Halacha and Ethics – Lesson 1
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Table of Contents
- Opening the series: defining Jewish law and morality
- Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed: Adam’s sin, intelligibles and conventions
- Rabbi Kook versus Maimonides: intellect versus will
- The status of good and evil: a difficulty in Maimonides’ classification
- Factual claims versus normative claims: logical positivism and the description/prescription distinction
- The dilemma of morality: neither fact nor convention, and moral relativism
- Moral realism, moral intuition, and the naturalistic fallacy
- Morality as obedience to a command: the parable of Amnon Yitzhak, Kant, and Maimonides
- “If there is no God in this place, they will kill me”: morality without God as a normative problem
- Closing question about relativism and intuition, and a brief answer
Summary
General Overview
A new series opens on Jewish law and morality, מתוך a need to define mainly morality, and to some extent also Jewish law, and to understand the character of the two systems and how one navigates between them. A passage is brought from The Guide for the Perplexed (beginning of Part I, chapter 2), where Maimonides interprets Adam’s sin as a decline from the world of intelligibles—truth and falsehood—to the world of conventions—good and evil, proper and improper—and not as an upgrade. From this distinction a difficulty arises regarding the status of moral claims, and a philosophical argument develops according to which anyone seeking valid morality must assume moral realism and some capacity for moral cognition; also, morality and Jewish law require responsiveness to a command and not merely natural inclination or convention, to the point of linking this to the article “If there is no God in this place, they will kill me” in a normative sense.
Opening the series: defining Jewish law and morality
A new series opens on Jewish law and morality, and the discussion draws on material that was addressed in the past in various frameworks that became mixed together during the Zoom period. A more precise definition is needed of “morality,” and perhaps also of “Jewish law,” in order to understand the character of the two systems and the way one should maneuver between them.
Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed: Adam’s sin, intelligibles and conventions
Maimonides explains that “elohim” is a shared term that can refer also to angels and judges, and he cites Onkelos, who interpreted “and you shall be like elohim” as “and you shall be like great ones,” meaning important people. A sage objects that the verse seems to imply that before the sin Adam was like an animal without intellect and without distinguishing between good and evil, while as a result of the rebellion he attained an intellectual perfection that seems like a reward rather than a punishment. Maimonides replies that the intellect—which is man’s ultimate perfection—was given to Adam before his rebellion, and because of it Scripture says he was created in the image and likeness of God, and because of it he was commanded, for there is no command for one who has no intellect.
Maimonides states that through intellect a person distinguishes between truth and falsehood, whereas “improper” and “proper” belong to conventions and not to intelligibles; therefore one does not say of factual claims such as “the heavens are spherical” that they are proper or improper, but rather true or false. Maimonides describes that before the sin, when man was in his intellectual perfection, he had no capacity to use conventions and did not grasp them at all, to the point that he did not see anything improper in nakedness. Maimonides explains that after the rebellion man turned toward imaginary desires and sensory pleasures, and was punished by losing that intellectual apprehension and becoming immersed in the world of convention, of disgrace and propriety; therefore Scripture says “and you shall be like elohim, knowing good and evil,” and not “knowing truth and falsehood.”
Maimonides interprets “and the eyes of both of them were opened” as the revelation of a new kind of knowledge and not as new sensory sight; therefore it says “and they knew that they were naked” and not “and they saw,” because sight itself did not change, only the judgment of shame was newly formed. Maimonides adds an explanation of “you change his face and send him away” as a turning away from a proper direction toward what had been forbidden, and he presents the expulsion from Eden and the move to toil for food as measure for measure, including “thorns and thistles shall it bring forth for you,” “by the sweat of your brow,” and “you shall eat the herb of the field.”
Rabbi Kook versus Maimonides: intellect versus will
It is said that as a consistent motif in “To the Perplexed of the Generation,” Rabbi Kook reworks The Guide for the Perplexed for his own era, and instead of Maimonides’ emphasis on intellect as the main human perfection, Rabbi Kook emphasizes will, the capacity to choose, and values. This is identified as an important point that will return later.
The status of good and evil: a difficulty in Maimonides’ classification
A difficulty is presented in the fact that Maimonides places “good and evil” together with “improper and proper” in the realm of convention, while the examples of intelligibles seem to be only factual propositions. Three categories are distinguished: facts, judged as true or false; social conventions of manners and conduct, belonging to convention; and moral good and evil, whose status is unclear, though in Maimonides it appears to be assigned to convention. A possibility is suggested that Maimonides mainly meant conventions such as clothing and the like, and that moral prohibitions such as murder and theft belong for him to intellect—but the question remains how such an assignment can be justified.
Factual claims versus normative claims: logical positivism and the description/prescription distinction
A factual claim is defined as a claim that describes a state of affairs in the world and is judged in terms of truth and falsehood, even if there is not always a practical ability to verify it, while rejecting the extremism of logical positivism. Examples are given such as the number of ants in the world or the prediction “tomorrow there will be a naval battle,” and it is also argued that the question “whether God exists” is a factual claim even without sensory or scientific verification. A descriptive claim such as “the law book contains a prohibition against stealing” is distinguished from a normative claim such as “it is forbidden to steal,” and the distinction is formulated as that between a descriptive sentence and a normative sentence.
The dilemma of morality: neither fact nor convention, and moral relativism
It is argued that it is hard to see “it is forbidden to murder” as a factual claim, because there is nothing to compare it to in order to determine truth or falsehood; but it is also hard to see it as mere convention, because then a society in which murder is accepted would be morally “fine.” A distinction is made between descriptive relativism as an anthropological statement about the variation of norms between societies, and substantive moral relativism, which claims that there is no binding moral truth and that norms are only convention. It is argued that moral relativism leads to a moral vacuum in which a person does whatever he wants, and that in the end all that remains is a forceful protective response—prison or force—without the ability to judge in a substantive moral sense.
Moral realism, moral intuition, and the naturalistic fallacy
It is argued that in order to accept “valid morality,” one must assume moral realism, according to which there is a moral element in objective reality that obligates everyone, and not merely a psychological structure or social agreement. It is also argued that there is a necessary epistemic assumption of an ability to recognize this reality through conscience or moral intuition, similar to general perceptual ability, even though there may be moral “color-blind” people. The naturalistic fallacy is presented as the claim that one cannot derive a norm from a fact; therefore explanations such as “murder causes pain, therefore it is forbidden to murder” are insufficient without an additional assumption.
It is argued that the only way to deal with this is to say that morality does indeed belong to the intelligibles, but not as sensory observation of neutral facts; rather, it is as the contemplation of the intellect/conscience upon the idea of the good, and thus “ethical facts” are disclosed—facts that are not neutral but charged and motivating. It is argued that the question “I understand that murder is evil, but why not murder?” is meaningless, because a charged ethical fact already includes its own normative motivational force. A distinction is drawn between descriptive sentences, which describe neutral facts, and prescriptive sentences, which direct action; and it is concluded that morality requires an external source that serves as the foundation of validity for the moral command.
Morality as obedience to a command: the parable of Amnon Yitzhak, Kant, and Maimonides
A story is brought from Amnon Yitzhak about a rabbi who slaughtered a sheep, covered it with a prayer shawl, and announced, “A righteous man has passed away,” in order to illustrate that the criterion “he doesn’t murder and doesn’t steal” alone does not define righteousness. It is argued that the parable sharpens a moral point: a sheep is not moral because it acts out of nature without choice, whereas a moral person is one who chooses the good out of responsiveness to a command, and not merely because it feels pleasant or “warm in the belly.” Kant is credited with the view that a moral person acts out of responsiveness to a command, and a practical implication is clarified: even when it is unpleasant or difficult, one still acts correctly.
The verse “Now I know that you are a God-fearing man” is brought in the context of acting out of obedience, and it is said that this points to religious fidelity to the divine command, not necessarily to fidelity to the moral command. Maimonides is cited at the end of chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings, where a gentile who keeps the seven Noahide commandments “because reason compelled him” is not among “the pious of the nations of the world” but rather among “their wise men”; and it is concluded that a commandment is defined as responsiveness to a command—“because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it”—and not as an experience or natural inclination.
“If there is no God in this place, they will kill me”: morality without God as a normative problem
It is said that moralists use the statement “If there is no God in this place, they will kill me” to argue that “where there is no God, there is no morality.” It is argued that a descriptive reading, according to which non-believing societies are not moral, is mistaken, because there are non-believing societies and people who conduct themselves morally. It is argued that the statement is correct in a normative sense: without God there is no valid and consistent morality from a rational standpoint, even though people can behave “perfectly decently”; and it is said that the full connection between this whole line of thought and the Holy One, blessed be He, is a leap that will need to be completed in the next lecture.
Closing question about relativism and intuition, and a brief answer
A question is asked whether one can maintain a moral relativism in which what obligates is an intuition to be moral, while the content depends on the variables of life. The answer given is that appealing to variables and facts just returns us to the naturalistic fallacy.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, today we’re starting a new series on Jewish law and morality. Overall, this will bring together things I’ve touched on here and there in various frameworks, and by now all the frameworks are getting mixed together in these cheerful Zoom days, but before we get to Jewish law and morality, first I need to define a bit better mainly morality, but maybe also a little bit Jewish law, and to understand the character of these two systems and exactly how one can or should navigate between them. So I’ll start, maybe, with a famous passage from The Guide for the Perplexed. Let’s enlarge the text a little so it’ll be easier to follow. He’s talking about Adam’s sin, yes? This is at the beginning of The Guide for the Perplexed, chapter two. “A learned man asked me many years ago a great question. We must reflect on the question, on our answer, and on its resolution. Before I mention the question and its resolution, I will say that every Hebrew speaker already knows that the term elohim is a shared term for God, for angels, and for judges, the leaders of states.” Yes, that’s the Talmud at the beginning of Sanhedrin, that the word elohim basically means judges, or important people. “And Onkelos the convert, peace be upon him, already explained” — this is where it appears in his translation — “that the phrase ‘and you shall be like elohim, knowing good and evil’ refers to the last of these meanings,” and he translated it as “and you shall be like great ones.” When the Holy One, blessed be He, warns Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and says to them, “you shall be like elohim, knowing good and evil,” he explains that elohim there doesn’t mean the Holy One, blessed be He. Wait, let me mute something here.
[Speaker B] There’s some noise here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t mean the Holy One, blessed be He, but rather important people, elohim in the second sense. That’s the introduction. Now, “and you shall be like great ones” means you’ll be like great people. “And after setting out the shared use of this term, let us begin mentioning the question.” Throughout the opening chapters of The Guide for the Perplexed he tries to distinguish between shared terms or related terms, concepts that seem similar and aren’t exactly the same, or don’t seem the same and actually are; so here too he does that. “Let us begin mentioning this question. The questioner said: From the plain meaning of the text it appears that man’s original intention was to be like the other animals, having no intellect and no thought, and not distinguishing between good and evil. And when he rebelled” — when he did not obey the Holy One, blessed be He — “his rebellion brought him that great perfection unique to man, namely this cognition that exists in us, which is the noblest of the things found in us, and by which we are constituted.” Yes, this is what in a sense defines our very essence. “And it is astonishing that the punishment for his rebellion should be the granting of a perfection he had not possessed, namely intellect. This is like saying that a certain man rebelled and greatly increased his wrongdoing, and therefore his nature was changed for the better and he became a star in the heavens.” A person sinned, and as a punishment they put him — he was in a bad state, sinned, and as a punishment he got transferred into a perfect state. Right? So he’s basically saying: how can such a thing be, that when Adam sins, the punishment he receives is an upgrade — “and you shall be like elohim, knowing good and evil” — now you become people with intellect as a result of the sin. That’s not a punishment; that’s a reward. Something here doesn’t work. “This was the intention of the question and its content, even though it was not phrased exactly this way. And now hear the substance of our answer. We said: Let any person who examines at the beginning of his reflections and plans, at the beginning of his thinking, and who imagines he can understand a book that guides the earlier and later generations by skimming it in spare moments between drinking and intercourse, as he would skim a history book or a collection of songs — let him sit down and reflect, for the matter is not as he thought at first glance.” When you approach the Torah, don’t think you can just read things and whatever first interpretation pops into your head is probably the point. If this is meant to guide all the earlier and later generations, then apparently you need to go a bit deeper into the text in order to understand what exactly it means. “But, as becomes clear upon reflection on this matter” — after you reflect and don’t do it superficially — what do we discover? “That the intellect which the Creator bestowed upon man, and which is his ultimate perfection, was given to man before his rebellion.” Before he rebelled against the Holy One, blessed be He, man had already been given intellect. His final perfection, the most complete one, the one that completes his perfection, actually came to him before the sin. “And because of it it was said of him that he was in the image of God and in His likeness.” So when the Holy One, blessed be He, says that man was created in His image, the meaning is that before the sin man was already complete. It’s not that perfection came to him as a result of the sin; he was complete even before the sin. He was already in the image of God then. “And because of it He spoke to him and commanded him.” Therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, speaks to man and commands him, because this is the creature built for that. This is the complete creature. He doesn’t speak to animals and plants. “As it says, ‘And the Lord God commanded,’ and there is no command to beasts or to one who has no intellect. And through intellect man distinguishes between truth and falsehood.” And this was present in him in its fullness, in its perfection. The intellect that Adam had before he rebelled was full, complete. It’s not that he improved as a reward after the sin. Therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, spoke to him and commanded him and all those things. By the way, as an aside, for Maimonides man’s greatest perfection is intellect. In one of the previous years we studied — in the Thursday class, the Petah Tikva class; today everything is done on Zoom in the same way — in one of those earlier years we studied Rabbi Kook’s book “To the Perplexed of the Generation,” and we saw there that in a fairly consistent way it’s a kind of adaptation or editing of The Guide for the Perplexed to fit Rabbi Kook’s generation. He thinks the original Guide for the Perplexed wasn’t suitable, so he says “To the Perplexed of the Generation,” to the perplexed of our generation. And the central motif running through at least the beginning of the book is that where Maimonides speaks about intellect, Rabbi Kook speaks about will. Meaning, Maimonides here says that the main perfection of man is intellect; Rabbi Kook sees the main perfection of man דווקא as will and not intellect. Will, the ability to choose, values, not necessarily intellect or cognition. And that’s an important point that we’ll get back to in a moment. In any case, Maimonides says that perfection, intellect, was present in man even before the sin, in its full form. He was completely whole; it wasn’t that as a result of the sin he became complete, as that sage asked. “However” — I continue reading — “the improper and the proper belong to convention, not to intelligibles.” When we talk about something being improper or proper, that belongs to conventions, not to intelligibles. Conventions meaning what is accepted among people. People know that this is what is accepted, as opposed to intelligibles, which are what is actually true. The improper and the proper belong to conventions, not to intelligibles. It’s convention, not truth. “For one does not say ‘the heavens are spherical’ is proper, nor ‘the earth is flat’ is improper.” You can’t say about the statement “the earth is flat” that it’s an improper statement. “Rather one says true and false.” Not proper and improper, but true and false. About facts we don’t say that the facts are proper or improper. Facts are either true or false. “And similarly in our language, regarding what is correct and what is null, one says true and false; but regarding the proper and the improper, one says good and evil. And through intellect man knows truth from falsehood.” With what faculty do we distinguish between truth and falsehood? Intellect. “And this applies to all intelligible matters. And when man was in the perfection and completeness of his condition, together with his thoughts and intelligibles, concerning which it was said, ‘You made him little lower than elohim,’ he had no capacity whatsoever to make use of conventions, nor to apprehend them — to the point that even the most obvious matter of convention in terms of impropriety, namely exposure of nakedness, was not improper in his eyes, and he did not apprehend its impropriety.” So that was man’s initial state. “And when he rebelled” — after he committed the sin — “and turned toward his imaginary desires and the pleasures of his physical senses,” he desired the tree because it was pleasant for food, and that’s why he ate it. He went after his bodily urges, the pleasure of the senses, after imagination, which told him it was worth eating. Imagination always works together with desire. “As it says, ‘for the tree was good for food, and a delight to the eyes,’ he was punished by being deprived of that intellectual apprehension.” Meaning, because he had a lofty intellectual apprehension, he didn’t know how to grasp conventions; and therefore, when he went after his urges, the improper, and bodily desires — “for the tree was good for food and a delight to the eyes” — and he ate it, against intellect but with the urges, he was punished. So what was his punishment? “He was deprived of that intellectual apprehension.” So he was taken out of the sphere of pure intellect in which he existed before the sin, that perfection of which it says, “You made him little lower than elohim.” “And because of this he rebelled against the commandment, which had been commanded to him because of his intellect, and he attained apprehension of conventions and became immersed in judgments of disgrace and propriety.” He entered this whole atmosphere of improper and proper. At first he was in the sphere of truth and falsehood; after the sin he was punished, taken out of the sphere of truth and falsehood, and suddenly the whole world that he hadn’t seen before was revealed to his eyes — of proper versus improper. “Then he knew the measure of what he had lost and of what had been stripped from him, and in what condition he now found himself. Therefore it says, ‘and you shall be like elohim, knowing good and evil,’ and it does not say ‘knowing falsehood and truth’ or ‘grasping falsehood and truth.’ For good and evil are not matters of necessity at all.” But falsehood and truth, with regard to facts, are necessary; and when you judge facts, you judge them in terms of truth or falsehood, not in terms of good and evil, not in terms of proper and improper. Therefore “and you shall be like elohim, knowing good and evil” basically means that they were taken from the Garden of truth and falsehood and thrown into another world, where the operative categories are more improper and proper, or good and evil, rather than truth and falsehood — conventions instead of intelligibles. Now, he says here that this is not just some opposition between these two things. He says that when they were in the world of intelligibles, they couldn’t distinguish conventions at all. That’s why they didn’t notice they were naked. Only after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge did “their eyes open and they knew that they were naked.” Obviously that doesn’t mean their eyes literally opened; they saw before too, but they didn’t notice. Why? Because going naked belongs to convention; it’s a social convention. And someone occupied with intellect is occupied with the question of what is true and what is not true; he isn’t occupied with conventions — conventions aren’t interesting. After they sinned with the Tree of Knowledge and entered this world of conventions, of good and evil, proper and improper, suddenly they became sensitive to conventions, to social norms, and then suddenly they saw that they were walking around naked. And therefore it says there, “and you shall be like elohim, knowing good and evil,” not knowing truth and falsehood. All this is an answer to the question, I remind you. The question was: how can it be that as a result of the sin man is punished and his situation improves? He suddenly becomes like elohim, knowing good and evil. So Maimonides says: that’s not improvement, it’s decline. From the world of truth and falsehood he entered the world of convention, and in that world you have to cover your nakedness. In the previous world you didn’t have to cover it at all, because conventions played no role; what mattered there was only truth and falsehood. In the world of proper and improper, in the lower world to which they descended after the sin, in that world proper and improper, good and evil, conventions, all play a role. “And reflect on the verse: ‘And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked,’ and it does not say, ‘and the eyes of both of them were opened, and they saw.’ For what they saw before is what they saw afterward.” When their eyes were opened, it didn’t enable them to see something, in the sense of literal eyesight, because they were seeing exactly what they had seen before. Their eyes didn’t change. There weren’t blinders removed from the eye. “But something else was renewed in them, by which they judged as disgraceful what previously they did not judge as disgraceful.” The concept of the disgraceful was what became new. Before, there was no such concept, and now suddenly it seemed disgraceful to them that they were naked. “And know that this expression, to open, or to be opened, is in no way used except regarding the revelation of knowledge” — some knowledge was suddenly revealed to them — “not for the occurrence of a new sensory sight. ‘And God opened her eyes’; ‘then the eyes of the blind shall be opened’; ‘he opens ears and they do not hear’ — as in the phrase ‘they have eyes to see, and did not see.’” In all those cases, “opening” means some awareness came to them that they previously lacked, not that they saw something they couldn’t physically see before. “And God opened her eyes” — speaking of Hagar — and suddenly she sees a well there. The well was there before too; she simply didn’t notice it. What changed here wasn’t sight, but awareness. “But regarding Adam it says, ‘You change his face and send him away’; its meaning and explanation are that when he changed the direction of his face, he was sent away. For face is a term derived from turning, from facing, because by his face a person directs himself toward what he intends. And it says that when he changed his orientation and directed himself toward the thing concerning which he had previously been commanded not to direct himself” — man turned toward the Tree of Knowledge, to the thing he had been commanded not to turn toward — “he was sent from the Garden of Eden. And this is a punishment corresponding to the rebellion, measure for measure.” This punishment is measure for measure for what he did. “He had been permitted to eat from delights,” he was allowed to eat from every tree of the garden and enjoy himself peacefully and securely. “And when his desire grew and he pursued his pleasures and imaginings, as we have said, and he ate from that which he had been warned not to eat, he was deprived of everything and became obligated to eat the lowest kind of food, which had not previously been his nourishment, and even that only after labor and toil,” as it says, “thorns and thistles shall it bring forth for you,” and so on, “by the sweat of your brow,” and so on. “And He clarified and said, ‘And the Lord God sent him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.’ And he was made like the animals in his food,” he too now begins to work the ground and eat like animals that eat things from the ground, as it says, “and you shall eat the herb of the field.” And he says — in short, that’s his claim. What is he really saying? He’s saying that the process after the sin was actually a process of decline, not of ascent as the one who asked the question thought. What was the decline? Before the sin, man was occupied only with intelligibles, truth and falsehood, and was not at all sensitive, not at all aware, of conventions — of proper and improper, good and evil, social conventions. After the sin, because he followed desires rather than intellect, they took him out of the world of intellect and put him into the world of desires, the world of urges, the world of imagination, the world where conventions come in, where people invent all sorts of things, establish some convention, agree on it — we agree among ourselves, and now suddenly it becomes binding. Why do you need to wear clothes? Because everyone decided you need to wear clothes. What’s the problem if we walk around without clothes? Nothing. It’s convention. Therefore Maimonides’ claim is that we are now entering a world that really is lower. This punishment genuinely lowered them in rank; it didn’t elevate them. The world in which they now live is a lower world. By the way, as an aside, of course once you’re already in this world, then you also need to act according to conventions. It’s not that now, despite living in this world, you remain operating only with intelligibles. Maimonides is not calling on us to be nudists. He’s saying that in a world where this really isn’t relevant, there’s no problem — but that isn’t called nudism; that’s simply the natural state. Nudism is always when it comes as a reaction to some culture that rejects it, as a protest movement or defiance against the culture that rejects it. That’s not what Maimonides is talking about here. In a place where these conventions already exist, these social norms already exist, then there too you must observe them. If there are accepted norms in society, one must keep them. Okay, so that’s what he says. In any case, the strange point here is that when Maimonides divides between intelligibles and conventions, I would have put good and evil under intelligibles, not conventions. Maimonides puts good and evil, proper and improper, into conventions. So what falls under intelligibles? It seems, from his examples, that it’s only facts. Right? What examples did he give? That the heavens are spherical and the earth is flat and things like that. Right? That’s basically his example of intelligibles. We read it — for some reason I suddenly don’t see it now. Yes, here. “For one does not say the heavens are spherical is proper, nor the earth is flat is improper, but rather true and false.” So he’s talking about facts. So intellect deals only with facts, and everything else belongs to conventions. What is “everything else”? There are a few things there. There’s proper and improper in the sense of cultural conventions, manners and etiquette. Wearing clothes, eating with knife and fork, speaking politely, I don’t know, all sorts of things like that, Hanna Bavli. Hanna Bavli isn’t dealing with morality; Hanna Bavli deals with manners, with social conventions. So that, I understand, belongs under conventions, fine — because it’s a human convention, everyone has to know what’s accepted in society, and it’s fitting to behave accordingly, but it’s still convention. One could have chosen the opposite convention and that would also have been fine. But good and evil in the moral sense — say, the prohibition of murder, theft, harming someone, the obligation to help another person — I’m talking about morality, not conventions — does that also belong to conventions? And in Maimonides here it somewhat seems that it does, because Maimonides speaks about good and evil together with conventions. If he had said only proper and improper all along, I would say he means just manners and etiquette, just Hanna Bavli. But here he also includes good and evil together with proper and improper. And on the side of intelligibles he included only facts — what I marked here on the page: the heavens are spherical, the earth is flat — in other words, factual propositions. So there’s some category here where it’s not entirely clear what’s happening. Meaning, good and evil — if Maimonides means moral good and evil, and in the simple sense that’s what these words mean — then he’s placing them under conventions, and that’s very strange. On the other hand — and this is a good point with which to open the whole discussion — because Maimonides really is classifying the different categories. If we speak about three categories: one category is facts, a second category is proper and improper, say manners and etiquette, social conventions, and the third category is good and evil. The first two are fairly clear in how they’re classified: facts are truth and falsehood; social conventions are proper and improper, they’re conventions. But good and evil — their status in itself isn’t clear, although in Maimonides it somehow appears that he puts them under conventions. And that really raises the question of how to relate to moral principles. That’s why I say this is a good point from which to begin clarifying what morality is at all. When we speak about a moral principle such as that it’s forbidden to murder, or forbidden to steal, or honor your parents, or something like that — where does that come from? Why is it true? Or does it even make sense to speak about it in terms of true and false? Are these factual propositions? So, factual propositions in the simple sense are propositions that describe facts in the world. In order to know whether such a proposition is true or false, whether a factual claim is true or false, what I need to do is make a comparison. Say I claim now that the fan next to me is on. I want to check whether that claim is correct or not — so I look and see: if the fan is on, then the claim is correct; if it isn’t on, then the claim is false. So to determine about factual claims that they are true or false, what you really need to do is make a comparison. Now, the logical positivists took this to an extreme place. They basically assumed that the content of a claim cannot be detached from the way one can verify whether it is correct or not. For example, if someone says that there are ten billion ants in the world — okay? Now there’s no way to check that. How can you count all the ants in the world? There’s no way to check that. So for the logical positivists, that thing is not a claim. It isn’t judged in terms of truth or falsehood because we have no way to make the comparison and check whether the claim is true or false. But that’s an extreme definition, because I think it’s quite clear that the statement that the number of ants in the world is ten billion is a factual claim. Either it’s correct or it isn’t. The fact that I, or anyone else, can’t know whether it’s correct or not, or can’t check it — fine, that’s a technical limitation. But clearly it describes something in the world. If there really are ten billion ants in the world, then the claim is true, and if not, then it isn’t true. The fact that I can’t check it doesn’t mean it isn’t a factual claim. Likewise, the statement “tomorrow there will be a naval battle” is a factual claim. I have no way to check it because tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. When tomorrow comes, we’ll see. Right now I have no way to check it — so is it not a factual claim? Of course it’s a factual claim. It says something about the world, and that something is either true or not true. The fact that I can’t check it is irrelevant. Okay? Therefore, if you’ll agree with me to broaden the definition of factual claims a bit, then I’ll say: factual claims are claims that say something about the world, describe some fact in the world, and are judged in terms of truth and falsehood even if we can’t always judge them or verify them; but that’s how we relate to them. That’s Maimonides’ first category, the intelligibles — yes, truth and falsehood. Let’s say the same thing about the question of whether God exists. Even that we have no way of observing through the senses or confirming scientifically. Okay? But it’s still a factual claim. If God exists, then the claim is true; if God does not exist, then the claim is not true. It’s a factual claim. The fact that we have no scientific way to verify it, to check whether it’s true or false — fine, that’s our limitation — but it has nothing to do with the fact that the claim says something about the world. And whoever disagrees with me — one is right and the other is wrong, no tricks here. So that’s with respect to factual claims.
[Speaker C] It’s a matter of definition. Meaning, if I say “this is a chair” because there’s an agreement — we all agree that this shape of furniture is a chair — then it’s true only because we all agreed that this piece of furniture is a chair.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, I didn’t understand — so it’s simply a matter of definition, right?
[Speaker C] Right, so what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why are definitions interesting? Obviously there are things that depend on definition, so what?
[Speaker C] But does that fall under the definition of truth and falsehood?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s a definition. If you say a definition isn’t true or false, that applies to a claim. Claims, not definitions. A definition—whatever you define, you’ve defined. A claim can be true and it can be false. In principle, with definitions—we talked about this once—there’s no point arguing about definitions. You can define it this way, you can define it differently; that’s not an argument. Define it however you want. So factual claims are judged in terms of truth or falsehood. Claims of social convention—well, that depends. Of course, if I describe that in the world there is a convention to eat with a knife and fork, that too is a factual claim. You can check whether there really is such a convention, and then the claim is true, and if not, then not. But the obligation itself to eat with a knife and fork is not a fact, right? It’s like if I say that in the law book of the State of Israel there is a prohibition against stealing. That is a factual claim. You can look and see. But if I say, “It is forbidden to steal,” that is not a factual claim in the simple sense. Two different things. The first sentence is a descriptive sentence. Okay? The second sentence is a normative sentence. A sentence that says something is permitted, forbidden, or obligatory. All right? That’s something completely different. Okay? So the question that arises here is how we are to relate to normative statements: “It is forbidden to steal,” “it is forbidden to desecrate the Sabbath,” “you must love your fellow as yourself,” all kinds of things of that sort. How should we relate to that kind of statement? Are these statements part of intelligibles or conventions? Somehow it seems they are neither here nor there. And therefore this ambiguity that comes out of Maimonides, whom we read, actually also exists in this very category of these statements. It’s apparently not just that somehow it accidentally fell between the cracks. These statements really do fall between the cracks. And why? On the one hand, it is very hard to see them as factual claims. Let’s say we take the claim, “It is forbidden to murder.” It’s very hard to see that claim as a factual claim. Why? Because if I want to know whether this claim is correct or not, I look for what to compare it to. Right? We said that in order to judge whether a claim is true or false, you have to perform an act of comparison. What exactly am I supposed to compare that claim to in order to know whether it is true or false? I don’t have anything. I have nothing to compare it to. So at first glance it seems that this is not a factual claim. And again I remind you: if you tell me that under Israeli law, Israeli law forbids murder, that is a factual claim, and you can open the law book and see that it contains a prohibition against murder. But what I’m talking about here is not the claim that the Israeli law book contains a prohibition against murder, but the claim “It is forbidden to murder.” All right? That claim is a norm, not a fact. If the claim “the Israeli law book contains a prohibition against murder” is a factual claim, then indeed you can check it: open the book and see whether there is such a prohibition there or not. That will determine whether it is true or false. Then there’s no problem at all, a regular factual claim. But if we are talking about the claim “It is forbidden to murder,” that claim I have nothing to compare with in order to check whether it is true or false. If someone tells me that murder is permitted, what can I say to him? I disagree with him, fine, but what—can I bring him evidence? Can I take him and say: look, see, it’s obvious that murder is forbidden. What exactly is he supposed to look at? Nothing. There’s nothing to look at. What do I look at when I determine that murder is forbidden? There’s nothing to look at. So apparently this is not a factual claim. The problem from the other side is that if it’s not a factual claim, then what category remains? If it’s not intelligibles, then it’s conventions. What else could it be? Either objective truth and falsehood, or something subjective—that is, an agreed convention. What else could it be? But that doesn’t work either, or at least it’s hard to accept. Why? Because if I assume that normative claims are claims of convention, then that basically means that the reason murder is forbidden is because in this society it’s accepted not to murder. Okay. And if there were another society where it was accepted to murder, then fine, there the moral principle would say to murder, because what determines it is the convention. Okay? That sounds a bit too weak to describe a moral normative statement. Okay? About aesthetics you can argue whether aesthetic claims depend on society, on a society’s conventions; it’s pretty clear that to some extent at least they do. But with ethical claims it is harder to accept such a thing. For when I see a society in which people murder each other freely, won’t I think that that society is morally problematic? It seems I would; at any rate I would think so. But why? After all, their convention is that there is no convention forbidding murder. If this kind of statement is conventional, then what’s the problem? Then indeed they don’t have that convention there and everything is fine. If I judge them or condemn them, that means that from my perspective this is not a convention. So what is it? If it’s neither conventions nor intelligibles, then what can it be? There is this dilemma here, and that is what underlies the debate over what is called moral relativism. Moral relativism, by the way, can also be interpreted in two ways. There is a relativism that is merely a descriptive claim; it describes. It simply says: there are different societies in the world that practice different moral norms. The Eskimos put the elderly out into the snow, and elsewhere they care for them. Okay? So that’s a factual statement, right. And again, not all moral norms are disputed, but some are. Okay? So there are various disagreements between different societies regarding moral norms here and there. I don’t think there are all that many, by the way, but here and there there are. But that is a factual claim. Substantive moral relativism is a claim from anthropology, not from ethics. An anthropologist documents different societies and what is practiced in each such society. So he reports his findings and says there are different societies in which different moral or ethical norms are practiced. Okay, I understand. That is not what is called moral relativism in the substantive sense. Moral relativism means that there are no correct norms, that a norm is merely a convention, and therefore in every society there are its own norms, or can be its own norms, because whatever they agree on are the binding norms—it’s just convention. That is exactly what the moral relativist claims. With the anthropologist I can agree, because in different societies different moral norms really are practiced. With the moral relativist I do not agree. I do not think there is no moral truth, or that everyone’s convention determines the moral norm for him. With that I do not agree. That is a claim in ethics, not in anthropology. It is not a descriptive claim; it is itself a normative claim. It is a claim asserting the absence of a norm, but it is also a normative claim. It says there is no binding norm; each person has his own conventions. That is basically the logical source of this approach called moral relativism. Because what the relativist is really saying is: I have nothing to compare the normative claim to, and therefore there is no truth or falsehood here. Go try to convince someone who thinks morally differently from you—how will you convince him that he is wrong? With a factual claim, he will see and realize that he is mistaken, or you will realize that you are mistaken. But with a moral dispute there is no way to handle it. What are you going to do? He thinks this way, you think that way, and what? You have no way to show it to him. So the moral relativist says: why don’t you? Because a moral claim is not a fact. So what is it then? Apparently the only thing left is convention. What else could it be? And once it’s convention, then not only can’t you persuade him, you also don’t need to persuade him. Let him do what is accepted in his society; I’ll do what is accepted in my society, and that’s it. The very interesting question is why I should do what is accepted in my society. Is that too a conventional norm? In other words, how do I justify the fact that I have an obligation to behave in line with what is accepted in my society? After all, that itself is not a convention, because otherwise I’d ask about that too: why uphold it? That itself is apparently an absolute norm: every person ought to behave according to the conventions accepted in his surroundings. And then of course I ask the moral relativist: where does that norm come from? That one you do accept? Where does it come from? And then moral relativism goes one step further and reaches a moral vacuum. I do what I want, regardless of the conventions accepted in my surroundings. I don’t feel like going along with those conventions; I do what I want, everyone does what he wants. That is the next required step from moral relativism. From relativism to vacuum. And therefore, by the way, these two views are often identified with one another. Moral relativism and moral vacuum are often treated as synonyms. They are not exactly the same thing, but logically, when you think about it, one really does lead to the other, if it is in fact true. The question is: if someone disagrees with them—and I disagree with them, for example—what can you claim? Apparently they are right, because this doesn’t belong to intelligibles. You have nowhere to draw from. On what basis can you determine that a society in which people murder is a bad society, unless you empty the concept of “bad” of all content and say simply: because it doesn’t fit my conventions, that’s what I call bad. Fine, but then that is no longer judgmental, it is descriptive. Fine, so their conventions don’t fit my conventions—so what? Let an anthropologist document that in his research. What does that have to do with me? Why should I care? There is something here for which there is a very heavy price if we go to the relativist pole. And it’s not just, no problem, it’s really not truth and falsehood, it’s conventions and everything is fine, and we can go on as before. It’s not like that. Because if it’s only convention, the next step will be that someone says: conventions don’t interest me; why should I obey them? I don’t want to. And the moral relativist will have nothing to answer him. What will he usually answer him? I know what they usually answer because I’ve had this argument many times already. What they usually answer is: true, you’re right, I have nothing to say to you, I’ll just kill you, or put you in jail, or whatever, just to defend myself against you. That’s all. But if you really accept this power-based position, that means there can be no judgment here. You cannot judge him—judge him in the substantive sense, not in court. Judge him in the sense of deciding that he is a bad person, that he is someone who does not do what ought to be done, because there is no such thing as what ought to be done. You can say that if it is accepted among them to murder, then maybe it’s worth putting them all into some large enclosure and not letting them out, because otherwise it’s dangerous here. Okay, so for self-defense, fine, I understand, let’s say so. But judgment in the moral sense—that is, to say that these people are behaving in a way that is unworthy—you cannot do from such a perspective. It’s not relevant within moral relativity, moral relativism. So a person now has to decide. We have what Maimonides presents: either intelligibles or conventions. Etiquette belongs to conventions, facts belong to intelligibles. Where is morality found? When Maimonides speaks about good and evil, apparently he also places that in conventions. I don’t know—we’d need to see the translations; I haven’t actually seen Schwartz’s translation. But it seems to me that a good translation should not use “good” and “evil” here. Rather “ugly” and “fitting,” maybe with synonyms, I don’t know how it was written in Arabic, because Guide for the Perplexed is after all translated from Arabic. But it seems to me that Maimonides does not really mean morality here; rather he really means conventions. And morality is not a convention. From Maimonides’ perspective, it seems to me that the prohibition of murder or the prohibition of theft belongs to reason. It is truth and falsehood, not fitting and disgraceful. It belongs on the side of intelligibles, not on the side of conventions. The conventions he is speaking about here are really etiquette: not to walk around naked, to eat with the knife in the right hand and the fork on the left side, and the like. But good and evil belong to intelligibles. The big question is how one justifies such a thing. Why on earth would it belong to intelligibles? What observation is there from which you can derive what is good and what is bad? That isn’t clear. It seems to me that the only way to deal with this dilemma is what in philosophical ethics is called moral realism. Moral realism means that the basis of moral obligation is rooted in some sense in the objective world. Because what the moral relativist is really claiming is that a moral norm has no anchor in the world itself. It is not the result of an observation, some fact in the world. It is either a result of the way I’m built, or a convention among people, which in the end is just the way they are all built. But ultimately it is not rooted in the external world in any way. It is something that resides in the human world, either inside him or in society somehow having decided upon it, something like that. Moral realism says that morality begins from some sort of thing in the real world, in the objective world. There is some moral fact, and when I observe it—and I’m using that term deliberately—when I observe this moral fact, I discover that murder is forbidden, or theft is forbidden, or that one should help others, honor parents, and all the moral principles, the prohibitions and the obligations. Okay? It is the result of observation. But what does “observation” mean? What kind of observation is that? For it is obvious that through the senses we cannot make this observation. The only way, it seems to me, to describe this is basically to say that a person has some ability to observe two things—we have to assume two assumptions, and pay attention. Anyone who believes in valid morality must assume the following two assumptions. One assumption is moral realism. Moral realism means that there is something in the world or in objective reality from which morality emerges. It’s not just a convention or an invention or my psychological structure or something like that. If it were my psychological structure, someone else has a different psychological structure. By what right do I condemn him for behaving differently from my psychological structure? Why should he behave according to my psychological structure if he has a different one? If I condemn him, that means I accept that there is some standard that binds both him and me. There is something in the objective world—I’m not speaking right now about something physical, it doesn’t have to be something with mass—but something in the objective world from which good and evil can be derived, and it binds everyone. So one assumption is moral realism, ethical realism. The second assumption is that we have tools to observe this reality. Because if it were there but we had no way to know it or observe it, then what good would that do? I still wouldn’t know what is good and what is evil. Clearly I must assume, first, an ontic assumption, meaning about reality itself, what exists in reality itself, and second, an epistemic assumption. Epistemic means about theory of knowledge: that I have some ability to know this moral reality. This ability can be called moral intuition, it can be called conscience—those are synonymous terms.
[Speaker D] But here you can see that there can be people who interpret it differently, the same thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, I didn’t understand?
[Speaker D] If there is an ability to observe, then every person can observe it differently.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe, and maybe not. With the eyes too there is an ability to observe, and usually we observe the same thing, don’t we?
[Speaker D] But someone who observes differently can say that he observes differently, so how can you say he is behaving differently?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Someone who observes differently can also say that it’s different. What do color-blind people say? Color-blind people observe a different reality from you. Fine, what can you do? Does that mean it’s not observation? Fine, that’s life. By the way, even things that are not the result of observation can be disputed—indeed even more so they can be disputed. So when I assume there is observation here, that is not the basis from which you would derive the possibility of argument or the inability to decide. On the contrary, if there is any ability at all to argue and decide, it is only if you assume that there is some sort of observation here. And if I can somehow get the other person to observe in the same way I do, maybe I’ll manage to persuade him, maybe not, but at least there is a chance. But if this is not observation, but just each person according to how he is built, then certainly you will not be able to settle a moral dispute. So the claim is not against me—the opposite. I’m proposing a position for which this is less difficult. And it’s true, there are moral disputes and it’s hard to resolve them; we’ll talk about that later. In any case, the point is that in order to escape moral relativism, in order to accept morality, the existence of valid morality, we have to assume two assumptions. One assumption is that there is some kind of moral reality in the objective world, and the second, an epistemic assumption, is that we have some ability to observe it, grasp it, and understand what it says, and derive from it what is permitted and forbidden, what is good and evil in the moral context. That is what I earlier called conscience or moral intuition. Now this point, this conclusion, apparently stands in opposition to an accepted philosophical principle in this context. It was born in the ethical context. It is called—again, the name isn’t always exact, I always say this, but I still keep calling it that because that’s the conventional name—it is called the naturalistic fallacy. The naturalistic fallacy basically says this: when you ask someone why murder is forbidden, explain this norm to me, that murder is forbidden, he says: what do you mean? Because murder causes pain, it hurts people, the relatives of the murdered person, maybe it hurts the murdered person himself, whatever, and therefore murder is forbidden. So the naturalistic fallacy basically says that such an explanation is invalid. Why? Because that explanation is rooted in facts. The fact that if you murder someone it hurts people, or hurts him himself—that is a fact. But from a fact you cannot derive a norm. There is a huge gap between facts and norms. Therefore there cannot be a justification of morality that is made through factual claims. You cannot justify morality through factual claims. You can’t say, “Why should I give him money? Because the poor man has nothing to eat.” Right? He has nothing to eat—okay, he has nothing to eat. How does it follow from that that I should give him money? What’s the connection? “I should give him money” is a norm. You can’t derive a norm from a fact. Those are two different conceptual categories. I can’t say, “This painting is made of three colors: pink, green, and yellow, and therefore it is beautiful.” That it is made of those three colors is a fact. That it is beautiful is a judgment. You cannot derive a judgment from a fact. In order to derive it, the judgment, I need to add an assumption that moves me from the facts to the judgments. For example, that what is made of yellow, pink, and green is beautiful. Okay? If I also adopt that assumption, then I can arrive at the conclusion that this painting is beautiful. So that is the naturalistic fallacy. And indeed this is a very difficult problem that lies at the foundation of ethical discussions. How can you justify to a person his moral obligation? Someone who does not recognize moral obligation—how do you explain to him that he is obligated? Or leave the other person aside—how do you explain to yourself that you are obligated? Why? What, where is the rationale here? The fact that I am built this way, because this is how I feel—so what? I’m also built in a way that makes me want to speak slander. So because of that should I speak slander? No. So being built in a certain way is also a naturalistic fallacy. If I am built in a certain way, that is a fact. How do permission and prohibition, or good and evil, or judgment emerge from that? They cannot emerge from facts. But if they don’t emerge from facts, then where can they emerge from? It’s not an agreed convention, it’s not convention, it’s not conventions, but it’s also not intelligibles, because it doesn’t emerge from observation, it doesn’t emerge from facts—so where does it emerge from? Therefore I say: the only way to overcome this is to say that it does emerge from observation. It belongs to intelligibles. In Maimonides’ categories, between conventions and intelligibles, it belongs to intelligibles. But the observation we use is a different kind of observation. It is not done with the senses; it is done with the conscience, or if you like with the eyes of the intellect. Yes? Our intellect contemplates the concept, the idea of the good or the idea of morality, and from that derives what is permitted and what is forbidden to do, good and evil. But it is more than that. Because if our intellect contemplates physical facts, it still cannot derive norms from them, even if it is the intellect doing the contemplating and not the eyes. Because contemplation of facts does not produce norms. Therefore it is clear that not only in the epistemic sense is seeing with the eyes of the intellect or the eyes of conscience different from sensory perception that deals with intelligibles as factual propositions, but reality itself is different from ordinary factual reality. Ethical reality, moral realism, is not reality in the same sense as physical reality. What is the difference? The difference is that physical reality is neutral reality. When I say there is a table here, then there is a table here. That is a fact. In this case it is a correct fact. What does that say about me? Does it mean I should do something? That I am forbidden to do something? It says nothing. It is a fact. Facts are transparent on the normative plane. That is the naturalistic fallacy. You cannot derive norms from facts. Meaning, from a normative perspective, when I am looking for norms, facts are transparent. Facts do not play on that field. Factual claims are neutral claims. Whoever is convinced accepts them, and whoever is not does not; there is no room here for disagreement unless the facts are unknown. But if the facts are known, then the facts are known. Period. In ethical reality, moral realism means that there is some idea—the idea of morality, the idea of the good, the ethical idea if you like—at which we look with the eyes of the intellect or with the conscience. But that idea itself is a fact that differs in essence from the physical fact that there is a table here, for example, or that it is now dark outside or something like that. It differs in essence. How does it differ? It is a fact that is not neutral. Whoever recognizes that fact derives from it permitted and forbidden, or good and evil, unlike contemplation of physical facts. If, for example, I ask you a question—many moral philosophers wrestle with this. Suppose someone says to me the following claim: I understand that murder is evil, but why not murder? That question is meaningless. Not that I don’t have an answer to it. It doesn’t need an answer. The question is meaningless. Either he doesn’t understand that murder is evil—he may simply not understand that he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand that murder is evil. Or he cannot ask the question, “So why not murder?” Because when you tell him that murder is evil, that is an ethical fact. When I contemplate the idea of morality, I see that murder is evil. But “murder is evil” is not a neutral statement. It is a statement that has within it some potential to push a person, or to stop him from doing an act, or to push him to do an act. Ethical facts are non-neutral facts; they are charged facts. They have a charge, an electric charge, yes—they are not neutral. They push you either positively or negatively, like an electric charge. Okay? They are not like physical facts, which have no charge whatsoever. Okay, that’s the fact, that’s all. This means that the difference between viewing ethical reality and viewing physical reality is twofold. First, the means of observation are different. In physical reality we observe with the senses. In ethical reality we observe with the eyes of the intellect, with the conscience, with moral intuition; all these are synonymous names in my view. The second difference is that ethical reality itself is different—even before I observed it, it itself is different from physical facts of reality. Because it is a charged fact, not a neutral fact. Here there is no naturalistic fallacy. Here you cannot ask: so what if the fact is that murder is evil? Does that mean I am forbidden to murder? What’s the connection? “Forbidden to murder” is a norm; “murder is evil” is a fact. I observed the idea of the good and discovered that fact. Okay? No. Because this is a charged fact. From a charged fact you can derive a norm. It is not like a physical fact. Notice: everything I’m saying now may sound a bit like some detached mysticism, but in my opinion you cannot ultimately argue with any of it if you are not a moral relativist. Either you are a moral relativist, or you accept the whole line of argument I’ve just laid out. In my opinion, you cannot disagree with anything I’ve just said unless you give up on valid morality. You say there is no valid morality, it’s all conventions, it’s relativistic, it’s just local custom, whatever. But there is nothing here by which you can judge, nothing valid. If you think there is, then in my opinion you have to go through this whole route. Even though lots of philosophers argue from here and argue from there, I say again, in a very broad and rough way: there is no such thing. Those arguments are nonsense. You cannot reach valid morality without this whole structure. In fact there is another difference between these two worlds, the physical world and the normative world, and that is in the statements that describe them. I said that statements that describe physical facts are descriptive statements. Statements that describe normative facts are called in analytic ethics prescriptive statements. These are statements that direct you somewhere. They have an agenda. Okay? They are not neutral statements. Okay, that’s the fact; a fact is a fact. No, these are statements that require you to do or not to do something. Therefore the character of the statements that describe them, the character of the facts, is different; the character of the means of observation is different; and the character of the verbal expression is also different. The verbal expression “It is forbidden to murder” is not like the verbal expression “This table is white.” “This table is white” describes a fact. The expression “It is forbidden to murder” describes a charged fact, meaning it tells me: do something or don’t do something; it does not remain neutral, such that I learned it and now I can do whatever I want. So even the verbal expression has its own name, the difference in verbal expression: prescription versus description. Okay? So basically the conclusion is that morality must stem from some external source. There is some source that constitutes the basis of the validity of the moral command. Without that there cannot be morality. Without that it’s conventions, or do whatever you want, everything’s fine, but it’s not morality. There’s a nice story from Amnon Yitzhak that I once heard. He tells there about the town rabbi who wanted to rebuke his congregants concerning their observance of the commandments. So he got up at four in the morning, slaughtered a sheep, placed it on the main road, covered it with a prayer shawl, and started crying with tears, “A righteous man, a righteous man has died,” wailing bitterly there. All the people wake up at four in the morning, see the town rabbi sobbing there on the main street, and apparently this really is some supremely righteous man, so they all join him in the procession of weeping. They take that sheep wrapped in a prayer shawl, of course, to the cemetery, and then when they lower it toward the grave, suddenly everyone sees who is under the shawl. So they want to put the rabbi in there instead of the sheep—yes, what are you doing, making fools of us? So the rabbi says to them: I don’t understand what you want. You always tell me, whenever I rebuke you, that you are righteous, you don’t hurt anyone, you don’t murder, you don’t steal, you are good people, righteous people. So this sheep too is righteous. It also doesn’t steal, it doesn’t murder, it doesn’t hurt anyone, everything is fine. So by your criterion, what do you want? I said a righteous one died, and indeed a righteous one died. And what stands behind this, of course, is that the sheep is not righteous, and if you behave like a sheep, then you too are not righteous, even though you don’t hurt anyone and you don’t… Now Amnon Yitzhak meant to derive from this the claim that not only are you required not to hurt anyone, you are also required to fulfill commandments, to do what you ought to do, because you are a human being and not a sheep. But it seems to me that this parable illustrates far better a somewhat different point. Let’s speak only about the moral aspect and not yet add the religious layers. On the moral level too, the sheep is not moral, whereas the person who does the same thing is. Why is he? Because the sheep does what its nature tells it to do, so that is not called being moral. It is simply programmed that way. The one who is moral is the one who programmed it that way, the one who built it that way. It itself does not make decisions; it has no choice. Its nature takes it, and it behaves nicely because it is a nice animal. Fine? When a person behaves nicely, he is supposed to choose nice behavior. If he behaves nicely simply because he has a nice nature, then he is not really righteous; he is a person who may be very pleasant, and maybe it is fun to be his neighbor or his friend, but righteous he is not. A righteous person is someone who does things out of responding to a command. This is Kant’s most basic conception in his theory of morality: you must do things because of responding to a command. Let’s return for a moment to our moral relativists. When I ask him, so tell me, why do you help others? Why do you—after all, he’s a good person too, he’s a good person—so why do you do it? What do you mean? Because it feels nice to me, that’s how I’m built; it gives me a warm, pleasant feeling in my stomach after I help someone else, so I help others. Such a person is a sheep; he is not a righteous person, he is a sheep. The righteous person is the one who programmed him that way, whom he usually doesn’t acknowledge exists, apparently—but there is no righteousness here. You are simply doing what you feel like doing. The fact that you happen to feel like doing something good—very nice, the environment thanks you, or thanks your programmer, but there is nothing remarkable in that. You do not become righteous. You simply behave like a sheep. The sheep too is programmed in a way that makes it pleasant for it to behave well, so it behaves well. A moral person is a person who behaves well because one must behave well—that is why he behaves well. That is called a moral person. That does not mean he has no natural inclination toward the good. It does not mean that if he has a natural inclination toward the good then he should try to destroy it—certainly not. But he should know that when he does good, he does it because of responding to a command. Or in other words, where is the practical difference? If, when he does not feel that warm feeling in his stomach when something is required of him, he still does it. “Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld from Me your son, your only one.” What does that mean? The moment you did something that made your whole gut ache as you did it, then I understand that you really are faithful to My command. As long as you did things that you identified with anyway, so what? That is not service of God. It just happens to fit everything the Holy One, blessed be He, said. You do all the Jewish law, but it is not service of God. You do it simply because it feels good to you, because that’s how you’re built. That is what Maimonides writes at the end of chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings. Maimonides writes that any resident alien, any gentile who observes his seven commandments because of rational conviction and not because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them to Moses at Sinai, is not one of the pious of the nations of the world, but one of their wise men. So he is a person who does good deeds, and for Maimonides—I already said—that good deeds are wisdom; that belongs to the intellect, to intelligibles, not to conventions, unlike manners and etiquette. But commandment is not. Commandment is not. Why? Because commandment means responding to a command. It is called a commandment because I do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it, not because it gives me a religious experience or because I don’t know what, or because it gives me a warm feeling in my stomach—it has nothing to do with… But he is not supposed to do it because of the experiences or for the sake of the experiences. He should do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it. That is called service of God. And in the moral context too, what Kant says is what is called moral work. A moral person is a person who behaves correctly because it is the command of morality, not because he happens to feel like it and it’s pleasant for him. And again I say, that does not mean that if he feels like it then he is not moral. If he feels like it and he does it, that’s fine. He is not moral, however, if he would not do it without feeling like it. What will happen if one time he doesn’t feel like it? Then he won’t do it? Then he really is not moral. So even when he did do it, retroactively it becomes clear that even that was not done from moral motives, but simply because he felt like it. But if in truth, even when he doesn’t feel like it, he will still do it, then it is revealed retroactively that even when he did it and did feel like it, it was still a moral act, because after all he also felt like it—he is simply also a good person by nature, so what’s wrong with that? That’s perfectly fine. But I know that he would do it even without that, and so he is a moral person. In other words, the basic moral principle according to Kant is that you are supposed to do the moral act out of responding to a command, what he called the categorical imperative. Okay? I did not compare it to the halakhic command by accident, because it is the same thing. Both in the halakhic command and in the moral command, it is exactly the same. In both cases you are a religious person or a moral person if you do it out of commitment to the command, not if you do it because it feels nice to you or because you saw it in your parents’ house and want to connect to the heritage of the generations. All that leaves you an atheist; it has nothing to do with this. Meaning, you have to do it because there is such a command and you are faithful to the command. That is the meaning of a moral act or a religious act.
[Speaker C] If there were some command to kill my son and I say, “That’s not moral,” and I refuse because it goes against that, then it still doesn’t work for me that Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son and that is moral because it is an external command and he obeyed it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, you’re taking us much too far ahead. I’ll get to conflicts between Jewish law and morality—that’s our topic.
[Speaker C] But you used the verse “Now I know.” Right, you used it. You just said that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I used it, right, and I used it correctly. I’ll explain briefly, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself, so I’ll explain only briefly since you asked. What I’m claiming is that “Now I know” does not mean, “Now I know that you are moral.” “Now I know” means that you are religious. If Abraham had refused the Holy One, blessed be He, and said, “I’m not willing to do this immoral act,” he would have been supremely moral. But he would not have been a religious person, because he would be acting according to the command of morality, but he would not have acted according to the religious command. When the Holy One, blessed be He, said, “Now I know,” He meant: now I know that you are faithful to Me, not that you are faithful to morality. You are faithful to My command. And there we certainly see that. All right?
[Speaker C] There is overlap between Jewish law and morality, fine, no problem, that I can accept.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but we’ll get to that later on. I answered only because you asked. Okay, now basically what I just want to finish with on this point is that the ethicists say, “If there is no God in this place, they will kill me,” this statement of our father Abraham. So they say: in a place where there is no God, there is no morality. Usually people take that as a descriptive claim, an anthropological claim. Meaning, societies that don’t believe are immoral societies; they don’t behave morally. I think descriptively that is not true. It is not true. There are societies that do not believe in God and they definitely conduct themselves morally, perhaps no less morally than religious societies. It depends who, it depends what; in every place there is more and there is less. I also think—or again, maybe that isn’t the meaning of the statement, but perhaps what I’m saying is in fact its meaning—I think that statement is true not in the descriptive sense, but in the normative sense. Meaning, in a place where there is no God, there is no valid morality. That does not mean people will not behave like human beings; they may behave perfectly fine. They just won’t be consistent in it. They behave that way, but there is no real logical basis for it, no rational basis for it. That’s the point. But they do it—that is, clearly such societies can be moral societies, or moral people. The claim is only that their moral theory is inconsistent, because without God it is impossible to produce valid morality. Now here I’ve already jumped a bit, because until now I said there is moral realism and there is… moral realism, and I have the ability to observe moral realism, and there are differences, that these are charged statements, all true. Where is the Holy One, blessed be He, in all this? Why is this connected to the Holy One, blessed be He? So here I already made a certain leap, but that is the next leap that I will probably have to make next time. I think that from the whole line I’ve followed until now, it is really called for also to arrive at the Holy One, blessed be He, to arrive at God. And that will be the conclusion of the first link in the chain of this series. Okay? Good, we’ll stop here, and if anyone wants to comment or ask, this is the opportunity.
[Speaker E] I apologize if my question is because I connected late to the lesson and not on time. My question is this: maybe one can also say, even within moral relativism, that what is binding really is intuition. The intuition that one must be moral. And what I can’t… and my moral behavior is actually dependent on variables. I can’t—there is no principle that is a totally valid moral principle; only how to behave on the moral level depends on the variables of life.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So there is a principle that obligates me to be moral, but the definition of what is moral does not necessarily follow from it? So where does it come from?
[Speaker E] From the variables of life.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What are the variables too, if not facts? That’s again the naturalistic fallacy. Okay, fine. Anyone else? Okay, then we’ll stop here. Thank you very much. Good night. Thank you very much.
[Speaker E] Thank you very much, Rabbi.