote, I remember a foolish director-general of the Ministry of Science saying something like “I try to throw plastic into trash bins. Nothing will happen to the earth—God promised us”). How does one define bodily purity? One can do it by subjects connected to sex, and then conservatives see that as a value; or by various forms of natural food, and then liberals see that as a value. What about the value of lust for knowledge? Liberals tend to be more educated (and the reasons for that too are complex).
For reasons of evolutionary-psychology motivation, there is a very strong bias among those who set the research questions to choose very ancient principles for the matter (say, lust for knowledge or curiosity are not there). Much less surprisingly, it turns out that if the principles are defined that way, then the entropy in the content is lower among those who replaced the above principles with other principles. Personally, if I had to choose, I would replace loyalty with environmental preservation. The rest of the post too, which in my view is quite foolish, falls into exactly the same problem. If monotheism is an intellectual leap compared to polytheism, then atheism is a subset of monotheism by an arbitrary and uninteresting definition. The rest of the post too, with the claims that morality can derive only from God, follows within a system of definitions that is uninteresting (and even logically mistaken).
Still, there remains the question why conservatives succeed in predicting liberal positions better than vice versa within this framework.
1. This is explicitly a point requiring some humility. Empirical predictive ability is an empirical achievement.
2. As I noted earlier, this discussion takes place on conservatives’ playing field, so perhaps they have an advantage there. It would be interesting to understand whether this also happens on a playing field that includes up-to-date liberal values. What can one do—this is social science (and still, it is far more useful than barren philosophy).
3. There are points on which conservatives are much more mistaken. Opposition to evolution, global warming, vaccines, preventive measures for corona, etc., are characteristic of conservatives, not liberals. (Whoever thinks the error here goes in the opposite direction, good health to him—up to corona and vaccines—and he may argue that conservatives consistently tend to be more right.) Higher education in the US actually characterizes liberals, and even if there is a confounder of money here, why are liberals wealthier? There are several possible explanations. It may be that conservatives are more exposed to liberalism than vice versa. It may be that this is due to liberals’ contempt toward conservatives. As an anecdote, it seems to me that an exhausting Bnei Brak Haredi will predict my view regarding aspects of preventive corona measures better than I will predict his. To some degree, his bizarre opinion simply does not interest me, and it may be that I would exaggerate his craziness. As in point 1, there is food for thought here.
If you really want to see Rabbi Michi’s argument regarding God and morality, go into the fourth notebook (I think it is the fourth notebook) here on the site.
By the way, I don’t know at all why you define Rabbi Michi as conservative.
P.S. You really did raise a very embarrassing point about conservatives: that they insist on coming out against correct things liberals do just because liberals do them (for example, environmental quality).
Trying to understand your answer to Yinon. It seems to me that you are saying roughly this: there is no moral justification whatsoever (as opposed, say, to psychological justification) for exacting retribution at the end of the war from that Nazi who sincerely believed in his path that Jews should be destroyed. In fact, you are even saying that from a purely moral standpoint it is forbidden to harm him.
Did I understand you correctly?
And if you would be willing, please also address Chava’s comment in passing. She tried to correct your wording and said that this is about loyalty, not righteousness.
Gabriel,
I understand that you live in the real world. So, what’s it like there? I’ve always wanted to know.
As for your argument itself, it contains a conceptual fallacy and an empirical fallacy.
The empirical fallacy is that you fail to notice that societies with more or less the same ideology sometimes arrive at “results on the ground” that are not identical. Think, for example, of Stalinist communism versus the way of life in certain kibbutzim in this country in the corresponding period. The ideology is very close, but morally it is night and day.
Not to mention the example of “religion,” where it is clear that we are dealing with such a broad-scale and heterogeneous human phenomenon that there is an infinite multiplicity of forms of life of every kind (from very “moral” to depraved and corrupt).
But what interests me more is your conceptual fallacy. Relying first and foremost on “results on the ground”—as opposed to a more balanced approach, at least in my view—collapses the very definition of morality in advance. It turns out that your claim is not about the subject under discussion at all. At most its meaning is that in certain societies people are a little more “well off” than people in other societies. That is not a moral (value-based) discussion but a discussion of psychological facts, sociological facts, etc. Not that it is not an important discussion, but it is not connected to the discussion to which you referred in the first place.
There is legal justification in order to deter others. But no moral justification. He does not deserve retribution for his deeds. All this on the assumption that he really believed in his path (it is not clear how that could be checked).
The terminology of loyalty or righteousness does not seem important to me. Choose as you wish.
You did not answer my question whether there is a moral problem in harming that Nazi. Or perhaps you mean that such an act is morally neutral?
Second, I understand from you that consistency (loyalty to a path) and righteousness are overlapping concepts (because the difference between them does not seem important to you). If that is indeed your view, it is unclear to me how it can be defended at all. Consistency is especially a formal matter, whereas righteousness also has to do with content.
I did answer: there is no moral justification for harming him. What is unclear here?
I did not say they are overlapping concepts. I said there is no point in getting into those definitions because my argument is clear and does not depend on them. One can certainly define loyalty as consistency with values not connected to morality (aesthetic or human values), and righteousness as loyalty to moral values. The question whether, in the Nazi’s view, his actions stem from loyalty or righteousness depends on whether in his view killing Jews is a moral duty or a duty of a different kind. But why does all this matter to our issue?
To Dawkins—greetings,
In a considerable portion of Western countries there is no duty at all to save a human life. In the State of Israel as well, the Mandatory legacy exempted the individual from rescuing his fellow who is in danger, until MK Rabbi Hanan Porat arose and initiated the “Do Not Stand Idly By the Blood of Your Neighbor Law.”
During the Holocaust the Western countries fulfilled, in practice, their moral conception and closed the gates of rescue before the Jewish refugees. And indeed, why should they be obligated, when man is after all merely a random mutation of an ape?
By contrast, an observant Jew will treat a gentile on Shabbat by means that reduce the prohibition to a rabbinic one, by telling a gentile to do it and by doing it in an unusual manner, and if there is no choice even by full Torah prohibitions because of “enmity.”
Regards, Shimpan-Tzvi Levingang-Outan
Doron,
Do you seriously want to infer from the kibbutz movement to communist states?
Come, let’s see whether you can explain to the class and to me where the mistake is in your comparison. (Hint—Ballad of a Kibbutz Leaver.)
If you stick your nose outside for a moment into the real world, you’ll get slightly wet from the rain that falls in our world, but you may be able to identify trends and patterns, and then you’ll come back to the warm room and the old books and check how far they are from reality.
In present-day Israel the only place where admission to school depends on skin color is in Haredi society, which preserved a religious way of life thanks to the autonomy to which it is entitled.
In Bnei Akiva yeshivot the situation used to be similar, but as the influence of the liberal public increased (along with sanctions from the Ministry of Education), the situation improved despite the fact that the founding fathers wanted separate education for children of different ethnic communities.
Do you think that is entirely accidental?
The value of equality is a liberal value that does not exist in religious society, and therefore it is not surprising to see a religious society acting contrary to that value…
You did not solve the empirical fallacy in your words, and certainly not the conceptual fallacy.
Empirically, very different societies (for example, certain kibbutzim in the past and the Stalinist regime) held a similar ideology, but actual conduct was very different. Do you deny that fact? If not, that does not fit with your claim that a given ideology will necessarily lead to the same moral level and the same “results.” Therefore, for example, groups can arise whose members voluntarily adopt what Stalinism tried to impose by force. Note well: the same ideology but different practice. At most you can point to a higher correlation between similar ideologies and practice. But as stated, even when this is true, and here there are many reservations, it does not touch the plane of our discussion. The conceptual fallacy in your words remains.
By the way, I do not know Haredi society all that well, but I have the impression that the “racism” problem that exists there rests on somewhat different mechanisms from what you described. Tribalism is indeed a great danger (religious and non-religious tribalism), but it also has its blessing.
A brief note, without getting into the thickness of any beam: minority groups know the majority group better; the majority group knows the minority group less well. Therefore religious people know secular men and women better than secular people know religious men and women.