Means and Ends – Lesson 4

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s fine, of course. Even a poor person who lives off charity gives—I didn’t say otherwise. That’s perfectly fine. But offsetting is still giving. I’m saying it doesn’t contradict that statement. A poor person who lives off charity has to give, certainly he has to give. That’s unrelated. But you can offset. If he gives to another poor person, then we determine—there has to be a determination—because it’s as if I gave and then he said, forget it, let’s save the trip from me to you and from you to me. I’ll give you a can of tuna, you’ll give me a can of tuna, so I’ll take mine and you’ll take yours. Why should I hand it to you and you hand it to me? What sense does that make? No sense at all. What’s the problem? I transfer ownership of mine to you, you transfer ownership of yours to me, and that’s it. We gave—what’s the problem? But of course you really do have to offset; you have to verify that I’m giving to you and you’re giving to me and that we agree to offset. That’s perfectly fine. The claim that… that’s actually Kant’s claim too, when he asks: what would happen if everyone did as you do? But he asks it in a different sense from the way people usually ask it. He’s not saying: what would happen if everyone did as you do—look, you’d bring about a bad state because everyone would do as you do. No. He asks: what would hypothetically happen if everyone did as you do? Let’s examine the hypothetical case—which is hypothetical; it won’t happen. But we need to test it as a criterion that determines whether the individual act I’m doing is a moral act or not. That’s what Kant says. It’s not a consequentialist criterion; it’s the opposite. Kant consistently—and many people get confused in interpreting Kant—starts from the premise that morality is not consequentialist. You can’t interpret it that way. Meaning, he starts from the premise that morality is not consequentialist. The moral act is determined by the good intention, not by its result. So that’s the Kantian criterion. And then of course it follows from this that it’s forbidden to evade taxes, even though a thousand shekels is nothing, and not everyone will do what I do because nobody will know from this. What I do, others will do—maybe they’ll evade too—but that’s not connected to my evasion; they’ll evade anyway, so they’ll evade. But I’m only talking about my thousand shekels; it has nothing to do with what others do. Or voting in elections, or all those things. Once this becomes a general rule, clearly the situation is bad. Everybody agrees to that. Therefore the act itself is immoral, regardless of whether it will actually happen or not. In my opinion, that’s the only answer that can explain why you have to go vote and why you may not evade taxes. Everything else is made-up answers from people whose intuition tells them correctly—they feel it’s right—but when they try to look for the explanation, they always try to put it in consequentialist terms, and that’s where they go wrong. The consequentialist consideration doesn’t get you there. A lot of… by the way, this is a very well-known phenomenon. I run into it a lot. People have a correct intuition, but they don’t know the whole spectrum of philosophical possibilities for explaining things. So they go with the option they know and insist on it, but it doesn’t work—that explanation doesn’t hold up. But their intuition actually is right, and they feel correctly, they feel that it’s right. They just can’t present an explanation that explains why it’s right; they can’t conceptualize for themselves why they feel it’s right. So then they start inventing all kinds of explanations that don’t hold water—it’s obvious they don’t. But the fact that your explanation isn’t right doesn’t mean you’re wrong. That’s also an important lesson. A lot of times you have a correct intuition and you just aren’t sufficiently aware of all the ways such an explanation could be grounded. And so, for example, many people—I’ve run into this countless times—people who came to speak to me tell me: look, I don’t believe in God, I’m completely secular, in the full sense of the word, thoroughly detached from all the trappings. I’ve met a few like that, including, by the way, I think more than two already who are rabbis in Haredi yeshivas—one in a small yeshiva and one in a large yeshiva, I remember. They came to me and sat in my house, and said: I don’t believe in anything, I’m an atheist. He’s still actually in the yeshiva, everything—he’s a senior figure there in the yeshivas. Yes, I’ve met quite a few like that. And when I try to ask him, tell me, how did you reach that conclusion, he says: look, there’s no proof of anything. If I’d believed this way, or if I’d been born somewhere else, I’d have reached different conclusions, I’d have been educated differently, I’d have reached different conclusions. So I said to him—and then I try to ask them—there are other things you do believe in, right? For everything you believe, do you have proof? For a scientific result, do you have proof? Proof? What proof? There’s no proof in science; you can refute, not prove. So why do you believe? Because it seems most reasonable to me. Right? Of course we have standards for how we build our sense of plausibility, but… in the end we accept things even without having proof for them. Now tell me: if you think there’s no proof for this, that certainly is not enough to say you don’t believe. It could be that you do believe. That’s a different discussion. But if your reasoning is that you have no proof—that’s not a reason. Okay? Now here there are two possibilities: sometimes the feeling really is that he genuinely doesn’t believe, and when he tries to explain why, he says: because I have no proof. Having no proof explains nothing. But he still genuinely doesn’t believe. But another situation is possible: sometimes the person feels that without proof there’s no justification for belief, while in fact he does believe. He believes—I’ve met such people. But he says: but without proof, what do I have to believe on? Just inventions; it’s my education; I could have grown up elsewhere and had different feelings, so therefore it’s all subjective, it has no significance at all—even though I believe. So there I tell him: no, that’s not right. It’s the same mistake from the other side of the coin. Meaning, the fact that you have no proof doesn’t mean you’re not right. There are many things we believe because they seem reasonable to us. So what’s the problem? Your belief is perfectly legitimate and you have no proof; I have no proof either—so what? Fine. But if that’s what you think, then you do believe. So what if you have no proof? These are two sides of the same coin, and in both of them the person doesn’t understand that there doesn’t necessarily have to be a connection between the explanation and the conclusion. Sometimes he holds the conclusion and invents an incorrect explanation to ground it. Sometimes the explanation seems obvious to him and he invents a conclusion that doesn’t follow from it—sorry, that he says he doesn’t believe in because it follows from the explanation—and there too he misses the point, because it doesn’t follow from the explanation. And so—by the way, there are corresponding phenomena in brain research, very well-known psychological phenomena. For example, people who have a disconnection in—what’s it called? corpus… I forgot the name of it, the thing that connects the two hemispheres. There are people who have even undergone surgeries like this—still today, in rare cases, they do such surgery and sever the connection between the two hemispheres—but sometimes it’s the result of accidents. Phineas Gage, the famous case—they severed a lobe, the connection between the hemispheres was cut. Now normally our thinking draws on both hemispheres; there’s some kind of processing because they have different functions, okay? And then you process things and create a full picture. Now when the hemispheres are severed, it’s like two human beings. This hemisphere reaches one conclusion, that hemisphere reaches another. This hemisphere is Republican and that hemisphere is Democratic. You can question the person in certain ways and get this answer and that answer. Meaning, depending—for example, if you ask through the right ear, then the answer comes from the left hemisphere, right? In the left hemisphere. Right? And the left hemisphere is also responsible for speech. Okay? So what happens is—I think, wait, no, the left hemisphere—no, it’s the other way around. You ask through the left ear, the right hemisphere, and the right hemisphere is also responsible for speech, then you’ll get a Republican answer. Ask through the right ear and you’ll get a Democratic answer. And I wrote about this in the book Science of Freedom, and I tried to explain why this doesn’t mean it’s supposedly evidence for materialism. What? Schizophrenia?

[Speaker B] No, no—schizophrenia is a mental phenomenon.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But here you have a person who simply is—ask neuroscientists, they’ll tell you it’s two human beings. Because as far as standard lab neuroscientists are concerned, we don’t have a soul; there’s no soul, there’s only a brain. Once there are two brains, there are two human beings. It doesn’t matter that they’re in one body—there are two human beings. But for example, with one such person, when he looks at, say, a certain scene, there’s a disconnect between—say speech comes from the right hemisphere, but what he saw is in the left hemisphere. So he saw the correct image, but when he answers your question the answer comes from the right hemisphere, and it doesn’t know what he saw in the left hemisphere. So he answers you with things that are unrelated; he tells you stories that never happened, asks him what he saw and he tells you things that have nothing to do with anything, because he fills things in with his imagination, all kinds of things, because he didn’t see anything—the right hemisphere has no connection to the left hemisphere—and only the left hemisphere saw through the right eye when you cover his left eye; only the right eye sees, so that information passes to the left hemisphere. Now speech comes from the right hemisphere. So when you ask him questions about what he saw, you get Arabian Nights stories. Experiments that were done. It’s Arabian Nights stories—he fills in pictures for himself, all kinds of things he never saw and that never existed. He has to fill things in somehow; he has partial information and has to complete it in some form. So this is exactly that phenomenon. A person comes with the same conclusion, and in his eyes the conclusion doesn’t follow from the argument. But he believes either in the argument, and then he has to adopt the conclusion even though he doesn’t really need to adopt it, or he believes in the conclusion and therefore finds himself forced to adopt the argument because he thinks only that argument leads to the conclusion—and that’s not true. So he can be right and give stupid reasons or incorrect reasons. These are phenomena I encounter all the time in arguments. Very often I try to explain to people that their conclusions may be correct. The claim is—my claim is—that people’s moral intuition is basically Kantian intuition. The categorical imperative causes me to think that one should go vote and that it’s forbidden to evade taxes, and so on. That’s the basis of the intuition. It’s just that people don’t know how to formulate it that way, so they look for a consequentialist explanation. And this criterion too can be a reason as well.

[Speaker C] What? Is Kant’s categorical imperative a reason? Is Kant’s categorical imperative a reason, or is it a criterion?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A criterion—what difference does it make? Fine, but I believe that the categorical imperative really is the correct rule that determines what is moral and what is not.

[Speaker C] But it’s all intuitive; in the end it’s all intuitive. And that’s right—it’s an intuition that this is what’s correct. You don’t ultimately have to say that the reason is the categorical imperative.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a semantic question. But I believe the categorical imperative is the correct criterion for a moral act. Once you have the categorical imperative, it is of course only a criterion, fine, but the very adoption of the categorical imperative is an intuitive decision.

[Speaker C] Why? The categorical imperative is the sign. If there are things that really are not nice—intuitively not nice. What does “not nice” mean? Take the example of elections: I won’t have the intuition that it’s not okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, if I don’t have—

[Speaker C] the intuition that not voting in elections is not okay, then I won’t vote? Not necessarily, not necessarily.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I can try to argue to you—look at examples of tax evasion. Do you agree that it’s not okay? Let’s run a simulation. Okay, so why? After all, consequentially it has no significance whatsoever.

[Speaker C] I just think it’s not okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? After all, consequentially there’s no problem with it. Unless what? You agree with me that the categorical imperative is the moral criterion. Ah, so if that’s so, let’s move to voting. Reconsider your position. True, you don’t feel that it’s immoral, but look—you do accept the categorical imperative, so you’ll have to reconsider. Again, you can decide no, my intuition remains as it is, with all due respect to the categorical imperative. But no—many times I’ll be able to persuade you that if you see that you do in fact accept the categorical imperative as a criterion. Even with tax evasion I don’t accept the categorical imperative.

[Speaker C] What? I didn’t understand. Even with tax evasion it’s not because of the categorical imperative.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not you personally—I’m trying to show you a simulation of a discussion in which I can persuade you to change your conclusion. If I show you that in other contexts you do accept the categorical imperative, then I can persuade you that your intuition is not correct. Intuition is not an exclusive thing; there’s a kind of back-and-forth interplay between intuition and arguments. Sometimes this affects that, sometimes that affects this, and I have no immediate formula for which is preferable and which isn’t. I’m only saying we need to look at this from both angles, and sometimes you’ll change your position and sometimes not. I agree—sometimes you’ll remain with your intuition and say, forget it, the categorical imperative doesn’t seem right to me. And that was exactly also on the website—I don’t remember now what it was there. It was also connected to elections, something, I don’t remember exactly how it was there. So I said, fine, with all due respect to the categorical imperative, in the end when I feel it’s not okay, then it’s not okay.

[Speaker G] Meaning, despite the fact that it’s this sort of pilpul that you say—you say—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, that I’d want the financial rules to operate, but not everyone. That itself is exactly what I would want the general situation to be. Yes, right. So you said—first of all, that itself can be a claim, and then I fit it into the categorical side. But beyond that, you’re completely right there too. The categorical imperative is also a rule. Right, that’s what I’m saying. So fine, the situation is more complex, but I’m trying to show the form of thinking. So I brought—I don’t remember if I brought—this example of leavened food that remained after Passover, or selling land during the Sabbatical year—the sale permit. Leavened food that remained after Passover was what gave me the first lightbulb moment in Bnei Brak. The grocery store underneath us in the building, on the ground floor, sold its actual leavened stock during Passover so as not to lose out—it was a substantial loss. Okay. But nobody in the neighborhood bought from him after Passover. Because the righteous people there don’t buy actual leavened food that was sold. Right? The store is allowed to sell, everyone will tell him, yes, certainly, one may sell because there’s substantial loss, and we don’t have to buy. So I said, wait a second, I don’t understand. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that the only buyers were kollel fellows from the neighborhood, okay? So you allow him to sell his actual leavened goods on Passover, keep them until after Passover, and nobody will buy from him? So what good did the permit do? The substantial loss remains even though he sold the leavened food. So if you permit him because of substantial loss, then automatically you also permit yourselves to buy. How can it be that you permit him to sell but do not permit yourselves to buy? It can’t be. And then the claim always came up that, fine, others will buy from him. You see, there are people who are less strict, and that’s true—there are people who are less strict and they’ll buy, what’s the problem? So I’m strict for myself, but others will buy. And then later I realized that I also reject that. Because here the categorical imperative enters the picture. Because the claim is: you’re essentially relying on people who, by your own standards, are not acting properly. Or not entirely properly. There are levels, but not entirely properly. So that basically means you would not want what you are doing to become a general rule. You would not want everyone not to buy from him, right? If so, then not buying from him is immoral. And then you have to buy from him even though others will buy and no one will lose—there’s no consequentialist consideration here. That’s when the penny dropped for me. That happened in Bnei Brak. I had this point long before the categorical imperative; back then I got stuck with the thought that, fine, others will buy and therefore I also didn’t buy from him after Passover, so I was still working with the standard categories. But years later I came across an argument in the Tzohar journal between two rabbis, Rabbi Yehuda Amichai and Rabbi Meir Nehorai, about the sale permit. And Rabbi Yehuda Amichai, who is from Otzar HaAretz, said that they prefer otzar beit din, and if there’s a product not available through otzar beit din, then they’ll buy sale-permit produce from Otzar HaAretz. So Rabbi Nehorai says to him: what do you mean? You’re causing the farmers a loss. After all, why do we permit them to sell the land? So that they can survive. If you don’t buy, then they won’t—so what did it help that they sold the land to a non-Jew? And others will buy? So what if others will buy? How many people consume from otzar beit din? It’s a minority, a small percentage. Overall people will buy from them; there’s no consequentialist problem here. And then Nehorai got stuck. He said all kinds of formulations like, fine, but it can’t be that we do things and rely on violators, or formulations of that sort.

[Speaker I] He had an intuition of the categorical imperative, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And then afterward I wrote an article and said—actually it was even a response—but that argument gave me a lightbulb moment, and I wrote an article on the categorical imperative in Jewish law. And I argued that Rabbi Nehorai is right, and that the intuition underlying what he said—he didn’t say this explicitly, it wasn’t his reason, he didn’t think of this deeper possibility—but I think his intuition is basically grounded in the idea that if it cannot be a general rule, then it is not moral. And if you think the sale permit is necessary, you can’t rely on violators, or on people who according to your own view are not behaving properly, to do the buying. No—if it can’t be a general rule, then don’t do it yourself either. Now this too is not entirely simple: am I forbidden to act with extra piety? Am I forbidden to be stringent? It could be that I really am forbidden to be stringent in a case where I’m relying on others not being stringent. Meaning, you wouldn’t want everyone to be stringent, and then it’s not a simple question. I think—I tend to think—that this is actually correct. In a stringency like that, it’s not a problem that not everyone has to be stringent; stringency is for people on a higher spiritual level. Fine—there are foolish stringencies, and there are valuable stringencies. But it’s still the same demand: not everyone has to be stringent. But in a place where, if everyone were stringent, a problem would arise—not merely that not everyone needs to be stringent and I’m excusing some people, but that an actual problem would arise—then it is not right to be stringent.

[Speaker I] A stringency that relies on the fact that there are people who won’t be stringent—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] is not right. I think in such a case it’s forbidden to be stringent, in my view. Now what does that mean—I have no source for it, but I argue that the source is the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is correct in morality and it is also correct in Jewish law. And that is from reason; it’s hard to justify something like that. So this shows the significance of the categorical imperative, because our issue here is means versus ends. So what I want to show here is the transition from a consequentialist consideration to a consideration about the act itself. The act is not a means for achieving a result; the act has value, and it itself determines whether something is moral or immoral regardless of the result that will emerge. But now there’s a twist in the plot, because in the end it does come back to the result. Now think about it—notice, it’s a very elegant trick. It parallels the prisoner’s dilemma; I wrote a post about that on the website too. Let’s go back to tax evasion, or to VAT—let’s call it VAT, that’s even more dramatic. So I’m weighing whether to evade a thousand shekels in tax or not, right? Consequentially it has no significance whatsoever. Obviously I won’t tell anyone, others will do whatever they think, but what depends on me is my thousand shekels, okay? There’s no consequential significance; ostensibly there’s no moral problem with evading the tax. Right? Kant tells us: but if everyone did as you do—as a hypothetical experiment, not that it will happen in practice—then it would be immoral, and therefore you must pay. Now what happens? If the categorical imperative were not valid, what would really happen? Assuming there are enough intelligent people—and that everyone is intelligent, which probably isn’t the case—but if there are enough intelligent people, then everyone would evade taxes. Each person, from his own personal reasoning, would evade taxes, right? He would simply do it—not because the other person evades taxes, but for the same reason the other person evades taxes, I too will evade taxes because that’s the logical outcome: it doesn’t affect anything. And then what would happen? Everyone evades. And then everyone evades taxes, and the treasury is empty. It’s true that if any one individual changes his behavior it won’t change anything, but if we don’t accept the categorical imperative as the criterion of morality, there won’t be any money in the state treasury. And so, in a reverse twist—and this is fascinating, I don’t think people notice this very much; now I found some article in English that makes this claim or a similar one, but I didn’t know it, at least until suddenly the penny dropped for me—in the end, only the categorical imperative produces results. It’s a non-consequentialist consideration, and precisely because of that it produces the results. Only a non-consequentialist consideration can lead to results. Because what happens is that if you use consequentialist reasoning, then each person individually will evade his own thousand shekels, and he’ll be right. Whether he pays or doesn’t pay makes no difference, right? So why should he pay? And the next person will make the same calculation, and the third as well—but each one will really be right. Because his personal contribution truly doesn’t change anything. Others are doing it, and if I don’t evade they’ll still evade, and it still won’t change anything, right? The consequentialist consideration remains even after the calculation I make here. Okay? And what comes out is that when you use consequentialist reasoning, you won’t achieve the result—you’ll fail at the level of result precisely by using consequentialist reasoning. How will you achieve the correct result? Only if you ignore consequentialist considerations and use the categorical-imperative consideration, which is a consideration about the act and not the result. Only then will you achieve the result. Because if you don’t make that kind of calculation, then each person individually will evade his thousand shekels. And then the state treasury really will, in practice—the thing everyone says: so what will happen if everyone does as you do? Right, that’s a good question, because everyone really will do as you do, because after all that’s the logic. And then the answers people give my son Yossi—the consequentialist answers—suddenly converge with the hypothetical answer. Because in the end they’re right: everyone will do as he does. But not because he does it, everyone will do as he does; rather, because by the same logic on which he acts, they too will make the calculation and they too will do as he does. Except that we need to make a gentleman’s agreement among ourselves, that each one of us, despite having no impact, will do his part, because otherwise we’ll all be in a mess. But now this is exactly the prisoner’s dilemma, exactly the prisoner’s dilemma. Right? Because in the prisoner’s dilemma—do you know the idea? In the prisoner’s dilemma from game theory, perhaps the most famous example in game theory, two prisoners are offered—two prisoners who committed a robbery together, okay? Fine, both deny it. If both deny it, the police are in trouble. So what do they try to do? Tempt one of them to confess—or rather, to incriminate the other, not to confess, to incriminate the other. And then there’s some payoff table; never mind, I don’t even remember the details right now, but the payoff table says this: if both of you deny it, then let’s say you both get a year in prison. Fine. If you incriminate him and he denies it, then you go free—some country like that—and he gets ten years. Fine. And vice versa. If he incriminates you, then he goes free and you get ten years. If you both incriminate each other, then you each get five years—actually, no, you get one—no, we’d have to draw the table. Fine. And now what comes out is that each one, when he makes his personal calculation, benefits by incriminating the other. Because say the other person does something, and now I compare the two possibilities: if I incriminate him and if I don’t incriminate him. It always turns out better for me to incriminate him. Fine? And of course he’ll make the same calculation. But then it turns out that both of us incriminate each other. We both incriminate each other, and we both get five years. Whereas if both of us had denied it, we’d have gotten only one year. If both of us deny it, nobody incriminates the other, we’d have gotten only one year. And that was the optimal result. But if I incriminate him, I walk completely free—zero—and he gets ten years. That’s the table. If I incriminate him, I get zero and he gets ten years. If both of us deny it, we each get one year. If we both incriminate each other, we each get five years, which is better than ten, okay? But of course worse than one. Now if you examine the table row by row, you’ll see that no matter what the other person does, it always pays to incriminate him. Because if he incriminates me and I incriminate him, I get five years; if I don’t incriminate him, I get ten years because he incriminated me and goes free. If he doesn’t incriminate me, then if I incriminate him I go completely free, right? And if I don’t incriminate him, then one year each. Therefore it always pays me to incriminate him. Five each, sorry. Therefore it always pays me to incriminate him. In the calculation each person makes separately, it turns out that it’s best for each to incriminate the other. But the result is not a good result. Because they both incriminate each other, and they both get five years. If both had made a gentleman’s agreement—let’s both not incriminate each other—they both would have gotten one year. A better result. And what comes out here is absurd: the calculation each one makes—these are coalition calculations. The calculation each one makes separately—what is the best outcome for me, the minimax—says incriminate. But if we make a joint calculation as a coalition, it says that neither one should incriminate the other. Okay? Now there’s a British TV game show—I really recommend watching it—it’s called Golden Balls. There was such a show. There are hundreds of clips. Fine? Each time they put people in front of a prisoner’s-dilemma-type situation, right there in life, and they had to arrive together at—nobody knows what the other has in his golden ball, never mind, with various sums—and they had to persuade each other, basically, or formulate a strategy together. And of course they could persuade each other—listen, you won’t incriminate me and I won’t incriminate you, whatever the equivalent is there, never mind—and they would either reach an agreement or not, and the question was whether you cheat or not. Think about it: if both of us reach the conclusion that we won’t incriminate each other, fine, each gets a year. That’s best, right? Now if I incriminate him, I go completely free. Better than getting a year. Right? Once I’ve signed the agreement, it pays me to violate it. But it also pays him to violate it. So it’s an unstable agreement. It’s an agreement that requires you to be a gentleman in order to uphold it, and if you don’t uphold it you’ll profit—unless he also doesn’t uphold it, in which case both of you get burned. If you know he’s an honest man, it pays you to be dishonest. But you don’t know, and the same is true on his side. And therefore the optimal solution for the general situation is that both of you be honest—even though for each individual it pays more not to be honest. This is really parallel to the categorical imperative. Because the two of us have now made an agreement across the whole group: we do not evade taxes. Because we know that if each person makes his own individual consequentialist calculation, there will be nothing left in the state. We will all pay our taxes. Okay? So there’s a gentleman’s agreement, the categorical imperative: don’t make the consequentialist calculation. Each one pays his tax. Now my son of course says: okay, and now I’ll fool all of you and I won’t pay the tax after we signed this gentleman’s agreement, this social contract. Okay, I won’t pay the tax. Because in the end it won’t affect anything—you’ll do whatever you do. The wheel keeps turning. But the others will make the same calculation too; they’re smart too, they’ll make it as well. And then what will happen in the end? There will be nothing left in the state. The only way out really is to be a gentleman and honor the agreement. Even though ostensibly you lose; there’s always a better option for you. But if everyone makes that calculation, then we all get burned together. Do you understand? This thing is mind-bending. And when you watch those clips—look up Golden Balls online—it’s amazing, truly fascinating. Each clip is a minute or two, I don’t know, something like that. And no game resembles the previous one. Not a single game. You’ll see: people raise arguments and look for strategies, how to make sure and how to persuade and how to cheat. And you can never know who’s cheating and who isn’t. And now this is a fascinating moral question, by the way. In that game, is it immoral to cheat? After all, it’s a game designed precisely to simulate this issue. I mean, what’s the problem? We made a contract, and he himself knows that we’re making this contract and making a game-theoretic calculation about whether to profit or lose. In the end it’s a consequentialist calculation. If both of us are gentlemen, both of us profit, but I can profit more if I’m not a gentleman and he is; on the other hand, if he also isn’t a gentleman then both of us get burned. You constantly have to gamble on whether you trust him or not trust him, and you can’t know—it’s amazing. It’s worth watching; it’s really fascinating. And there aren’t two similar clips. None, none. Hundreds of clips. The game is incredibly simple, and there still aren’t two similar clips. It’s amazing.

[Speaker G] What are the statistics?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Huh? Like, are most people gentlemen, or mostly exactly what we’ve seen? Again, I think part of the issue is that you can’t read people, because this isn’t a moral issue. I mean, in real life, I think morality—interpreters can relatively often interpret people correctly, who can be trusted and who can’t. But here it’s a game. It’s like who will commit a foul in basketball—what tactic he’ll choose. It’s not a moral question. Very often you appeal to someone’s emotions, and the connotation for the viewer is as if there’s something immoral here, and that’s what you’re playing on. You want to get his cooperation. And sometimes you say something like, listen, let’s cooperate, let’s really act straight, and then you stab him in the back. Because if he cooperates and you stab him in the back, you profit the most. So now, were you in the wrong? The connotation it arouses in you is: be a decent person, be moral, after all we made an agreement. But it’s not that—it’s a game. Meaning, there are so many questions like this. Really, it’s utterly fascinating. So in the end what comes out of this—the fascinating thing that comes out of this—is that the consideration, because people often ask: okay, so where does this Kantian principle come from? For years people asked me that, and only recently this penny dropped for me. Why should hypothetical experiments interest me—applying them and checking whether an act is moral or immoral in the abstract? I want things to be good for people—that’s what moral means, the results. Why should I care now how you define acts through thought experiments and all these things? What I’m claiming now is: right, that’s what brings the results. Therefore it’s the correct way to act. Because in the end, at the bottom line, that is what brings the results. At the social level, not at the personal level. If each individual personally does not make the consequentialist calculation, only then will we achieve the results that will benefit you too, and the whole society together—and you too. Not that you should be an altruist. The real egoist—the egoist who truly wants to take the best possible care of himself—will support rules in society. Meaning, this is always tricky, because now okay, now we’re done, we agreed, we made the category, everything is fine, now I’ll violate it.

[Speaker C] And what’s the answer to that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that always comes up again and again. The answer is that everybody makes that calculation.

[Speaker C] Fine, so what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The wheel will keep turning. And therefore I say: society will look bad if we do not remain gentlemen and indeed honor the gentleman’s agreement. Society will look bad. But that means each one of us individually has to honor the gentleman’s agreement—which is absurd, because at the personal level it’s more worthwhile for me not to honor the agreement. I gain my thousand shekels. Okay? But everybody makes that calculation. And here the question returns: what would happen if everyone did as you do—but not in Kant’s sense, rather in the ordinary sense in which everyone always asked my son. What would happen if everyone did as you do? In terms of utility—what? In the utilitarian sense. But not because when you do it everyone will do it, because he answers: what do you mean? I’ll do it quietly. That’s the answer. They’ll also do it quietly; everyone will do it quietly, based on this logical reasoning. And therefore the beautiful intellectual flip-flop that happens here in the end is that it does come back to a utilitarian calculation. And “what would happen if everyone did as you do” really is in the consequentialist sense and not in the Kantian sense—but it passes through the Kantian sense. Only that way do you achieve the consequentialist consideration. So this is a wonderful interplay between consequentialist reasoning and reasoning about the act itself—deontological morality and teleological morality.

[Speaker G] I think that’s not stable enough, that consequentialist reasoning—meaning if you look only from the direction of the result—it’s not part of the fact that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a collective result. On the personal level, it’s always worthwhile for you to cheat them, even after taking that consideration into account. Obviously. Only on the collective level. It’s only if you know that everyone will act that way. And therefore the only solution by which we as a society will survive is if each individual, on his own, does something irrational. And it really is irrational. It’s not that it only seems irrational, or that he’s sacrificing himself for the sake of the collective. No. It’s an act that is genuinely irrational, because the collective won’t lose anything if I do it. And there’s no way out of this mess. It really makes no difference at all—if others are going to do what they’re going to do, what difference does it make what I do? And if everyone is working with that logic, then they’ll work with that logic anyway, so it also doesn’t matter what I do. It doesn’t hold up in any way when you look at it. You have to look at society as an organ, as an organism. And when you make the calculation, you make the calculation together with everyone, even though each person does it separately and no one is coordinating with anyone else, but in essence we are making a collective calculation here. It’s like the Passover offering. The claim about the Passover offering is that it is an individual offering; the Passover offering is not a communal offering. But regarding the Passover offering it is said that impurity is permitted for the community. That was originally said from the Passover offering, and afterward applied to all communal offerings. So they ask: but the Passover offering is an individual offering, not a communal one. The claim is that it is an individual offering that all of Israel bring. As opposed to other individual offerings, where whoever brings one brings one—but here the entire people of Israel, each one as an individual, bring an individual offering. In such a situation, impurity is permitted for the community. What’s the idea there? The idea there is exactly the categorical imperative, or a symbol of the categorical imperative. You have to make your personal calculations as a limb within a collective. Not that you need to talk with everyone and make calculations together and vote. Even when you make your own personal, self-interested calculations, only then do you create a collective. You have to look at it through the lenses of the collective, as though everyone is making that same calculation. But it’s not a communal offering. A communal offering is when the whole community brings it, the Knesset Yisrael brings the offering, not each person separately. The Passover offering is the collective calculation made by the private individual. And therefore it is considered a communal offering and not an individual offering with regard to impurity, at least with regard to the rule that impurity is permitted for the community, and in several other respects as well. And what’s the basic idea here, now that I’m already talking about it? In the Passover offering—and you can also see this in the second Passover and elsewhere—there are a lot of ideas here. In the Passover offering, after all, on Passover we are basically entering into being a people. Right? Our fusion into being a people after the Exodus from Egypt—that is basically Passover. We left Egypt, and then the giving of the Torah completes that process, but Passover begins it. And I think it is not by chance that the transition from individuals to a collective is made through the Passover offering. Because the Passover offering tells you not how a collective functions. That comes after the giving of the Torah: then a collective is formed, and then of course there are communal offerings, additional offerings, and all that—those are offerings that the community itself brings; they are not connected to private individuals at all. They come from the money of the half-shekel given by private individuals, but the communal offering is decided upon by the collective and brought by the collective; it has nothing to do with the individuals. In the Passover offering, you take the separate individuals and fuse them into a community. How do you do that? You cause a person to make his personal calculation through the lens of what will happen to the collective, because everyone will make their personal calculation the way he does. Exactly the categorical imperative. As long as you don’t achieve that, there is no collective. And therefore collective decisions also cannot exist. The collective exists only where each individual undergoes some kind of mental transformation, to understand that he is really a limb within a collective. And therefore the Passover offering is really a collection of individual offerings, and yet it has the laws of a communal offering. Because that’s how you create a collective. That is the way the collective is formed: by each individual bringing a Passover offering. Fine, that’s just an aside, yes.

[Speaker B] And what if it really happens that the public doesn’t want to? If everyone really thinks…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then we’re sunk. We’re sunk—then there is no collective here. That’s exactly the point. Then this Passover offering is an individual offering; it’s not a communal offering.

[Speaker B] But doesn’t that justify coercion or something like that? Huh? Couldn’t that justify it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It does justify coercion. So indeed, law or public rules sometimes use coercion in order to force people—yes, that’s right. Even in situations where you are not directly harming anyone, but a phenomenon that spreads will turn society into a problematic society. In that case it’s more complicated, and still sometimes you permit yourself to coerce the individual. For example, drugs, speaking of legalization. Okay? Now, whatever one’s opinion is on that issue, what are the considerations there? Private individuals say: look, I go and use cannabis, I’m not doing anything bad, everybody does it, whether it’s legal or illegal, everybody does it. So what difference does it make whether it’s legal or not legal? There are claims like that. They need to be examined, I don’t know, but there are such claims that say: true, but if it becomes a social phenomenon, then it will create a problem. Even though any individual who wants to can still do it. Does that justify my coercing a single person, when what he does in any case doesn’t affect society? And here he is doing it, he wants to do it. Can I, on that basis, force him not to smoke cannabis? So there are many people who would say yes. Why? Because each person, on the individual level, must also make the public calculation. Meaning: even though on the personal level, if he himself smokes cannabis, nothing will happen to society, but if everyone does it, then something will happen to society. Some people will move on to harder drugs, trafficking will begin, here and there things will snowball. Let’s say—that’s an argument, never mind right now… It’s that kind of argument. Meaning, this is not coercing someone because he is directly harming me—that’s simple. If you are harming someone else, then society will stop you so that you don’t harm him. That’s the simple coercion. And for that you don’t need to be a limb in society. Being a limb in society means that people coerce you even though you are not harming anyone on the personal level, but if everyone does as you do, then there will be a problem. And in this case it’s very tricky, because liberals will say that you don’t coerce in such a case, but in my opinion they miss this point, because the claim is that in the end there is an outcome: you are harming society. That’s exactly the point. And when you harm society, they too agree that coercion is possible. It harms because if everyone acts like you, there will be nothing left in the state treasury. Therefore in the end it is also consequentially harmful, and therefore even a liberal outlook justifies coercion—not only non-liberal outlooks that say, okay, I will coerce you to do what is right regardless of whether it harms anyone, but rather: I coerce you to do what is right because that is what is right. But here, no—even מתוך a liberal outlook there is room for coercion in such a situation, and that is what many people do not understand. Meaning that sometimes—and I’ll say it again—because this is consequential, I am not coercing you because it is the right thing, which is the Kantian view. I am coercing you because it is right regardless of the consequences—the original Kantian, meaning only the consideration of the action itself. But here, in the end, the outcome—the derivative in the end—is a consequential derivative, and therefore even from consequential considerations, those that are not Kantian but rather utilitarian or liberal, they too can actually justify coercion in such a case. It’s a very—this point has many implications—it’s a very interesting point, I think, and I don’t think many people notice this subtle distinction between the outcome that comes from the non-consequential consideration and the way it relates to the collective. Meaning, why is this in fact the condition for a collection of individuals to be fused into a collective? Okay, fine, that’s a lot.