Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 21
This transcript was generated automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- The structure of “theological proofs” and the proof from epistemology
- The proof from morality and delimiting the claims that are rejected
- The validity of moral norms without God, consistency, and the logical anecdote
- Defining a “moral act”: neutrality, interest, and decision
- Good inclination and evil inclination, the Tanya, Elijah on Mount Carmel, and education for choice
- Kant, Schiller, “Eglei Tal,” and dual motivation
- Maimonides: religious value, acceptance of divinity, and rational and non-rational commandments
- Intentions versus outcomes, and the definition of moral evaluation
- Kant’s categorical imperative and the distinction from consequentialism
Summary
General Overview
The speaker presents a family of arguments that he calls “theological” in their structure, because they move from the conclusion to the assumptions that explain it, and he applies the same structure he used in the proof from epistemology to a proof from morality. He argues that if a person assumes moral norms are valid, that person is implicitly committed to assuming the existence of God, even if unaware of it. He stresses that this move is not a proof that God exists, but a diagnosis of the inner assumptions of someone who already accepts the conclusion. As he develops the discussion, he clarifies that he is not claiming that without God there can be no moral behavior, or that God serves as a “guarantor” through reward and punishment, but rather that without God moral norms have no philosophical validity. He then defines what a moral act is in terms of another person’s good, absence of self-interest, and free decision, and connects this to discussions in Kant, Schiller, Eglei Tal, Maimonides, and conceptions of choice and education. Finally, he presents Kant’s categorical imperative as a hypothetical criterion that is not consequentialist, and illustrates this through obeying Home Front Command instructions and desecrating the Sabbath.
The structure of “theological proofs” and the proof from epistemology
The speaker defines “theology” as an argument structure in which one starts from the conclusion and infers from it the assumptions required for it, as opposed to the caricature of philosophy as starting from assumptions and moving to conclusions. He describes the proof from epistemology as beginning with trust in the reliability of our cognitive tools, and from the attempt to justify that trust one arrives at the claim that only God can justify their reliability. Therefore, someone who holds that the tools are reliable is implicitly a believer. He emphasizes that the argument does not prove that God exists or that the tools are indeed reliable, but rather serves as “self-diagnostics” for exposing inner assumptions, while allowing for the possibility that the person is mistaken and all the conclusions in question are false.
The proof from morality and delimiting the claims that are rejected
The speaker transfers the same structure to the realm of morality and states that if morality is valid, then God must exist, because without God morality has no validity. The “theological” formulation begins from the assumption that morality is valid and infers implicit belief. He mentions a television debate with Professor David Enoch from the Hebrew University, where both of them are moral realists and think morality is a set of objective facts, and the disagreement is whether this requires assuming God. He refers listeners to columns 456–457 on his website for a more systematic presentation. He explicitly rejects two claims: that without God moral behavior is impossible, and that belief in God is needed as an enforcement mechanism through fear of punishment. He adds that in his opinion there is no clear difference between believers and non-believers in their moral behavior, and even remarks that nowadays believers “excel in immoral behavior.”
The validity of moral norms without God, consistency, and the logical anecdote
The speaker formulates his positive claim as a theoretical philosophical claim according to which, without God, there is no way to grant validity to moral norms, even if in practice non-believers behave morally. He offers two explanations for the moral behavior of atheists: acting because it feels “nice” and out of a good inclination without commitment to validity, or inconsistency between atheism and a conception of valid morality. He brings an anecdote about an article by Yael Cohen in the journal Iyyun of the Hugo Bergmann Institute, about a way “to get the truth out of any liar.” He presents riddles about guards, one a liar and one a truth-teller, and about a single consistent guard, and expands this to the case of an inconsistent person. He asks why the police cannot use such a tool, since people can simply answer “whatever they feel like,” even at the price of logical inconsistency. He ties this back to the claim that the discussion concerns what a person ought to think philosophically, not necessarily how people actually behave.
Defining a “moral act”: neutrality, interest, and decision
The speaker begins to characterize morality through examples in which investing in the stock market is a neutral act that is neither moral nor anti-moral. He states that helping the needy in order to gain money or publicity does not count as a moral act, and marks the central feature as a good action that helps another person and is not done out of personal interest but “for that person.” He adds a further condition of free decision, and says that “programmed” acts, hypnotized acts, or deterministic products that are not chosen do not count as moral acts even if they are highly altruistic. He mentions “Amnon Yitzhak and the sheep” to argue that naturally “good” behavior is not righteousness but nature, and develops the idea that moral evaluation depends on the person being “the coachman” who decides, and not “the horses” of the inclinations.
Good inclination and evil inclination, the Tanya, Elijah on Mount Carmel, and education for choice
The speaker describes a Shavuot night lecture on chapter 9 of the Tanya, where the struggle is not between the good inclination and the evil inclination but between the “divine soul” and the “animal soul,” with the inclinations belonging to the animal soul and the value lying in handing the decision over to “the coachman.” He interprets Elijah’s words on Mount Carmel, “If the Lord is God, follow Him; and if Baal, follow him,” as a demand for consistent decision rather than a rhetorical trick, and defines a state of following inclinations as a state of being “sheep.” From this he develops an educational model that prefers encounter with possibilities, challenges, and questions so as to enable choice, even at the risk of failure, and distinguishes between the failure of “not choosing” and the failure of “choosing evil,” with the former being worse in his view. He argues that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave free choice because He wants human beings who choose the good and not programmed machines, and he presents the example of hypnosis that would ensure people do not sin as an unworthy model because it replaces a life of choice with a “sterile” life.
Kant, Schiller, “Eglei Tal,” and dual motivation
The speaker presents Kant as someone who defines a moral act as moral only if it is done out of the moral motive itself, and he cites Schiller’s mockery in a poem about helping a friend out of natural inclination as opposed to duty. He tells an anecdote from a lecture during the Ten Days of Repentance in Sde Boker, where the audience saw asking forgiveness without emotion as hypocrisy, while he argued that this is pure asking forgiveness because it is not meant to soothe pangs of conscience but is done because “that is what ought to be done.” He quotes Eglei Tal, which calls it a mistake to claim that enjoyment in Torah study detracts from studying “for its own sake.” He distinguishes between learning solely for pleasure and learning for the sake of the commandment with pleasure accompanying it, and stresses that “the pleasure too is a commandment.” He expands this and argues that even if in practice a person enjoys it and therefore in some sense “also does it because of the enjoyment,” the criterion is whether he would do it even without the enjoyment, and he formulates this as a legitimate double intention. He compares this to discussions of “for its own sake and not for its own sake,” to slaughtering “for the sake of Passover and for the sake of a peace-offering,” and to discussions by later authorities about acting under the threat of a gun while there is also inner willingness.
Maimonides: religious value, acceptance of divinity, and rational and non-rational commandments
The speaker cites Maimonides in Laws of Kings, chapter 8, according to which a non-Jew who observes the seven commandments “out of rational conviction” is “one of their wise men” and not “one of the pious of the nations of the world,” and interprets this as a distinction between moral-human value and religious value, which depends on commitment to command. He cites Maimonides in Laws of Idolatry, chapter 3, on someone who worships idols out of love or fear and is exempt, the gloss of the Raavad who interprets this as love of a person and fear of a person, and Maimonides’ choice to interpret it as love and fear of the idol while requiring that one “accepted it as a god” as the basis of liability. He explains that “god” here means an authority that obligates obedience by virtue of being authority, similar to judges who are called “elohim,” and he emphasizes that the motivation of religious service is binding acceptance and not only love and fear. He presents Maimonides in chapter 6 of the Eight Chapters, who distinguishes between non-rational commandments such as pork and shaatnez, where it is preferable to “subdue one’s inclination,” and rational-moral commandments, where the person who naturally identifies with them is preferable. He reconciles this with the requirement of command through a model of double intention in which the person both identifies and also acts because it is commanded.
Intentions versus outcomes, and the definition of moral evaluation
The speaker argues that when evaluating human beings, what determines matters is intentions, not the weight of the act in itself, to the point that a person with a good intention who erred and caused a bad result will be evaluated similarly to a person who did a good act out of that same intention. He emphasizes that a moral act requires the “so that” of conscious decision, absence of self-interest, and motivation to benefit, and parallels this to the halakhic plane, where religious value depends on acting “for the sake of” the command.
Kant’s categorical imperative and the distinction from consequentialism
The speaker presents Kant’s categorical imperative as obedience performed “by virtue of its being a command” and not for self-interested reasons, and formulates its content: act only according to a rule that you can will to become a universal law. He argues that the criterion is meant to be personal and does not depend on what other societies do, and stresses that at this stage he is still not dealing with the objectivity of morality. He points to the difficulty of applying the criterion in complex situations, where one can narrow or broaden the rule so as to justify almost anything. He illustrates the distinction between a categorical imperative and consequentialism through Home Front Command instructions: even though the personal risk is very small, so that personal calculation does not justify fleeing, the wish that this not become a “universal law” obligates obedience as a hypothetical test rather than a consequential forecast. He brings a question from his website about a person locked out of a building on the Sabbath who asks whether it is permissible to activate an electrical mechanism to enter a protected space, and answers that it is not, because there is no real danger to life here, and “the categorical imperative does not override the Sabbath.” He closes by saying that the distinction between the categorical imperative and consequentialism is a central point for what follows.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I now want to begin a move similar to the one I made in the last few lectures. I spoke about the proof from epistemology, and I’m mentioning it again because I need it as background for the next proof, which is the proof from morality, because their structure is the same structure. Both are proofs that I called theological and not philosophical. Of course, theology here doesn’t mean that we’re dealing with the field of theology; it’s not a question of content, it’s a question of structure. Meaning, I mentioned that joke about how the philosopher takes premises and derives conclusions from them, while the theologian takes conclusions and derives premises from them. Meaning, you look for the premises that will lead you to the conclusion you want to reach, namely that God exists. Okay? So in that sense, this whole family of proofs I’m talking about now are theological proofs. They are proofs that move from the conclusion to the premises, and I explained why I think there’s no problem with that at all. It’s not a criticism; it’s a joke that sounds nice, but there’s no criticism in it. A lot of philosophical arguments actually have the structure of theological logic and not philosophical logic. So how was it built in the proof from epistemology? Basically the claim was that I believe my epistemology is reliable. That’s the starting point. Because in the philosophical outlook we ask: is our epistemology reliable? A philosopher asks whether I can trust my eyes, my thinking, my generalizations, it doesn’t matter, all the cognitive tools we have. And then he looks for whether he can trust them, can’t trust them, arguments this way, arguments that way. You can be a skeptic, you can be a non-skeptic, all sorts of things like that. That’s the philosophical move. The theological move goes the other way around. I trust my tools. Period. Now I ask myself, okay, looking backward, what could justify that trust? And I say: only God. I won’t go into the details, I just want to go back over the structure. Only God. What does “only God” mean? Okay, so don’t accept God and don’t trust your tools. No—the assumption is that my tools are reliable. And therefore it’s clear that implicitly I also believe in God. Now maybe I’m wrong, and maybe there is no God, and therefore my tools really aren’t reliable. This proof proves neither that God exists nor that my tools are reliable. The proof says: if you think they are reliable, then implicitly you are in fact a believer. That’s the claim. I’ve revealed to you who you are. I didn’t say you’re right. Maybe you’re wrong. But first of all, know that this is who you are. In other words, I’m giving you an aid to check, to do self-diagnostics, to examine yourself and see what your inner positions are, because a person is not always aware of his inner assumptions. And therefore through various indicators I can help a person discover what his inner assumptions are. And in that sense, this really is what I called a theological proof, because it goes from the conclusion—that my epistemic tools are reliable—to the assumption that God exists. Usually I say: God exists, He created my tools, therefore the tools are reliable. Right? That’s the usual direction. I say no, I go the other way. First of all the tools are reliable, because that’s what I think. Then I ask myself, wait, but if there is no God, then they can’t be reliable. So apparently I’m implicitly assuming that God exists. And I go backward from the conclusion to the premises that lie somewhere in the depths of my thinking. All right? So in that sense this is a theological proof and not a philosophical proof, and we talked about how this is basically a two-headed attack, that you can go with the theological formulation or the philosophical formulation, but somehow you attack from both sides. So that’s all, I won’t go back to it again. What I want to do now is make exactly the same move, but this time it isn’t built on my trust in my cognitive, intellectual tools, in epistemology, but in morality. The claim is: morality is valid. If morality is valid, then God must exist, because without God morality has no validity. Right now I’m putting it very schematically; I’ll spell it out. I just want to show you the analogy so the framework of the discussion will be clear. You see, again, you can say it in the philosophical formulation: God exists, He commanded morality, so apparently morality exists, right? That’s the usual formulation from premises to conclusion. I say no, I go in a theological formulation and say: if I assume that valid morality exists, then necessarily I’m actually an implicit believer. It may be that there is no God and morality really isn’t valid, and I’m mistaken all the way down—the proof doesn’t do that. What it does do is make the connection. It says: if you think there is valid morality, then you’re a believer. It may be latent, you may not be aware of it, but you’re a believer. You can say, okay, I understand the connection, so I retract it—I don’t believe, and valid morality doesn’t exist either.
[Speaker B] What does morality necessarily mean?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? No, no, don’t drag me in there. We’ll get there, we’ll get there, we’ll get there. I just now jumped to the end, only to show that the structure of the argument here is similar to the structure of the argument from epistemology, and that’s why I’m doing it as a continuation. Okay? I’m now going to spell it out in much more detail, but first of all I want you to see the course of the discussion, that it’s really the same thing. Now, whoever wants can watch it: I once had a television debate with Professor David Enoch from the Hebrew University, exactly on this point. Meaning, he deals with the philosophy of ethics and morality and law and so on, and together with me he is a moral realist. Meaning, he thinks morality is a collection of objective facts, apropos your earlier remark. And precisely because of that it made sense to have the discussion, because otherwise there would be nothing to discuss, as we’ll see later. And then the claim, the question we dealt with was: okay, if we agree on that, does that mean one has to assume in the background that God exists? He argued no and I argued yes. Okay? That was basically the focus of the discussion. A lot of the discussion actually went to the first part, on ethical realism, on which we agreed. Very little actually went to our disagreement over whether this also requires belief in God in the background. I think it could be interesting. I also wrote on my website two fairly long columns following that debate, to present things in a more systematic way, because in a debate you answer questions, you don’t really have the chance to present things in an organized form. So those are columns 456 and 457 on my site. You can see there, basically, the philosophical focus of the discussion. But here I’ll need various preliminaries, some of which don’t appear there, or are only mentioned briefly. So here’s the thing: the claim I want to make—I want to clear some similar claims off the table, and explain why I’m not making those claims. I do not mean to claim that without God moral behavior is impossible. That a non-believer cannot be a person who behaves morally. That is not my claim. Okay? On the contrary, I think that at least I don’t see any clear difference between believers and non-believers on the question of how moral their behavior is. Okay? That’s not the point. Often moralists like to quote: “Because I thought, surely there is no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.” Then they say, you see? If there’s no God, people throw each other away. Meaning, then there’s no morality. I do not mean that claim, and I also don’t believe it. Meaning, not only am I not discussing it, I don’t believe it, I don’t think it’s true. More than that, I also do not mean God as the guarantor of morality. Meaning, that He will ensure moral behavior because I know I’ll be punished if I don’t behave morally. Therefore belief in God is a condition for moral behavior, because otherwise there is no fear of punishment, nothing that will cause a person, or ensure that a person, behaves morally. I’m not making that claim either. It’s similar to the previous claim, and I’m not making it either. First of all because factually it’s not true. It’s not true on either side. It’s not true because in fact people who do not believe in God also behave morally, as I said before. And it’s also not true because people who do believe in God do not behave morally. I think these days not another word needs to be added to that claim in the present moment. It seems to me they excel in immoral behavior, those who believe in God. So those are two claims I’m not making. What do I want to claim? I want to claim that without God there is no validity to moral norms. This is a hypothetical, theoretical, philosophical claim. I’m not claiming anything about what the world looks like, whether people behave well or badly. That’s not the point—it’s not that it’s uninteresting, maybe it is interesting, but that’s not what I’m claiming. Nor do I think it’s true that God will bring about a world that behaves more morally, okay? What I am claiming is that without God there is no way to grant validity to moral norms. Philosophically it doesn’t work—there isn’t one. You cannot hold that a moral norm has validity if in the background there is no God, no belief in God. That’s my claim. Ah, so how do I explain the fact that people still behave morally if they don’t believe in God? One of two things. Either they behave that way because it feels nice to them to behave that way. Not because moral norms have validity, but because it feels pleasant or nice or whatever to behave morally. Human beings have a good inclination, and human beings like to behave morally. Usually our good inclination is stronger than our evil inclination. Contrary to the stereotypes, it has terrible public relations, the good inclination. But the good inclination is, all in all, a strong inclination. I mentioned the songs my grandchildren sing in kindergarten—the good inclination is, all in all, a strong inclination. It feels very good for us to behave well. Most of the time what leads us is the good inclination and not the evil inclination, okay? So that’s one explanation. People say: true, moral laws have no validity, but you don’t need validity. I behave this way because that’s what is nice for me, that’s how I feel, that’s what I like. I don’t need anyone to wave a whip or tell me there are valid principles that I have to obey. I don’t need to be forced to obey them, I want to do it. Why do I need a whip in order to behave that way? That’s one possibility. A second possibility is to say that such a person—true, he behaves morally, but he is inconsistent. He is inconsistent. On the philosophical level, if you do not believe in God, if you are an atheist, that does not fit with the view that there is valid morality. Ah, you hold both views—you don’t believe in God, and you also think there are valid moral norms? Then you are inconsistent. There are inconsistent people in the world. It happens, that’s not a refutation of anything, right? There can be people who make a mistake in arithmetic and tell you that three plus five equals minus seventeen, okay? Does that refute the claim that three plus five equals eight? No, it only means they don’t know mathematics. Right? Therefore the fact that I find people who do not believe and yet behave morally does not refute the claim that without belief in God there is no validity to moral norms. It refutes the claim that a moral person who does not believe in God can be consistent. No, he cannot be consistent. Fine—but being consistent is a philosophical claim, it doesn’t say anything about what he will do in life. In life he can behave inconsistently, and, thankfully by the way, he can behave inconsistently and still behave morally even though it’s inconsistent. That reminds me—I once saw an article by a woman named Yael Cohen from the philosophy department at the Hebrew University, many years ago already, an article in Iyyun, there’s a philosophy journal that comes out at the Hebrew University, at the Hugo Bergmann Institute for Philosophy, and she wrote an article there showing that there is a way to get the truth out of any liar. Let me open a parenthesis—it’s just an anecdote that came to mind, there is a logical tool that can get the truth out of any liar. What does that mean? Think of the question you start with—you know the famous riddle: there are two paths, one leads to heaven and one to hell. On each path there is a guard. One of the guards is a liar, one is a truth-teller. You have one question for one of them; you don’t know who tells the truth and who lies. With one question you have to get the answer of how to reach heaven. What’s the answer? Familiar. You ask one of them what the other would say if I asked him which is the road to heaven, right? And whatever he answers, I do the opposite. So it doesn’t matter whether I asked the liar or the truth-teller, I’ll always get to heaven. Right? Do you understand why? Because if I asked the liar—yes—then I ask him what the other one, who tells the truth, would answer if I asked him the way to heaven. What will the liar tell me? Let’s say the way to heaven is left, okay? So the truth-teller would answer you: turn left. But the liar lies when I ask him what the truth-teller would answer, so he’ll tell you: he would tell you to turn right. Right? That’s if I asked the liar. What happens if I asked the truth-teller? Then the liar would have answered me: turn right, right? The truth-teller tells the truth, so he will tell me the truth about what
[Speaker B] the liar would answer, so he says—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the liar would answer you: turn right. Therefore I always need to do the opposite of his answer, whether I asked the liar or the truth-teller. What happens if there is one guard? One guard, who is either a pathological liar or a pathological truth-teller, okay? You have one question, there are two roads—how do you get the truth out of him? Are you a truth-teller or not? Yes. You don’t know whether he is a pathological liar or a pathological truth-teller. He’s one of the two, but he is consistent. Meaning, either he always lies or he always tells the truth. Okay? How do you get the answer out of him? Right—what would you answer me if I asked you which is the road to heaven? There, that’s a double question. Because he has to think what he would answer, and then answer me about what he would answer. A double negation or a double affirmation. This time you have to do what he says, not the opposite of what he says. Right? Either double negation or double affirmation. The more interesting question—and this is what I dealt with in the article—is: what happens if you have someone who is inconsistent? Sometimes he lies, sometimes he tells the truth, you know nothing at all. It turns out that you can get the truth out of him too. There’s a logical table, never mind, I won’t do it here. There’s an interesting logical table where you can calculate and show that no matter whether he is a liar or a truth-teller, what he answers is always—say, if you ask him the question in the right way, he always has to lie. Whether he is a liar or whether he is a truth-teller, he always has to lie, so ask him that question and do the opposite. The interesting question I asked afterward—I think I also wrote about it on my website. I think. If not, I really should. I think I wrote it. I asked: so then why doesn’t the police use this? They interrogate someone suspected of theft, murder, whatever. Let them ask him that question and you can get the truth out of anyone. You don’t know whether he’s a liar or a truth-teller. Excellent, it’s a logical polygraph. Right? By logical means you have a perfect polygraph. You can get the truth out of anyone. Why don’t they use it? Because suppose that in the answer, suppose the logical calculation comes out that whether he is a liar or a truth-teller, he always—if the road to heaven is left—he always has to answer right. I constructed the question so that he always has to answer right. Right? Then if he tells me turn right, I know I have to go left. That’s why they call him January, because that was in February, as HaGashash said. Okay, so the point is that now when I ask the defendant or the suspect, right? And in the logical calculation he has to tell me right—that means if he stole, he’ll tell me right. What prevents him from saying left? The logical calculation is very nice, so what? He answers left. What, his mouth won’t be able to produce the word left? The fact that according to the logical calculation he has to answer right—logical calculation is wonderful, but he can always say left. He wants to be logically inconsistent? So what? Where is the law that says people are always consistent? That’s exactly what I was saying before. What?
[Speaker C] He’ll answer whatever he feels like.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly! Meaning, but in the logical calculation it comes out that whether he is a liar or a truth-teller, if the correct answer is this, then he will always answer that. I can prove it. Wonderful that I can prove it, but he can also always choose to say the other thing. The fact that it comes out logically inconsistent and gets us into tangles—okay, that’s his goal, to get his investigators into tangles. Okay, so it’s not—that’s exactly the same thing here. Meaning, I’m not claiming—what I’m claiming is how a person ought to behave. I’m not claiming how a person behaves. Meaning, I claim that a person who does not believe in God cannot behave morally unless he feels like it—but to behave morally in the sense of being committed to valid laws, okay? That can’t be. Fine, but he can still do it. Philosophically it can’t be, so he gets tangled up, but I can still do it. Why? Because I’m inconsistent. So what?
[Speaker B] Repeat that about the individual person.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t explain it, so there’s nothing to repeat.
[Speaker B] No, now that you said the logic of getting the truth out of a person.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I didn’t give the logic. For that question, I’d need half an hour for that, and I’d also need some logical formalization. It was written in a philosophy journal, not in a criminology journal.
[Speaker C] With a person it doesn’t work, with a machine it does.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] With a machine, seemingly, you could get it out, although a machine too can get into, you know, the halting problem. Yes, a machine can get into a loop, meaning it also doesn’t—yes. The question is what happens when you ask AI this question. Interesting question. It’s worth asking ChatGPT this question. What would you tell me if I asked you whether you are artificial intelligence? Yes, and basically… okay, well, that’s an interesting experiment too. I may actually do it. An interesting experiment: to ask it the question she formulated and see what it answers.
[Speaker B] You can’t dismiss AI—I saw two phones talking to each other, it was incredible.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, look, the LLMs of today, the LLMs of today pass the Turing test in no time; with their eyes closed they pass it. That’s obvious. Which teaches us, by the way, a very interesting lesson—I also wrote on my website a whole series of columns about the meaning of LLMs. Turing formulated his test so that we could decide when a machine already deserves to be treated like a human being. Meaning, if you do—you know his test? You have two terminals. You stand here in front of two terminals, and you ask a question and get answers. One terminal is connected to a human being on the other side, you don’t see him, you just see the terminal. Here a human being, and the other side is connected to a computer, software, okay? You ask them questions, talk with them. If you can’t tell who is the human and who is the machine, then the machine is already a human being. That’s the Turing test. Okay, a kind of phenomenological test to see when the machine can pass tests as though it is already like a human being. We are already there today. Okay? We’re there. It seems to me that almost no one imagines—apart from a few crazies like Ray Kurzweil and others—almost no one imagines that an LLM is a human being. Turing thought that if we got there, that software would already be a human being. Why? Because he didn’t experience it. When you formulate these kinds of hypothetical tests about a state of affairs you can’t even imagine happening—you understand that in Turing’s day he couldn’t even imagine a situation in which software could have a conversation with you like a human being. And that was science fiction until ten years ago, not just for Turing. Okay? And so you formulate all kinds of tests and you’re sure you’re terribly clever and that this will give you a tool to check—but until you live through it, you don’t really understand whether that test is relevant or not. And in that context I explained all kinds of things. For example, people ask why Abraham our father didn’t refuse the Holy One, blessed be He, when he received the command to bind his son. Why didn’t he refuse? What, didn’t he understand? After all, it’s not logical. It’s not logical and it’s not moral, both of those things. And the Holy One, blessed be He, is supposed to be both logical and moral. And it also contradicts what the Holy One, blessed be He, told him: “For through Isaac shall your seed be called.” Right? It should have been clear to him that this was some sort of deceptive illusion. It wasn’t really that the Holy One, blessed be He, appeared to him and told him to bind his son, right? Kierkegaard also talks about this in Fear and Trembling, and a lot of people ask this quite a bit. Why did Abraham not even entertain the thought? He didn’t even weigh it. There it is, clearly: “Abraham rose early in the morning,” “and saddled his donkey,” ran off and so on, ready to do anything. Don’t you understand that it’s a deceptive demon? After all, it’s obvious—there are logical proofs that this cannot be the Holy One, blessed be He. So how can that be? The answer is that we ask that from our point of view. We have never spoken with the Holy One, blessed be He. I at least haven’t—I don’t know about you, but be careful how you answer because they may come and hospitalize you. Someone who talks with the Holy One, blessed be He, today is usually someone they’d hospitalize. In any case, I’ve never spoken with the Holy One, blessed be He. Yes, and that’s another reason not to speak with Him if He doesn’t answer. That’s my claim, but that’s another discussion. The point I want to make is that I have never spoken with the Holy One, blessed be He. I have never experienced a state of divine revelation. It may be that if I had experienced it, it would be very clear to me that I know when the Holy One, blessed be He, is revealing Himself. I simply know. You ask from the outside, without having experienced it: wait, who told you? Maybe it’s a deceptive demon? It’s like a blind person asking—you’re looking at this lectern and you say there’s a lectern here. The blind person says, who says? Maybe vision is deceiving you. That could happen, after all. Vision could be deceiving you, right? But none of us would seriously entertain such a wonderment from a blind person. Why not? Because we have experienced vision directly. And we know that it’s a reliable thing. The blind person has never experienced it in his life. So he looks at it intellectually, academically. Maybe the system is deceiving you, right? That can happen. There’s a difference between a situation in which you experience the thing, and then you understand what is right and what is not right, and a situation in which you discuss it in an academic, intellectual, hypothetical way. Okay? So in the context of the Turing test too, it’s the same thing. You’re sure that if there were software that answered you like a human being, it would be a human being. Today we see there is such software. And we know that it’s all just the same hardware, just with several billion neurons connected to each other, and we know exactly what they did to those neurons. We know exactly what is there. There are no souls there and no other things. And apparently there is also no consciousness and no psychology and none of the nonsense people are trying to hang on it. There’s nothing. It simply does its calculations. Okay? So when we experience things, it’s completely different from when we think about them in a theoretical, philosophical, abstract way. How I got to all this I don’t know. With the questions, yes, with that question to ask the LLM and see how it gets tangled up with that question.
[Speaker C] Okay, anyway, so it didn’t get tangled up—it answered me, “I am artificial intelligence.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—if you ask him which one it is, that’s not such a trick. I need to ask him the precise logical question where you know what he is supposed to answer, but he alone can answer the opposite and then get stuck in a loop. He goes into a loop. It’s not that he can’t answer the opposite. Right now he can choose the opposite and go into a loop. Meaning, he can answer the correct thing in order not to go into a loop. Okay? So that’s that. Fine, anyway, yes—so that’s why I’m saying: this is the framework of the discussion. I want you to understand—the structure of the argument is the same structure as the argument from epistemology. I’m going from the end back to the premises that lead to that end. Meaning: there, it was trust in my cognitive faculties; here, it’s trust in the validity of moral laws. Okay? And I’m saying: if I have such trust, then in the background I implicitly believe in God, even if I’m not aware of it. Okay? And maybe I’m wrong; maybe there is no God and there is no validity to moral laws. Everything is possible. Everything I said there is true here too. I’m just making the same move here. That’s it. Up to this point, that’s the first structure.
Now I want to start from the beginning and build it in a more orderly way. So let’s first characterize what morality is. Okay? Let’s say Reuven wants—I don’t know—to make money. Okay? So he decides to invest in the stock market, and he heard there’s some company that has a chance of making a profit, doesn’t know exactly what, and he decides to buy that company’s shares in order to make money. Is that a moral act? Hm? I didn’t ask whether there’s a problem; I asked whether it’s a moral act. “There’s no problem” doesn’t mean it’s a moral act—it means it’s a neutral act. Right? It’s neither a moral act nor an anti-moral act; it has nothing to do with the realm of morality. You’re acting in order to make money—perfectly fine, legitimate, do your best, try to make money. Everything is fine, permitted. As long as you’re not stealing, not lying, not doing anything like that, everything is fine. This is a person’s area of occupation; everything is fine, right? It’s completely neutral.
What happens if that same Reuven decides to invest all his money in helping the needy? Okay? But he does it because someone else promised him that if he does that, he’ll give him a sum three times larger than what he has. Is that a moral act? Also not, right? I think we’d agree it isn’t. Here, that’s his job. He works at it. Meaning, he works in helping the needy, everything’s fine, he gets paid, helps the needy, everything’s fine, right? Like that famous recording of Bonim Schreiber—you know it? Where he explained that we should feel gratitude to soldiers the way we feel gratitude to garbage collectors, like to everyone… immortal gratitude. Which shows you that a Torah scholar who lacks understanding—a carcass is better than he is. In any event, the claim is: you work in helping the needy, and you even get a very nice salary for it. There’s no reason to value you more than someone who invests in the stock market. He invests in the stock market and you invest in helping the needy, right? Clearly the result benefits people, right? But in the judgment I pass on the person, I don’t see this as a moral act. Not an altruistic act, not a moral act.
Another point: what if he does it so his name will be displayed publicly? He helps the needy, he’s a billionaire, helps the needy, and he wants publicity—look what a righteous man, helping the needy; his name will also appear there on the wall in the place he donated to, all kinds of things. What about that? Here it’s a bit subtler. On the face of it, same thing—it’s also profit. Like the previous profit, this is also profit. Here maybe you could say: look, he’s doing a good deed, maybe not for its own sake, or… But at root, if he’s doing it only for that, then it’s the same as the previous case, right? Meaning, if he also wants to help the needy, and it doesn’t hurt that his name is on the wall too—that’s already mixed. Okay?
So now we’re starting to see the characteristic of a moral act. The characteristic of a moral act is supposed to be a good act, okay? One that helps another person, assists another person, prevents harm to another person, or something like that—and that it is done not out of my own interest, right? Not for me, but for him. Right? I’m doing it for him. And there’s another condition. And the additional condition is that it be done out of choice. Right? An act not done out of choice is also not a moral act. Agreed? Meaning, if I’m programmed to do it, if I’m hypnotized to do it, or if I just believe in a deterministic world where I have no choice—I simply do it because that’s how I am. Okay? Then that too is not a moral act. Even if I can sacrifice my life for another person and chase after the needy to the ends of the earth, invest all my money and all my wealth in them without pause—really pure altruism—but it’s all simply programmed into me. I didn’t decide on this way of life; I just do it because that’s how I am. Okay? That too is not a moral act, right?
This is Amnon Yitzhak’s favorite example. Did I tell this? Amnon Yitzhak and the sheep. Yes, did I tell it? He says that the city rabbi slaughtered some sheep at four in the morning, and yes, “a righteous person has passed away,” and everyone comes out. So in the end, when they see this, he says to them: what do you want? When I rebuke you, you say, “What do you want, honorable rabbi? We’re righteous, everything’s fine, we didn’t hurt anyone, we didn’t murder anyone, we didn’t steal from anyone, everything’s fine.” So the rabbi says to them, “Yes, the sheep is the same—it didn’t murder, didn’t hurt anyone, didn’t steal from anyone, everything’s fine.” So why really isn’t the sheep righteous? Right—because that’s its nature. Okay? It simply did that because that’s its nature. That rabbi’s claim is that those people are also doing it because that’s their nature. You’re not doing it because you’re righteous, but because we have a good inclination; it feels pleasant to do good, unpleasant to do evil. If we don’t have some very, very special reason, we won’t do evil—not because we decided to behave well, but because we have no reason to behave otherwise. Right? So you’re sheep. You’re not righteous people, you’re just sheep. Okay? That is basically the claim.
[Speaker B] But there’s always some factor here that will cause you to do the opposite. The evil inclination exists no matter what.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If the good inclination is stronger, then you go with the good inclination.
[Speaker B] Good.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does “stronger” mean? That it has more influence than the evil inclination. There are two inclinations here in a tug-of-war. If the good inclination is stronger, you go there; the evil inclination pulls there. This is exactly what I gave a lecture about on Shavuot night in one of our synagogues. I spoke there about chapter 9 of the book of Tanya, where he talks about the confrontation between the divine soul and the animal soul. And I said there that he changes the accepted picture—the accepted picture that we learned from kindergarten—that the struggle is a struggle between the good inclination and the evil inclination. Because in that simplistic description, what comes out is that there’s some struggle between two forces within me, and whichever is stronger will manage to pull me. What does that have to do with me? There are two inclinations; if the good inclination is stronger I’ll do good, if the evil inclination is stronger I’ll do evil. How is that connected to me? If those are my inclinations, or other inclinations—it’s a given, that’s what’s inside me. Therefore it can’t be right. In the end, the responsibility is on you.
So clearly the struggle—and that’s what the author of the Tanya argues there—the struggle is not between the good inclination and the evil inclination, but between the divine soul and the animal soul. Not between right and left, but between above and below. And what is “below”? “Below” is both inclinations—both the good inclination and the evil inclination—both are the animal soul. And the divine soul is the decision, handing over the decision to the coachman and not to the horses. The horses can pull me here, they can pull me there. The coachman has to decide where we’re going. Okay? The inclinations are inside me. We have a good inclination, we have an evil inclination, everything’s fine. But what determines whether I’m righteous or wicked is not whether my good inclination is stronger than my evil inclination or vice versa. Because if I go after my inclinations, then I’m a person of the animal soul—even if I go after the good inclination. Even then I’m a person of the animal soul. Because the inclinations are taking me, the horses are taking me; I am not the coachman. The coachman is not controlling the matter; the horses are controlling the matter. Okay?
What will determine whether I’m worthy of moral appreciation is whether I decide what to do with my inclinations. Of course, it’s preferable to decide in the positive direction. But first of all, one has to be someone who decides. After you decide, you also need to decide in the positive direction. Yes, this is Elijah on Mount Carmel saying to the people: “How long will you keep hopping between two branches? If the Lord is God, go after Him; and if Baal, go after him.” And usually people see this as some kind of rhetorical provocation. He doesn’t really mean they should go after Baal; he’s trying to push them into a corner. Decide, yes exactly, decide. I read it literally. Elijah meant to tell them: go after Baal. If you believe in him, then go for it. Go for it! But decide on something and go after what you decide. One day you go after Baal, one day after the Holy One, blessed be He, because you aren’t deciding at all. The inclinations are taking you. One day your good inclination is stronger, one day your evil inclination is stronger. And you’re nobodies. You’re sheep. Sheep who also have an evil inclination. An ordinary sheep has only a good inclination. You’re sheep who also have an evil inclination—and you’re still sheep. Nothing. What is required of you is to decide. Now if you decide in favor of Baal, that’s a shame—but at least you decided. That’s better than not deciding at all. Best of all, of course, is to decide and decide correctly. Fine, that is certainly the ideal model. But first of all, one has to be someone who decides.
And there are lots of implications to these things. Lots of implications. For example, when we talk about an educational model—how do you build an educational path for students, or for society in general? Do you shut people in as much as possible so they won’t encounter problems, difficulties, questions, things like that—and try to program them to do what you think is the right thing to do? Then, of course—not of course, but some people think—the chance of success goes up; meaning, people will probably do what I want them to do. As opposed to leaving them exposed, confronting them with other options, with questions, with difficulties, with inclinations, with all kinds of things—and trying to help them cope, overcome. Now the chance of failing might, let’s say, be greater. I’m not at all sure of that, by the way, but let’s say the chance of failing is greater. Does that automatically mean it’s wrong to choose that educational path? My answer is no. It’s better to choose that path, even though the chance of failure is greater.
[Speaker C] If you don’t want to fail in sexual prohibitions, and you go every day to a nudist beach, then why would you put yourself in that kind of situation?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so there are limits. I’m saying: I don’t put myself through tests for no reason, but I do open things of value even though they carry risk. Just going to places that have no value—what for?
[Speaker C] What’s the reason—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To keep you in such an environment if that protection doesn’t involve the price of not encountering things of value. But if you shut people off even from things of value just because maybe they’ll get here or get there—that kind of closure is problematic.
Now what does that really mean? It basically means that although the chance of failure is supposedly greater, that isn’t right. Because “failure” doesn’t mean that the boy won’t do what I want him to do. That is not the definition of failure. The definition of failure is that he won’t choose to do what is right. And if that is success, then what is failure? One of two things: either he doesn’t choose, or he chooses to do what is wrong. Okay? Two kinds of failure. I prefer the second failure to the first.
[Speaker B] In the first one you’re just guiding him as to what the right path is. You’re just guiding him, you’re not—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is whether your goal is a goal of a collection of actions, or whether your goal is that he choose those actions. Because it matters very much, since if you want him to choose, you also need to expose him to difficulties, you need to expose him to problems, to challenges. Exactly—that he won’t be a sheep. And despite the risk that if he isn’t a sheep, then he can also choose evil. Right? That’s the risk. What can you do? And still I think that’s more correct.
The Holy One, blessed be He, Himself did not create us as programmed machines, but gave us free choice. Why? After all, one who gives us free choice also gives us the option to sin. What’s the problem? Why not program us to do exactly what He wants us to do? Because He Himself doesn’t want that. Because what He Himself expects from us is not a collection of actions, but exactly—choosing the right actions. That’s what He wants. That’s part of the matter. If we don’t choose—so let’s say someone offered to hypnotize you so that you would do only the right thing. At no point in life would you fail in anything: not in a moral transgression, not in a halakhic / of Jewish law transgression, not in anything. One simple hypnosis, give him fifteen minutes, he’ll fix your life. Would you go for it or not? I wouldn’t go for it. Not only because of the fear people have of someone messing with their brain, but no—not only because of the fear, but because I don’t think that’s the right model. The Torah was not given to ministering angels. You need to choose the right path, not merely walk the right path. Those are two different things.
[Speaker C] But I already chose.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, “I chose”?
[Speaker C] I chose once—I chose to be hypnotized.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, I chose that he should hypnotize me—what? You made that choice—
[Speaker C] Once, doesn’t matter.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You did or didn’t, but he did it—he programmed you.
[Speaker C] I gave the ball.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so you chose to be hypnotized by him. That’s what you mean by “I chose.” Fine. Okay. If you think that’s enough, then everything is fine. You can also kill yourself afterward, by the way. You can kill yourself afterward. Why not? What’s wrong with that?
[Speaker C] Fine?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s perfectly fine—why not? It’s a means of assistance. The line, the line, the line is always the question of the difference between an aid and changing life itself. Two different things. There’s a situation where you make use of aids, which is perfectly fine, versus a situation where you withdraw from life completely. Meaning, you simply live a different kind of life, one that is more sterile—you’re in a monastery, you’re shut away like that, everything is fine. That’s not an aid; that’s not living in the world. Now where is the line? I don’t know where the line is, but there is such a line. Okay? It’s not black and white.
[Speaker B] It’s not just once. It doesn’t work for me, because He gave you both options. He told you, choose the good. He told you, choose the good; He came and said, choose.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He said it, but He also gave you the option to choose evil.
[Speaker B] Fine, no—He gives you both options, He doesn’t say to you—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He doesn’t say to you, but He gave you the possibility of choosing evil. A possibility? He didn’t remove from you the possibility of choosing evil, right? Of course He recommends the good—why shouldn’t He recommend it? He needs to tell you that it’s good. But why didn’t He remove from you the possibility of doing evil?
[Speaker B] You chose to be human.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Because He wants human beings and not angels. Not sheep. An angel or a sheep is basically the same thing. The difference is only in mass. So the claim is that for an act to be a moral act, we need it to be an act that benefits, okay? We need it to be done not for the sake of an interest, and we need it to be done out of choice and not programmed, or not—okay? Those are the three requirements of a moral act.
Now one more remark. Kant says that an act is defined as a moral act only if it is done out of the moral motive. Meaning, if you do it in order to be moral, that is the criterion that can determine whether a certain act is moral or not. If you do it for other motives, then it’s not a moral act. You have to do it in order to do the good. If that is your motive, then it’s a moral act.
And Schiller, yes, the well-known poet, laughs at him over that. It’s written here somewhere; let me look for it a moment. The pop-up here isn’t working for me. Here—we go. Oh, my ChatGPT, I found the poem. ChatGPT didn’t tell me. “It is better that my friend should like me from natural inclination than love me only out of duty.” That’s the conclusion. But first of all, he’s mocking Kant. And it says: “Gladly I serve my friends, yet alas I do it with inclination”—inclination means I love him; therefore I serve my friend, I help him. “And so it often grieves me that I am not virtuous.” “There is no other advice: you must try to despise them, and then with aversion do what duty commands you.” You need to despise your friend, not love him, and then you can make sure that what you do is only out of the desire to do good and not for any other reason. Okay? That is Schiller’s criticism of Kant.
Now, he understands that Kant basically said exactly what I said before: that an act is a moral act only if it is done out of the desire to be good. That’s it. If you do it because you love your friend, then it’s not a moral act, because you are really coming to feed some emotion inside yourself.
I don’t remember if I mentioned this—I already don’t remember what I mentioned here. Did I tell you the story about Sde Boker, where I spoke about how I have a friend who was the principal of the environmental high school in Sde Boker, and he invited me to speak there during the Ten Days of Repentance about atonement, forgiveness, things like that—but without religious matters, he told me. Meaning, let’s talk about these issues. So I started and said to them: look, suppose I hurt my friend and I don’t feel any pangs of conscience. Okay? Nothing. Happy and cheerful, I go home. But I think to myself: really, that wasn’t right. Some sort of banal thought, yes—it wasn’t right, you’re not allowed to hurt another person, okay? So then I decide to go and appease him, ask him for forgiveness. So I go and ask him for forgiveness.
I asked them: tell me, do you accept that request for forgiveness? Elijah the prophet comes to you and tells you—he isn’t religious, Elijah the prophet, but he comes and says to you: deep down inside, this idiot feels nothing, okay? But he’s asking you for forgiveness and pardon. Do you accept that request for forgiveness or not? So they said—there was total consensus—that it’s hypocritical. It’s not real, it’s artificial, it’s not—you’re not really regretful. Why should we accept his request for forgiveness?
[Speaker B] In this case specifically, yes—in this case it is good, because without additional motives he decided to forgive, to appease.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. I told them exactly the opposite. In my eyes, there is no request for forgiveness purer than this one. Because if I have pangs of conscience and I go to ask you for forgiveness, then that is actually being done in order to feed the stomach pains that I’m feeling. I’m really doing it for me, not for you. But if I feel no stomach pains at all, I’m completely indifferent, my empathy department is cut off over there, okay—not present, doesn’t exist, fine, it’s burned out. So now what? But I know that I was in the wrong, and I go ask you for forgiveness. That is the purest request for forgiveness there can be. I’m doing it truly because I understand that I was wrong and that this is what is proper to do. So there—that’s exactly what Schiller is mocking, right?
So Schiller is really mocking that. What is the answer? The answer is that Kant is right, and Schiller is also right, and the judge’s wife is also right. What do I mean? Obviously, this brings me back to the Avnei Nezer’s introduction—sorry, the Eglei Tal in the introduction. He says: “And as I speak of it, I remember what I heard: a few people err from the path of reason regarding the study of our holy Torah, and said that one who studies and develops novel insights, and rejoices and delights in his learning—this is not Torah study so much for its own sake as when one studies simply, deriving no pleasure from the learning, and doing it only for the sake of the commandment. But one who studies and delights in his learning—his own enjoyment is also mixed into his learning, and so the learning is not for its own sake.”
But the Eglei Tal says: “In truth this is a famous error. On the contrary, this is the essence of the commandment of Torah study: that one be joyful and glad and take delight in one’s learning, and then the words of Torah are absorbed into one’s blood. And since one enjoys words of Torah, one becomes attached to the Torah,” and see the commentary on Sanhedrin, etc. “And in the holy Zohar, both the good inclination and the evil inclination grow only out of joy. The good inclination grows out of the joy of Torah,” and the evil inclination—not important now. “And if you say that because of the joy he has from the learning, it is called not for its own sake, then in any case this mixture of for its own sake and not for its own sake would weaken the power of the commandment and dim its light, so how could the good inclination grow from it? Since the good inclination does grow from it, it is certainly the essence of the commandment.” Okay, these are famous words of the Eglei Tal.
But later there are two less famous sentences. He says like this: “And I admit that one who studies not for the sake of the commandment of learning, but only because he has pleasure in his learning—this is indeed called learning not for its own sake. Like one who eats matzah not for the sake of the commandment but only for the pleasure of eating. And regarding this they said: a person should always engage in Torah and commandments even not for their own sake, because from not for their own sake one comes to for their own sake. But one who studies for the sake of the commandment and delights in his learning—this is learning for its own sake and wholly holy, for the pleasure too is a commandment.”
What’s the catch here? What he basically wants to say is that sometimes a person can have a double motive for his act. Or before the double motive: I study for the commandment, okay? Only for the commandment, for the sake of Heaven. But besides that, I also enjoy it—I enjoy it too. So clearly, that doesn’t detract from the commandment. He argues it even adds to it—the commandment is even more praiseworthy—but certainly it does not diminish the power of the commandment. Why? Because the reason I’m studying is because of the commandment. The fact that I have pleasure doesn’t mean I’m studying because of the pleasure. But really, if I were studying because of the pleasure—not only that I have pleasure, but that this would also be the reason I’m studying—that would indeed be learning not for its own sake. Meaning, there is nothing wrong with having pleasure, but there is something wrong with studying for the sake of the pleasure.
So what happens now? I laugh like Schiller. So what am I now supposed to do? I enjoy learning. Am I supposed to chase away my pleasure and make sure I hate learning Torah, so that then I can ensure that I’m learning Torah for the sake of Heaven, only because of the commandment?
[Speaker C] You said—I’m saying, suppose a person isn’t righteous. He was born with the traits of a righteous person.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then every—
[Speaker C] Whatever he chooses doesn’t mean he can’t choose good. He should just be more righteous—choose to be more righteous.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, I chose. I was the most righteous there is. I have infinite love for Torah. I cannot study more than my love draws me to it. I can’t do more.
[Speaker C] But in the end it should become suffering.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, there is no—I’m built that way, there’s no suffering at all, pure pleasure. Hypothetically, though not actually me. Even in such a situation, what happens in such a situation? Even in such a situation, Schiller says, you’re basically—as if according to Kant, yes—you’re basically supposed to make sure that you suffer every moment of learning, right? That it becomes disgusting to you, and then you can be sure that you learned only for the sake of the commandment, for the sake of Heaven—then you’re the foundation of the world.
Now the point is—and I’m claiming an additional step here—it’s not only the claim of the Eglei Tal, who says that the question is what my motivation is in learning, not whether I have pleasure, but why I am learning. Am I learning because of the pleasure? That is not for its own sake. Am I learning for the sake of the commandment? That is for its own sake, even if I have pure pleasure. The fact that there is pleasure means nothing. It’s not that I’m learning because of the pleasure. Therefore there is no reason at all to get rid of the pleasure, as long as it is clear that I’m learning for the sake of the commandment.
Right? I think I mentioned the a fortiori argument about Jonah at the end of the book of Jonah, where the Holy One, blessed be He, says to him: “Are you so deeply grieved over the kikayon?” He says, “I am deeply grieved, unto death.” “You had pity on the kikayon, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow, and I should not have pity on Nineveh, the great city, with many thousands of people and many animals,” and so on. That is a foolish a fortiori argument. What kind of a fortiori is that? Jonah had pity on the kikayon? A fisherman loves fish—like the old comedy troupe says. Jonah didn’t pity the kikayon; he needed shade. He pitied himself. So then what kind of a fortiori is this?
So I said there are two answers to this—two answers in the matter. When you say that A is not similar to B, maybe you made a mistake in your interpretation of A, maybe you made a mistake in your interpretation of B, right? You say: Jonah over the kikayon is not like the Holy One, blessed be He, over Nineveh. The question is: where is the mistake? Is the mistake in our interpretation of Jonah, or in our interpretation of the Holy One, blessed be He? I claim the mistake is double, in both. Meaning, first of all, we have a criminal mindset. Meaning, when we see that Jonah benefited from the kikayon—he had shade—then it is obvious to us that when he asked the Holy One, blessed be He, when he got angry at the Holy One for what He did there, it was self-interested. Not true. It could be that it was for the sake of the kikayon. Besides, he also enjoyed the kikayon. Does that mean he did it because of the pleasure from the kikayon? Meaning, for himself? Who said so? That’s political commentary. As soon as you find that some politician has an interest, then obviously he isn’t working for the sake of Heaven—he’s doing it for the interest. That is not true. It could be that he’s doing it because he really believes in it, and besides that it also advances his interests. By the way, usually that’s how it is. Meaning, if you do what you believe in, that also advances your interests, because you were elected in order to do that. So all this political commentary is built in a warped way. Okay? So it’s exactly the same thing—we’re political commentators on the prophet Jonah.
But there’s also the opposite side here. I’m just saying—that’s what I needed here. When someone has pleasure, that doesn’t mean he is acting for the pleasure. The fact that you have pleasure—so what? Don’t be political commentators. Meaning, the fact that someone has pleasure does not mean he is learning for the pleasure. Right?
[Speaker C] Just—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To complete the picture, there is also an error regarding the Holy One, blessed be He. The Holy One, blessed be He, wants Nineveh because He needs them—not for Nineveh’s sake. Exactly as Jonah needed the kikayon, so too the Holy One, blessed be He, needs Nineveh, otherwise He would not have created them.
[Speaker B] What does it mean, “for the sake of the commandment”? What does it mean that you learn for the sake of the commandment? Suppose I come and learn so that people will say I’m a genius. That’s not a commandment—not for its own sake.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You do it for the sake of the commandment because there is a commandment to study, to fulfill your obligation. Is that what “for the sake of the commandment” means? Yes. Commandments require intention. Intention means the intention to fulfill the obligation. To do it for the sake of the commandment involved in it, and not for anything else. I don’t wave the lulav in order to bring rain. I wave the lulav because the Torah says to wave the lulav. That’s it. That is what it means that commandments require intention. That is the intention that a commandment needs. If you think it will also bring rain, then you can think about that too. But first of all, you need to do it because there is a commandment to take the lulav.
Now I want to go one step further beyond the Eglei Tal. I want to argue: even if—I mean, obviously it’s hard, hard to make this distinction. Meaning, if I enjoy the learning, then clearly I am also learning for the pleasure. Let’s say if there were no commandment, would I study? Of course I would, because I enjoy it.
[Speaker C] Maybe you’d study something else.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’d study this because this is what I enjoy most. Okay? So I would study this even without the commandment, right? If I enjoy it, why not? There are other things I do that I enjoy even though there is no commandment. Right? Of course I would. Meaning, you can’t say, look, I enjoy it but I’m not doing it because of the pleasure. I’m not buying that line. If you enjoy it, then you’re also doing it because of the pleasure.
[Speaker B] But what pleasure? Pleasure, for example, that they’ll call me a Torah scholar?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—pleasure, enjoyment. You read a topic / passage, you understand it—
[Speaker C] You—
[Speaker B] You enjoy the topic / passage, fine, but you enjoy the topic / passage, while in the background you have that they’ll say you’re—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—why, why are you suspecting me? You too are a political commentator. You too are a political commentator. No—I enjoy the topic / passage, that’s all. Not that they’ll call me anything, nothing. I’m alone.
[Speaker B] So here Schiller says that’s not good. Why not? Because you’re just enjoying the topic / passage, you’re learning because of the pleasure.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. I’m learning because of the commandment, but I have pleasure. But I’m learning—why am I learning? Because of the commandment. Now I ask, yes, but come on—between us—it’s clear that you’re also learning for the pleasure. If you enjoy it, then you’re also learning for the pleasure, right? Psychologically, conceptually it doesn’t have to be that way, but psychologically it’s certainly true. Therefore the requirement is weaker. The question was—the question is: would you study if it weren’t pleasurable? If you would study even if there were no pleasure, that is called learning for its own sake. And once you enjoy it, it is clear that you also study because of the pleasure. There is no problem with that. Schiller’s criticism I do not accept even on that level. Meaning, not only is it not disqualifying to enjoy—it is also not disqualifying to learn for the pleasure, as long as even without the pleasure you would still study, because you also study for the sake of the commandment. So if, together, in parallel, you also study because of the pleasure—that’s perfectly fine; it does not invalidate the commandment. Quite the opposite, perhaps. Meaning, this is called double intention.
There are discussions in Zevachim, in Menachot—yes, “for the sake of Passover, for the sake of peace-offerings,” someone who slaughters a sacrifice for two purposes. Meaning, sometimes you do an action and you have two motivations in parallel for why you’re doing it. And each one alone would have been enough to make you do it. There are examples of this in tractate Ketubot. Later authorities (Acharonim) discuss this: what happens if you do a forbidden act under a gun, under threat of a gun, but you would have done it even without the gun. You were planning to sin anyway. Someone did you a favor and pointed a gun at you, so now you have an excuse for why you did the thing—well, what could I do, I was coerced, they put a gun on me. Is that called an act under coercion or not? It’s discussed by later authorities (Acharonim); there’s that thing about modest women and promiscuous women there at the beginning of Ketubot. But again, it’s the same issue—what happens when you have double motivation. If you have double motivation, does that mean each of the motivations alone counts as your motivation, or not? And I think yes—it means each of the motivations by itself is valid.
In acting for its own sake, in learning for its own sake, what is required is not that you have no other goal. What is required is that your goal be the commandment. If you also have another goal, the main thing is that you also have the motivation of the commandment. If you would do it because of the commandment alone, even if you did not enjoy it, then I don’t care that you enjoy it and that you also do it because of the pleasure. That doesn’t bother me.
[Speaker C] No, but specifically in the negative case now—with the gun. If he eats leavened food because there’s a gun on him, and he would have eaten leavened food anyway—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then again, it’s double motivation. The motivation is to escape the gun and also to eat leavened food—he also wanted to eat the leavened food itself. That too is double motivation. It’s a case of double motivation.
[Speaker C] I still see him as coerced more than—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who says? I don’t know. He would have eaten it even without the gun. It could—
[Speaker C] If without the gun he could have changed his mind—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he doesn’t change his mind. He decided to eat leavened food and he ate it. He doesn’t even know there’s a gun on him. He has no idea—someone is pointing a gun, and he knows—I… if he doesn’t eat this leavened food I’ll shoot him. But he doesn’t know; his back is turned to me. Fine? So what then? In practice he’s coerced, right? He can’t not eat the leavened food. But he doesn’t know about it at all. So his psychological motivation is that he wants to eat leavened food. Now what difference does it make if he also knows? His motivation is still the same motivation. He still would have eaten it anyway.
[Speaker C] If he knows, he lost the power of choice.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, so what? But he had already chosen. He chose to eat leavened food before the gun, without the gun. So why does it matter whether he knows about the gun? Not a simple question. Okay. Fine, but no matter—I’m saying these are questions of double motivation.
Meaning, what happens? I think that for our purposes, both in the moral context and in the religious context—and there is a parallel between these two things—both in the moral context and in the religious context, double motivation is perfectly fine. Meaning, if you do it for the sake of Heaven, for the sake of morality, for the sake of the Holy One, blessed be He, in Jewish law, for the sake of morality in the moral context—then the fact that you also do it because it satisfies your good inclination, your desire to do good, you enjoy doing good—that does not invalidate it. That’s fine, as long as you would have done it even without that pleasant feeling in your stomach. Okay? So double intention is perfectly fine, as long as you also have the correct intention. And this is where Schiller was wrong. You don’t need to overcome the pleasure you have in order for the act to be pure morality. And you don’t even need to overcome the fact that you do it for the pleasure—not even that—as long as you would have done it anyway.
[Speaker B] The less interesting the topic / passage is—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, right, on the contrary—that’s exactly the mistake he’s talking about. No, absolutely not.
[Speaker B] When it’s less interesting, your interest, your pleasure, is less.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what? But it’s not good that the pleasure is less.
[Speaker B] There’s no value in the pleasure being less.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s no value in the pleasure being less. That’s the mistake Schiller is talking about.
[Speaker C] Doesn’t matter—you sit in a sauna and study Torah, so it’ll be hot and you’ll sweat and all that—on the contrary, there’s no—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No issue—very good that you enjoy it. As long as you would study even without the pleasure. With good conditions—
[Speaker C] You’ll study well—very good.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It reminds me that I have some friend who once went looking for Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky during the intersession break, at the house on Rashbam Street there, and his wife told him, “He’s on vacation now.” “Where is he vacationing?” “He’s at his sister’s place in the building next door, there’s air conditioning there.” He moved over with his shtender to the air conditioning for the intersession break. In any case, for our purposes, the claim is that what determines a moral act is the intention to do good. When you do the act in order to be moral. Okay? That’s what actually defines the act as an act. Right, right. In a certain sense it could even be that only that matters. Say if you made a mistake, you are completely moral even though you did an act—an atrocious act—but if you did it with good intentions, then you made a mistake, the consequences are problematic, but in terms of my evaluation of you, it’s exactly the same as a person who did a good act. Since what matters in our moral evaluation of people is their intentions and not their actions. Obviously, someone whose intention is good wants to do good actions, otherwise it’s not a good intention. But suppose he made a mistake and did a bad act unknowingly, he didn’t know, and his intention was good—the evaluation is the same evaluation. That’s my view, at least. The act in itself should carry no weight in moral evaluation, only the intentions. Of course, good intentions are expressed in the fact that you want to do good actions, because obviously that’s what is called a good intention. But there’s a practical difference, for example, if you didn’t know, you were mistaken, confused, I don’t know. By the way, just as this is true on the moral plane, so too on the halakhic / of Jewish law plane. Yes, Maimonides in chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings, at the end of chapter 8, says that a gentile who keeps the seven commandments out of rational decision, because he thinks that this is the proper way to behave, is not among the pious of the nations of the world but among their wise people. There is a version that says “and not even among their wise people,” but the more accurate version is “but among their wise people.” What does that mean? Translated into plain language, at least as I understand it, it means: this is an act that has human moral value, but not religious value. He is among the wise of the nations of the world—a good act—but not among their pious; it has no religious value. Why? Because a person has to do the religious act out of commitment to the religious command. Exactly as Kant spoke about morality, Maimonides speaks about Jewish law. In other words, in every normative value-context, your act has value if you do it for the sake of that value. In morality, for the sake of morality; in Jewish law, for the sake of the command, yes, for the sake of Jewish law. Okay? The motivation is what determines the value of the act, not the act itself. Interestingly, in that same context in Maimonides, you see this in a number of places, this approach. For example, Maimonides in the Laws of Idolatry, chapter 3, halakha 6: there is a dispute between Abaye and Rava in tractate Sanhedrin about what happens if someone worships idolatry out of love or fear. Someone worships idolatry out of love or fear, okay? Rava says exempt and Abaye says liable. Maimonides rules like Rava. In any case, there’s a dispute between Abaye and Rava, and the Jewish law follows Rava. Maimonides rules that someone who worships idolatry out of love or fear is exempt. The Raavad says, “And I say: out of love of a person and fear of a person,” not love and fear of the idol. Why? Because if he worships idolatry out of love and fear of the idol, then that is idolatry in the strictest sense. Why would he be exempt? What other kind of idolatry could there be? In other words, instead of loving and fearing the Holy One, blessed be He, you love and fear the idol—so that’s idolatry in the strictest sense. What could be more idolatrous than that? Therefore it’s obvious that this means idolatry out of love and fear of a person; that’s how Rashi explains it, that’s how the Rivash explains it, and so on. So then what is it? So Tzemach? So when is it actually idolatry? If he’s exempt for this, then that’s the question. Why do all the medieval authorities (Rishonim)… after all, that’s not the plain meaning of the Talmudic text. The plain meaning of the Talmudic text is like Maimonides: someone who worships idolatry out of love or fear—that means love and fear of the idol—is exempt. It’s just that the reasoning… so when would he be liable? This is idolatry. Therefore all the medieval authorities (Rishonim) depart from the plain meaning of the Talmudic text and say it means love and fear of a person. Maimonides says no, it means love and fear of the idol. So what is idolatry in the strictest sense? Yes, this is the Laws of Idolatry. You have to know how to worship idolatry in the strictest sense. Okay, so like this it’s not idolatry in the strictest sense. How is it? No, the opposite—so this is not in the strictest sense. Emotion? So Maimonides says there: unless he accepted it as a god over himself. Acceptance as a god. What does “acceptance as a god” mean? As distinct from love and fear of the idol—again, like toward the Holy One, blessed be He. When I love the Holy One, blessed be He, out of love or fear, is that ideal worship of God? No. Right? Parallel, same thing. So what is it? What is perfect worship of God? Right. Because I accepted Him over me as a god. What is a god? Why are judges called “gods” in the Bible? Because what they command, I have to do. They have authority by virtue of being judges, not because they are right at all. Even if they are not right. If he is the judge, you are obligated to obey. Right? That is called a god. Acceptance as a god means: whatever he says, I have to do because he said it—not because it makes sense, not because it gives me something, not because I love him and not because I fear him, but because he is a god. Period. Now, on top of that, I am also commanded—not only is it fitting, but I am commanded to love and fear the Holy One, blessed be He. Those are two commandments: love of God and fear of God. But the motivation for the service is not the love and fear. The motivation for the service is the acceptance as a god. The same thing Maimonides wrote at the end of chapter 8 in the Laws of Kings, where he says that worship or fulfillment of a commandment is when you do it because of the command. That’s on the one hand. On the other hand, in chapter 6 of the Eight Chapters, Maimonides writes there—he begins with the question that the philosophers say it is preferable to be a person who identifies with the good act than a person who struggles with his inclination and overcomes it and nevertheless does the good act. Or call it the one who conquers his inclination versus the whole person or the upright person—I don’t remember Maimonides’ exact terminology anymore, how it is translated from Arabic. So he says: the philosophers say the whole person is preferable to the one who conquers his inclination. But our rabbis say no: “Do not say, ‘I do not want to eat pork,’ but rather, ‘I do want to, and what can I do—my Father in Heaven has decreed it upon me.’” Better is the one who conquers his inclination. But for Maimonides this is a difficulty. He does not say, “Ah, our sages said this, so the philosophers are talking nonsense.” No. He says: the philosophers say this and the sages say that, so there is a contradiction. What do we do with it? A problem. Maimonides says: pay attention to the examples brought in that baraita of “Do not say, ‘I do not want to.’” The examples are eating pork and wearing shaatnez. These are all revealed commandments—commandments that have no obvious rationale—not moral commandments. Right? In those commandments it is better to be one who conquers than one who is naturally upright. In those commandments it is better if a person has an inclination to transgress them and overcomes it and does not transgress, than someone for whom this comes naturally and comfortably. By contrast, in the moral commandments, the rational ones, there it is preferable in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He, for someone to identify with that commandment even in his natural tendency, and not someone who has an evil inclination but manages to overcome it and does everything right, while his inclination still pulls in other directions. No, there it is better to be upright and not merely one who conquers. Okay? Now, one has to understand that this contradicts what we saw earlier in Maimonides. Because earlier Maimonides said you have to do things out of the command, right? And not out of identification. Now you have to understand that when Maimonides speaks in the Laws of Kings, he is talking about the seven Noahide commandments. The seven Noahide commandments belong to the category of rational commandments, not the revealed ones. A limb from a living animal—you could discuss that—but Maimonides himself says, “and they are things toward which reason inclines.” So Maimonides understands that the seven Noahide commandments are the moral commandments, the rational commandments. Okay? And there Maimonides says that someone who does them because of rational decision is among the wise of the nations of the world but not among their pious. It has no religious value; it is not a commandment. Everything is fine. How does that fit with what he says in chapter 6? And it fits exactly as we saw before. In other words, obviously it is better that you identify with it. That doesn’t mean you should do it because you identify with it. When you ask: why am I giving charity to a poor person? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it. I also pity him, and I also have a natural tendency to give to him, and I would have given to him even without the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. And still that is fine. Why is that fine? Because I would also have given to him if I had not pitied him, solely because of the command. That too would have been enough for me to give to him. If that is so, then everything is fine—it is a double intention.
[Speaker B] And penitents are greater than the righteous.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What you’re saying isn’t exactly this, but it’s similar. There there is something a bit different; that too is a different system. It needs to be discussed. I once wrote some article about it. There the question is whether what is preferable is the path or the result. A penitent versus a righteous person—let’s say the penitent is perfect, he managed to fix everything and reach the complete state. No more than that—a completely righteous person. How can he be greater than a completely righteous person? How can a penitent be preferable to a completely righteous person?
[Speaker B] Clearly what matters is that he doesn’t struggle, while this one does struggle.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The completely righteous person also struggles—why wouldn’t he struggle? He just didn’t sin. Yes, not like that. I’m telling you, he didn’t sin because he constantly managed to overcome his inclination. The penitent sinned and now returns in repentance. The difference between them is that one has no inclination? Who said that? Does the completely righteous person have no inclination? The author of Tanya wants to claim such a thing, but there is no reason to think that.
[Speaker B] It’s the same example you gave before, when you teach the guys, the population you teach Torah, just to walk in an orderly way.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, I know the examples, but who told you that that’s what is called a righteous person? Why do you think a righteous person is someone who has no inclination? It says, “Whoever is greater than his fellow, his inclination is greater than his.” Why—a righteous person has an inclination; he just never fell. He didn’t sin, because he always managed to overcome it. The penitent fell, and afterward he repents. It’s not that he has no inclination. That’s why I said—it’s not the same thing. So yes, what is the difference? There there is another principle, and it is also interesting. If the penitent is preferable to a completely righteous person, that means there is value also to the path and not only to the result.
[Speaker C] It’s not a Markovian process.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The sages say that a penitent is preferable. The sages say a penitent is preferable. A penitent is preferable—it says so. The sages, the Talmudic text. Not to encourage it—a penitent is preferable to a completely righteous person. He is preferable. Why is he preferable? Because he went through some sort of path, and the path is no less important than the result. And when did you improve—the improvement is not just the means to be in a more improved state. The improvement itself has value. The very fact that you are progressing.
[Speaker B] No, even more righteous,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m talking about the completely righteous person as an idealized model. A completely righteous person is someone who is perfect all the time. Otherwise he is a penitent, a penitent at his own level. Fine, he’s still a penitent. Okay? Only hypothetical figures, of course.
[Speaker B] So the righteous person is also constantly repenting.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If he is constantly repenting, then he is not the righteous person we are talking about there. There we are making a comparison between two hypothetical figures; it is typological. There is the completely righteous person—he never sinned, he is perfect. He cannot progress anywhere. He was born perfect, dies perfect, he is perfect all the time. And the penitent is something that progresses. So they tell me that progress is not just a means to reach a more perfect state, but the process of progress itself has value. The derivative is not only there so that the function rises. There is value to the derivative. Okay? To the change itself. That’s what Rabbi Kook writes in Orot HaKodesh, part 2. He says that self-perfection itself is also one of the values. The very fact that you are becoming perfected is itself one of the values, and therefore he raises a difficulty: how can the Holy One, blessed be He, perfect Himself? He does not have that perfection. He cannot perfect Himself because He is already perfect. So there is a problem here, which is why He needs us. Apropos Jonah the prophet, whom we discussed—the Holy One, blessed be He, needs Nineveh. That’s why He needs Nineveh, so that they will repent. The whole book of Jonah goes in that direction in order to tell us that the Holy One, blessed be He, needs us. Why does He need us? Not so that we won’t sin. The opposite. So that we will sin and repent. Because not sinning—well, that too the Holy One, blessed be He, knows how to do. But improvement, your ability to progress—that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not have. He needed to create creatures like that, who can fall and improve. In a certain sense, the penitent is the purpose of the world. Repentance is not the answer to this, not some kind of solution to a bad situation we got ourselves into—okay, we sinned, how do we get out of it. No. The world was created so that we would sin and get out of it. “A righteous person falls seven times and rises.” Therefore this has importance. What was the initial thought behind saying, “I will sin and repent”? Just because I’ll enjoy myself and afterward I’ll repent and everything will be fine? No. The initial thought is in order to be a penitent, who is greater than a completely righteous person. For the sake of Heaven, all of it. I want to sin and repent, because otherwise I’m just a completely righteous person. I want to be even greater than a completely righteous person—to sin and repent. And the novelty is: forget it, you’ll sin even without trying. Don’t make an effort to sin. In other words, that is not recommended even though the initial thought is correct, but it is not recommended to do that. Leave it, don’t worry, you’ll have a path, you’ll have what to do even without doing it with your own hands. So that’s the… okay, back to our matter. What I basically want to say is that both in the moral context and in the halakhic / of Jewish law context, what determines things is your motivation. If your motivation in doing the act is the doing of good—if that is why you did this act—then it is a moral act. Of course, everything has to be fulfilled as I said earlier: you do it not out of self-interest but in order to do good. You do it out of decision, because otherwise there is no such thing as “in order to.” You simply do it because that’s what you are like. When you speak about “in order to,” that actually sums up all the criteria or all the requirements I mentioned at the beginning. Okay? And the same thing in the context of the religious act. A religious act has religious value only if it is done for the sake of the religious goal, for the worship of God, yes, out of commitment to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. Up to here, that is the definition of the religious action. Now I want to go one step further. Kant, in fact, as I said earlier, in his moral theory the first datum is indeed that the moral act is defined by its motivation. An act will count as a moral act if you do it for the sake of the moral goal and not for the sake of any other goal. Then he goes on to say—he actually calls this the categorical imperative. That is, Kant’s categorical imperative is categorical in the sense that you do it by virtue of the fact that it is the categorical imperative. Not for any other reason. There are commands that I obey for other reasons. Say I obey a police officer on the road and don’t exceed the speed limit because I’m afraid of the fine. That is not called categorical obedience; it is self-interested obedience. Right? A categorical imperative is an imperative that expects obedience because of the very fact that there is such an imperative. Like with God, yes? God is someone one obeys by virtue of the fact that He is God. Like the judges, like… so that is called a categorical imperative. Now Kant goes on and says: and what is the content of this imperative? I have to want the good, right? What am I supposed to want? What defines the concept of good that I am supposed to want? I define the moral act by the fact that it is done from the motivation to do good, right? But what is the content of that motivation? When I ask myself, okay, what should I intend right now in order to be a moral person? What should I intend in order to do the moral act? But what is the moral act? What everyone would do? Exactly. So Kant arrives, through a chain of philosophical considerations—not important now, it appears in several of his works, actually in three of them—Kant finally arrives at the following imperative: “Act only according to that practical rule which, when you accept it, you can also will to become a universal law.” The Talmudic text comes and says, in Sodom they had this and here…
[Speaker B] If you would
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] want that to be their morality, fine. I’m not asking what exists; I’m asking what ought to be. In other words, Kant gives me a criterion. He tells me: if you want to know whether a certain act is moral or not, you have to make the following calculation. Suppose the entire world would do this act in this situation—would that be a good world from your point of view? If yes, then it is a moral act. If not, then not. It is similar to what Hillel the Elder says: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow,” but it is not exactly the same thing. Maybe not… in other words, we still need to examine this further; I’ll comment on it in a moment.
[Speaker B] There are societies in which good and evil…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But why should I care? There are also societies where they are not interested in good and evil at all. So what if there are? Why should I care? I am not talking now about what societies do. I’m talking about the question of what value one ought to follow. If there are other societies, then they are behaving improperly. What am I supposed to do with that? The fact that there are societies that behave in a certain way proves nothing, just as the fact that there are moral atheists does not prove that atheism and morality are compatible with one another. And it’s not the society you are in… no, no, it depends on no society whatsoever. I make the calculation with myself. The whole society can dance the hora. I make the calculation with myself. I ask myself, from your point of view—from my point of view, yes, I’m speaking to the mirror—if the whole world behaved in this way, would you be pleased with the world you see before your eyes? If yes, then it is a moral act. And if not, then not. If you arrive at a different answer from mine, no problem—then act differently. I am not talking right now about the objectivity of morality. That is another discussion. Fine? This is Kant’s criterion. Now this criterion is of course very hard to derive practical conclusions from. When I am in a certain situation and I want to use the categorical imperative to know what is incumbent on me to do. There are many objections that have been raised about this; it is very defined and very amorphous. Okay? Let’s say, is it fitting to go study medicine? So as not to save people’s lives? Right. Would you want the whole world to go study medicine? I don’t think so, right? Not a healthy world if everyone goes to study medicine. So I would not want it to become a universal law. So you’ll say yes, I would want those who are talented and suited for it to go study medicine. So what remains of the categorical imperative? I can always define it. I would want—I want to steal because I want to profit. I would want everyone who is poor—poor with an aleph—to steal so that he can profit. There, now I have a universal imperative that just happens to apply only… you understand that you can’t really reach unequivocal conclusions from this general formulation. And still, I think this is a very interesting formulation; it has many implications. One has to be careful not to take it too far—that I agree with. But it has a great many implications. I’ll give you one example—no, before the example—no, yes, I’ll give you an example. Say: should one obey Home Front Command instructions when there is a siren, to enter a protected space? On the face of it, there is no reason in the world—it’s simply idiotic. The danger is zero. Right? That’s obvious. The chance of being hurt is absolute zero. Much lower than the chance of being hurt in a car accident. Right? That’s obvious. Therefore if I ask myself, if I make a personal calculation: to enter a protected space or not? If I do not enter, I will be harmed with a probability of ten to the minus one hundred. If I do enter, I will be harmed with a probability of ten to the minus two hundred—which can also happen. Yes, okay, come on, ten to the minus one hundred—I wouldn’t pay a penny for that. In other words, throughout my whole life, every single day, I take much greater risks. There is absolutely no reason in the world to obey Home Front Command instructions. So why nevertheless? Maybe not?
[Speaker C] Maybe if everyone here were like you?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Because if everyone makes that calculation, then there will of course be some people who will indeed get hurt, right? At some point the missile does fall. For sure—the probability is already high, right? If everyone does not obey Home Front Command. When I make my own personal calculation, there is absolutely no reason to hide. But if everyone does it, then someone will certainly get hurt. I would not want that to become a universal law. If you would not want it to become a universal law, then you yourself should not do it either. Even though from your own point of view, this way or that way… after all, everyone is entering protected spaces anyway. It’s not as though if I don’t enter, then everyone else also won’t enter. Everyone makes his own decisions. So whether I enter or don’t enter is only my own calculation. So why should I care what would happen if everyone did it? The fact that I won’t do it doesn’t mean everyone won’t enter a protected space. What, does everyone read in the paper what I did and imitate me? It’s irrelevant. In any case, my decision concerns only me. So why really enter? Because there is a principled rule that says one must do what one would want to become a universal law. Not because everyone will actually do it. They won’t do it. Rather, this is a hypothetical criterion. I am making some sort of hypothetical calculation. If everyone did it, would that be okay? If yes, good; if not, then not. And therefore I do not do it. A practical difference, for example: someone once asked me on the website—someone got stuck outside the building on the Sabbath and the electric mechanism had locked. Okay? In the event of a siren, is he allowed to activate that mechanism in order to enter a protected space? I told him that in my opinion, no. Why? Because if you were entering because it is dangerous—saving a life overrides the Sabbath. You do everything because it is saving a life. Here there is no saving of life. You are doing it only because of the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative does not override the Sabbath. So if it’s not locked, everyone should enter a protected space. But to justify violating the Sabbath on that basis? There is no real danger here. Right? Therefore it is forbidden to do it. There, that’s a practical difference, for example. Now if my claim were a consequentialist claim—Kant’s claim seems to many people like a consequentialist claim: if you do this, everyone will do this, and then someone will get hurt. Mistake. It is not a consequentialist claim. Because if I do this, it will not cause anyone else to do it. Kant does not say that if you do this, then in fact everyone will do it. That is not the point. He says: if, hypothetically, everyone were to do it, would that be a good world or not? He does not say that if you do it, that is what will actually happen. It won’t happen. What I do concerns only me; no one is influenced by my decisions. Okay? Therefore this is really not a consequentialist decision. You have to do it because of the categorical imperative, not because it is saving a life—it is not saving a life. Rather, because of the categorical imperative. But the categorical imperative does not override the Sabbath; saving a life does. Okay? Now, I said this because later on I want to sharpen this point further—the difference between a categorical imperative and consequentialism. Because it is not consequentialist, and that is very important for our purposes. So next time.