Halakha and Ethics – Lesson 11

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m going to mute everyone. Okay. Rather, He Himself is the law for all things. If any law or standard or cause or rationale whatsoever existed for Him, then again it would no longer be God’s will. In other words, Martin Luther says that it cannot be that there is something that serves as a cause for the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, because if it were the cause of the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, then that thing would not be the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. In a parallel series that I devote to free will, I talked about the fact that there are people with what’s called the compatibilist approach, which says there’s no contradiction between determinism and free will. The two views are compatible. What does that mean? I can say that my will is completely free, and there are things that influence my will—in fact, even shape it, determine it, not just influence it—and that doesn’t contradict the fact that this really is what I want. In other words, the fact that I am compelled to want it does not mean that I don’t want it, does not mean that there is something else forcing me. I want it because it’s natural. My nature causes me to want that thing. So on the one hand it’s free will, and on the other hand it’s determinism, and there’s no contradiction between them. Against that, I argued that this is just empty chatter. In other words, once my will is not free but compelled, once it necessarily follows from my nature, then you can’t call it my will. Now of course this is semantics. You can call “will” whatever you want. But in contexts where we use the notion of free will—like moral responsibility or things of that sort—it seems to me that compatibilism has no meaning there. You gain nothing from it. In other words, you can’t impose responsibility on a person whose will is essentially dictated to him necessarily, independent of his decision. Martin Luther is saying the same thing here regarding the Holy One, blessed be He. If we claim these are the desires of the Holy One, blessed be He, then there cannot be a system—let’s call it morality—that dictates the desires of the Holy One, blessed be He, because then they would not be His desires. Therefore, he says, there cannot be a system that serves as the reason why the Holy One, blessed be He, wants us to do X or not do Y. And then in the next passage he says this: what God wants is not right because He must or is compelled to want it that way; on the contrary, what is right is such because that is what He wants. Causes and reasons are laid down for the will of creatures, but not for the will of the Creator—unless you posit another creator above Him. Yes, the Holy One, blessed be He, is supposed to be the most fundamental source of all principles, of all the things that are right. It cannot be that there is something independent of Him that dictates to the Holy One, blessed be He, what to want and what is right and so on. Therefore it is clear that things are right because the Holy One, blessed be He, determined them—not that the Holy One, blessed be He, determined them because they are right, right independently of Him. Which already points more toward the Euthyphro dilemma; yes, this passage is already almost using it—almost a quotation of the Euthyphro dilemma. Now the point is that this claim itself can also be understood on several levels, and various arguments can be raised against it. Because in principle, I could say that morality is defined independently of the Holy One, blessed be He. I’m saying this now at the level of principle, apart from all the theological problems—we’ll still discuss them. Morality, good and evil, is defined without reference to the Holy One, blessed be He. What the Holy One, blessed be He, says is simply that He commands us to do the good. As long as there was no command from the Holy One, blessed be He, there was a definition of what is good and what is bad, but there was no obligation on us to do the good. That obligation is born from the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. Maybe I’ll translate this with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. What Martin Luther is basically saying is that if morality existed prior to the Holy One, blessed be He, then it follows that the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, that we behave morally is not His will, because it is dictated to Him. He’s forced into it, yes, compelled to it. I don’t see why. It doesn’t have to be that way. It could absolutely be the completely free will of the Holy One, blessed be He, that He commands us—yes, that He wants us to do moral things and avoid bad things. The definition of good and bad, or moral and immoral, can be independent of the Holy One, blessed be He. He is still free to decide whether He commands us to do the good or whether He does not command us to do the good. That can be a free decision even if morality is defined prior to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. Therefore what you have in Martin Luther is some kind of intellectual leap. He assumes that if morality is defined before the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, or before the decision of the Holy One, blessed be He, that He expects moral behavior from us, then that also means that the Holy One, blessed be He, is forced to want or command that thing. And here I don’t see why. It may exist beforehand, and the Holy One, blessed be He, is not forced to choose it—just as I myself know what is moral and what is not moral, but I am not forced to do it; I choose to do it. Therefore this claim of Martin Luther, on its face, seems very problematic. In the previous passage I read from Martin Luther, the argument is a slightly different one. He’s not talking about the question that if the Holy One, blessed be He, is compelled then it won’t be His will—that he does in the second passage. In the first passage he says that there cannot be reasons or rationales for the law of the Holy One, blessed be He, because there is nothing on the same level as the Holy One, blessed be He, that could serve as reasons for what the Holy One, blessed be He, does. That is not the same argument. The first claim is a purely theological claim. The second has a theological dimension because we assume that when the Holy One, blessed be He, wants something, it is His will—but of course, because even for human beings, what they want is supposed to be their will. Yes, I don’t see this as a theological argument; it’s a logical or conceptual argument: if the Holy One, blessed be He, wants something, and something dictates that will to Him, then it is not called His wanting it—exactly as we discussed earlier regarding human beings. So the first argument he raises is a theological one. The Holy One, blessed be He, is the cause of all things; the Holy One, blessed be He, is the most basic thing. There is nothing that exists on the same plane as the Holy One, blessed be He, and therefore there cannot be criteria, standards, or reasons for the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. I’ll remind you again: when people talk there about reasons, they’re not reasons in the deterministic, compelling sense—as when I say, I think it’s not right to steal another person’s money because theft is a bad thing. Suppose I say something like that. Does defining theft as a bad thing compel me to say that I am against theft? On the face of it, no. I can accept that theft is a bad thing and still be free to decide whether to steal or not to steal, or whether to say it is proper to steal or not proper to steal. That is a question that seemingly can still be left to me. The definition of something as good or bad dictates nothing; it is only a definition. Therefore Martin Luther’s first claim is a theological claim. A claim that says there cannot be something on the level of the Holy One, blessed be He, or prior to the Holy One, blessed be He. There is no such thing. Put differently: after all, He created everything. So what is this morality if it does not depend on the Holy One, blessed be He, and precedes Him? Who created it? What created it? After all, the Holy One, blessed be He, is the source of everything; He created everything. So that seems to me perhaps the other version of his claim in the first passage. His claim in the second passage is that if the Holy One, blessed be He, wants something from us, then that is supposed to be His free will and not a will dictated by other factors. Dictated, not explained. Okay. Now the claim—what I just said in response—I see now in Yaakov Neumann’s question in the chat; I’m just about to answer that. In fact, the truth is that it connects to one of the things we discussed in previous lessons, and that’s why I said that this discussion here definitely raises various points we’ve gone through along the way. I talked about the fact that when I define—I spoke about moral facts. There are moral facts; say, that murder is a bad thing, that theft is a bad thing. And then I said that moral facts are different in their essence from the facts that we usually call facts—physical facts. Right now it’s dark outside, there’s a table here, I don’t know, there’s a lamp on here, and things like that. What’s the difference? The difference is the naturalistic fallacy. The inference we draw about what ought to be done from what is—we said that’s a fallacy, right? You can’t derive the ought from the is. But moral facts are indeed a basis from which one can derive norms. Here there is no naturalistic fallacy. From the moral fact that murder is wrong, not only can one derive but one must derive that it is forbidden to murder, that it is not proper to murder. Of course this does not mean I don’t have free choice. I can murder and I can refrain from murdering. But I don’t have free choice as to whether to define murder as good or bad—murder is bad, period. Okay? Therefore the naturalistic fallacy does not arise when we derive norms from moral facts. And my claim was—I was talking about moral realism—my claim was that our moral discernment is the result of observation. We observe the idea of the good, the idea of morality, and from that we understand what should be done and what should not be done. That observation yields facts—moral facts. And those moral facts dictate what ought and ought not to be done. Now here we need to be a bit careful. I return to the Euthyphro dilemma. Because if morality really preceded the Holy One, blessed be He, then in fact actions would be defined as good or bad independently of the Holy One, blessed be He, in a way that precedes Him and even dictates to Him. It is true that the Holy One, blessed be He, could still command us to murder, or fail to command us not to murder. But He cannot think that murder is proper. In a certain sense it does force the Holy One, blessed be He, because we are not speaking now about whether the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself would murder, but about what the Holy One, blessed be He, would command or what He would want us to do. And here it really is derived from the moral definition, because if the moral definition says that murder is bad, then the Holy One, blessed be He, has no option to say that murder is proper. He can of course physically command us to murder, command us to do something bad. He cannot define murder as good, because murder is bad. So in a certain sense it really does force something on the Holy One, blessed be He. It doesn’t force on Him the act of commanding us. That He can command and He can refrain from commanding. It also doesn’t force Him not to do it. He can do it, murder yes, or not do it. But it does force on Him the categories of proper and improper. And that already can pose a theological problem. Okay? So on the one hand, the second, conceptual objection that Luther writes in the second paragraph—I think it really does have something to it; it’s not entirely the logical leap I said earlier. He is somewhat right. He’s right in the sense that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot expect from us or think that it is proper to do something if that thing is defined in advance as bad. And therefore those prior, a priori definitions really do dictate something to the Holy One, blessed be He. They don’t dictate to Him what to do; they don’t dictate to Him whether to command us or not command us, but they do dictate to Him the standard of what is proper and improper. In that sense, it really does come out as something dictated to Him, and that is the theological problem Luther talks about in the first paragraph. Maybe one can add here something else as well: yes, as the Ramchal writes—and many others—there is a widespread belief saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, is good in His essence. And “the nature of the good is to do good,” as the Ramchal says. If that is so, then He doesn’t even have a choice whether to command us this. Because by virtue of His nature as good, if this act is good then He is compelled to command us to do that act or refrain from doing a bad act. And so if we add the assumption that indeed the Holy One, blessed be He, by His very nature is good, and that goodness is in a certain sense imposed on Him, then indeed the definition of moral good and evil dictates to the Holy One, blessed be He, not only what is proper and improper but even what to command and what to do. But that is, of course, if we add the assumption that His nature is to bestow good—that He does good by nature and has no possibility not to do good. So those are two passages from Martin Luther. Maybe I’ll give you one or two more examples. Let’s take Descartes. Anyone who notices God’s greatness understands clearly that nothing can exist independently of Him. Otherwise God would not truly be indifferent to His creation. Well, that last sentence is also a bit vague and can be understood in several ways, but broadly what he wants to say is that the greatness or infinity of the Holy One, blessed be He, dictates that there cannot be something that exists independently of the Holy One, blessed be He. In other words, if morality preceded the Holy One, blessed be He, that would mean it basically does not depend on Him. It is indifferent with respect to Him; it has no connection to the Holy One, blessed be He, does not depend on Him and does not need Him. There is no such thing, says Descartes. There cannot be something that does not depend on the Holy One, blessed be He. He is the source of everything. And everything that exists exists only by the truth of His existence, as Maimonides writes at the beginning of the Mishneh Torah. And here too one has to be a bit precise, because moral principles, simply speaking, are not things, existing entities, but norms. And the question is: when we say that everything that exists exists by the power of the Holy One, blessed be He, does that speak only of the objects that exist in the world, that He created them, or does it also speak of principles? Here one can hesitate. Descartes apparently understood it to speak also of principles. In other words, there cannot even be principles that are independent of the Holy One, blessed be He, and not only things. And here there would already be room to argue. It may be that principles can exist independently of the Holy One, blessed be He. The things, the world—He Himself created them, the objects, the beings that we know. To say that truths exist independently of God and that He depends on them—and again, “depends” in the limited sense I spoke about before, that He cannot think murder is proper. What to command and what to do is another matter, but to think murder is proper—He cannot. So in a certain sense He really does depend on morality that preceded Him. For to speak of God in that way is to speak of Him in pagan terms, to view Him as Jupiter or Saturn, subject to the river Styx or to fate. The river Styx of the underworld in mythology, or fate. In other words, you are basically telling me that there are things to which the Holy One, blessed be He, is subordinate—and that cannot be, because it is basically a limitation, or an injury, or contradicts the whole… And therefore Descartes says that one cannot assume there are principles that exist independently of the Holy One, blessed be He, or that precede the Holy One, blessed be He. Maybe one final source I’ll bring is from William of Ockham—again a Christian source. There is no reason whatsoever why the destiny of certain people is decreed in advance other than the fact that God wants it so. Why does one person suffer though righteous, and another prosper though wicked? Why is a certain fate decreed for a person? So William of Ockham says this: because the Holy One, blessed be He, wants it—decide. The reason God predetermines the fate of certain people for some reason and that of others without reason is nothing but God’s will to do so. Even if He does it according to some reason, it is a reason that He Himself decided on. There is nothing that dictates these decisions to Him. Yes, again that same conception which sees in the statement that there is something prior to the Holy One, blessed be He, to which the Holy One, blessed be He, is subordinate, some kind of dualism, because it is a pagan statement. It basically means there are things that are independent of the Holy One, blessed be He. Not only that, but even more—that He depends on them, meaning they dictate to Him what to think, what to do, what to command, and so forth. So all these reasons are reasons that lead many Christian thinkers to the conclusion that good and evil are the results of what the Holy One, blessed be He, decided upon; they do not precede the Holy One, blessed be He. Or in other words, to say that something is good is basically to say: this is what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants you to do. That is the translation of the concept of good. The concept of good has no additional content. Now I’ll perhaps make one more remark, maybe still about Martin Luther. Martin Luther and Calvin—both, I said, among the founders of Protestantism—and Protestantism is basically built on some theology that, I don’t know, to me is inconceivable. Yes, many have already spoken about it and asked about it, and excuses here and excuses there, but nothing I’ve seen at least makes sense. They basically claim the following: they believe in an entirely deterministic world. The Holy One, blessed be He, dictates everything that happens here, including human actions. Human beings have no choice. So why do we actually need to try and do good and avoid doing bad if in any case nothing depends on us and what will happen will happen? Because we have some interest in showing that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants us or loves us, that we are among His chosen. And those who do good are among His chosen. I can’t even understand that sentence, because if truly nothing depends on what I do, then in what sense does what I do prove that I am among His chosen? And if I wouldn’t do it, then I wouldn’t be among His chosen? After all, if it’s not in my hands, I would do it anyway. In other words, it’s a very strange theology, one that somewhat anticipated the compatibilism that is very popular today in the philosophical world, and it basically says there is a point in commanding human beings and expecting things from them and forbidding things to them even though the world is deterministic, even though basically everything is dictated to us in advance. And that somewhat raises a question about the remark—I won’t go into it more because it’s not the topic here—it somewhat raises a question about the argument Martin Luther raises here regarding the Holy One, blessed be He, what I read here. Because here he said that if something dictates to the Holy One, blessed be He, what to do, then it is not His will. Yet he himself, with respect to human beings, says something not exactly like that. Even if something dictates to me what I will do, what I do is credited to my merit—in fact by it I become one of the chosen of the Holy One, blessed be He. So with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He, for some reason he is unwilling to accept that these two principles can be reconciled, even though with respect to human beings he does. Fine, but that’s just a side remark. So up to this point it is very clear what the motivation is for holding the view that good and evil are products of the divine command. They have no independent existence; the concepts of good and evil are basically empty concepts—it’s a question of what the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded and what He commanded not to do. That is what is called good and evil; there is no additional content. This is what Avi Sagi and Statman call MTA, an acronym for “morality as God’s command.” Okay? In other words, morality is nothing but what the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded. So MTA is the first view, and this is the view common among many Christian thinkers, and as I said earlier, among Jewish thinkers it is almost nonexistent. That’s at least what they claim, and I think they are fairly right. So what leads people nevertheless to hold other views? Views that do see morality as something with independent existence and not dictated by the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. So I’ll present this through what I discussed earlier in connection with MTA. I said there that the fact that morality defines certain acts as good and other acts as bad independently of the Holy One, blessed be He, seemingly does not force anything on the Holy One, blessed be He. It isn’t clear what Martin Luther wants; there is some sort of logical leap here. The Holy One, blessed be He, can command us to do evil. So I said no—since by His very nature He does good, therefore He is in effect compelled or forced to command us to do the good, and also Himself to do the good. Therefore Martin Luther basically says that if good and evil were defined independently of the Holy One, blessed be He, then it would mean that the Holy One, blessed be He, is compelled or forced by them. But notice that there is an internal contradiction here. Because what does it mean to say that His nature is to do good? Have I said anything in that sentence? If according to MTA, according to the MTA view, yes?—if the whole meaning of good is simply that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants it—then what have you said by saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, is by nature good and that the nature of the good is to do good? What His nature is, is what is defined as good. That is not a claim; it is a definition. If the whole concept of good is nothing but what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants, then that is the definition of the concept good. That is not a claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to do the good; it is a definition: what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants is what is called good. But if it is a definition, then what is the meaning of the sentence “the nature of the good is to do good”? It has no meaning at all. I’ll ask even more than that: what is the meaning of the sentence that the nature of the Holy One, blessed be He, is good? I am not asking whether it is true or false; I am asking what it means at all. Obviously the nature of the Holy One, blessed be He, is good, because the concept good is nothing but what the nature of the Holy One, blessed be He, is to do. That is a definition; it is not a claim. So what meaning is there in the sentence “the nature of the good is to do good”? No meaning whatsoever, completely empty of content. And therefore other thinkers argue—Christian thinkers too, but also Jewish ones—that it cannot be that morality, moral good and evil, are empty of content. They are not merely synonymous statements for what the Holy One, blessed be He, commands one to do or not to do. They have some independent meaning not dependent on the Holy One, blessed be He, and only if that is so can one say of the Holy One, blessed be He, that He is good. Because otherwise saying that He is good is simply a definition. You are not saying anything. The Holy One, blessed be He, could have commanded us to murder, to slaughter every person who comes within four cubits of us, and that would have been the good because that is His nature, and He would have continued to be defined as good, and everything would be fine. So what does that claim mean, that the Holy One, blessed be He, is good? All it says is that whatever He says is what is defined as good. So what have you said? You have said nothing; you have defined. The Holy One, blessed be He, is defined as what the Holy One, blessed be He, is defined as. Okay, that is obvious. Everything is defined as what it is defined as; that is an empty sentence. If you want to turn it from a definition or empty sentence into a claim, you must assume that there is some existence to moral good and evil independently of the Holy One, blessed be He. There is such a category called good, there is a category called evil, and now when I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is good, I have made a claim and not merely given a definition. The claim is that the Holy One, blessed be He, fits that particular category. If that category were nothing but what the Holy One, blessed be He, is, then that statement becomes empty. And therefore when I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is good—there are verses that say this—then when I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is good, I am actually assuming that the concept good contains some content beyond the mere definition of what the Holy One, blessed be He, is. And I think this is the reason why quite a few thinkers are unwilling to accept the MTA view. And they claim that moral good and evil have an existence independent of the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. Because if that were not so, then those statements that the Holy One, blessed be He, hates injustice and loves the good and the moral would become empty of content. Now here too I want to make several comments, and this also touches on things we discussed. What I just said is not necessarily correct, because I can speak of a situation in which the Holy One, blessed be He—let me remind you that I said in the picture I described at the end in the lesson on Jewish law and morality—that picture basically said that both Jewish law and morality are desires of the Holy One, blessed be He. The Holy One, blessed be He, wants us to observe Jewish law and He also wants us to be moral. My claim went further than that: without the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, morality is in fact not binding. So if that is indeed the case, then perhaps I could say the following: the Holy One, blessed be He, is actually the one who created moral good and evil. They were indeed created or formed by Him, legislated by Him, and still I can describe the Holy One, blessed be He, as good. It is not empty of content. Why? Because the concepts of good and evil that the Holy One, blessed be He, created really are concepts that have independent content. The meaning of good is not what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants. The meaning of good is what every person, with his conscience and his moral sense, understands as good. That is the definition. True, the Holy One, blessed be He, created it, but that is what it is—right now it is a category that stands on its own and is not analytically identified with the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. Rather, then the Holy One, blessed be He, comes and tells us: I want you to do the good. That is a claim; it is not a definition. That is, He created the category of good and evil; it does not exist independently of Him, but He created them as categories that stand on their own, just as He created everything else in the world. Now I understand what good and evil are even without reference to the Holy One, blessed be He. I understand that murder is bad, theft is bad, helping another is good, giving charity is good, honoring parents is good. I understand all this as good and evil independently of the command in the Torah. I understand it from my conscience. I know this is good and this is bad, and for me it is not identified with a command of the Holy One, blessed be He. Now someone can come and say: and the Holy One, blessed be He, also commands you to do the good. Now that is already a claim; it is not a definition. Even though the good too is the work of the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He, still I do not identify it by definition with the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. I’ll say even more than that. In light of the moral view I described, which says that both morality and Jewish law are desires of the Holy One, blessed be He, then it is really not correct to identify morality with the will of God. Here, after all, there are desires of the Holy One, blessed be He, that are not connected to morality. According to Rav Kook’s view, which identifies Jewish law with morality, there perhaps this problem could arise. But according to the view I presented, which says there are two kinds of desires of the Holy One, blessed be He—moral desires and religious desires—according to that view there is no identity at all between the concept of good and the concept of what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants. Two completely different things; they have an independent meaning. But on top of that I say: besides the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants us to observe Jewish law, He also wants us to behave well and avoid doing bad things. He wants that too, not in Jewish law. He wants that from the verse “and you shall do what is upright and good”; we discussed that. Or from the very fact that He planted moral intuitions in us, the conscience. But it doesn’t matter—one way or another, He conveyed to us that this is what He expects from us. And then what comes out is this. True, the Holy One, blessed be He, wants us to do the good, and true, the Holy One, blessed be He, also created good and evil. In other words, He created these categories. But it is not true that to say the Holy One, blessed be He, is good is an empty definition—absolutely not. In the conceptual world familiar to me, which the Holy One, blessed be He, created in its entirety—He created the whole world and everything in it, the concepts and the things and everything. I’m assuming that at least for the sake of discussion. So within this conceptual world there is certainly meaning to the statement “this act is good” and “this act is bad.” We understand what the concept good means. Our inner feeling when we say of something that it is a good act or a bad act is a completely clear feeling. It is not connected to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the sense that its meaning is that the Holy One, blessed be He, commands it; that may be true, but that is not the meaning of this feeling. The meaning is that this is what conscience says is good. Even if the Holy One, blessed be He, created it, right now it already has an existence of its own. Now I understand that it is good. Now the Holy One, blessed be He, comes to me and says: I also expect you to do the good. That is an additional claim—that He expects me to do the good. And beyond that, He also expects me to behave according to Jewish law, and these are two separate categories that can even conflict, as we saw. Therefore the conceptual identification between the good and what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants does not follow from the second view I mentioned. After all, I said that the reason people choose not to adopt the MTA view—even though the Holy One, blessed be He, is the source of everything, which seemingly is theologically the most natural position—why depart from that? Why say that morality has an independent existence? And otherwise statements that the Holy One, blessed be He, is good become empty. That was the reason to leave MTA. And I say that is not correct. That reason is not a good reason. Why? As I said before, because I am speaking within the conceptual world I know, which the Holy One, blessed be He, created. In this conceptual world there are the concepts good and evil, and I know there are good things and bad things. And when I see how the Holy One, blessed be He, behaves and I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, behaves in a good way, that is not a definition; it is a statement. I see what He does, I compare it to the category known to me, which is the category of the good, and I see there is an identity. So I say: then the Holy One, blessed be He, behaves in a way that is good. That is absolutely not a definition. It is a synthetic claim. It is not an analytic definition; it is not an empty statement. Even though the source of the good is the Holy One, blessed be He. That is the interesting point. I think I brought one of the previous times the usual interpretations of Abraham our forefather’s verse, “I only said: surely there is no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.” The moralists are accustomed to interpret here that without God there is no morality. Without God, people swallow one another alive; you cannot rely on people’s moral behavior. And I argued that factually this is not true. Empirically this interpretation is refuted. Because societies that do not believe in God, people who do not believe in God—there can be among them people who are very good, behaving in a thoroughly moral way, altogether genuinely good people. More than that, I’m not even sure there are fewer good people there than in the religious, believing community. So what does that mean? I also said, of course, that I think those people are inconsistent, because I do agree that there is no morality without God in the sense that if you think philosophically, morality is not binding without God. But you can’t say that there are no people who behave morally when they do not believe in God. That is not true. Factually it is not true. Certainly there are such people. What this basically means is that the concepts of good and evil, after the Holy One, blessed be He, created them, have an independent existence, and people understand what they mean independently of faith in the Holy One, blessed be He. If the atheist understands what good and evil are without believing in the Holy One, blessed be He, then I too, as someone who believes in the Holy One, blessed be He, grasp the concepts of good and evil in a way that has independent meaning apart from the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. Even though I think there is a Holy One, blessed be He, and there is command, and I also think He expects me to do the good and not do the bad. I agree with that too. But the very perception of what is good and what is not good is a perception detached from the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. The Sages, after all, say that if the Torah had not been given, we would have learned from the ant and the cat and various roosters; we would have learned various good traits from animals. What does that mean? That we would understand that what they do is good, right, without a command. In other words, our perception of what is good and what is not good is a perception detached from the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. I’ll tell you more than that: this whole distinction that Maimonides—I brought it in chapter… in chapter six of Maimonides’ Eight Chapters—between revealed commandments and rational commandments. What does that mean? There are commandments I understand as fitting morality and commandments I do not. I don’t understand. If morality is nothing but what the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded, what room is there for dividing between these two categories? Then everything the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded is what is called good, both the revealed laws and the rational laws. Everything is simply good; there are no such two categories. If I say there are two such categories, that means that even I, as one who believes in God—and I also think He gave morality and also expects us to be moral—still the concept of morality has an independent meaning. When I think whether something is moral or not, my thought is not “does the Holy One, blessed be He, want this,” but rather I have a category called morality, and by it I classify actions: these are moral actions and these are immoral actions. And that category has an independent existence. Only I, as a religious person, unlike the atheist, think that perhaps the Holy One, blessed be He, also created that category. Not only did He create it, but He also expects me to behave according to it. Therefore the claim, the motivation of those who depart from the thesis and say morality has an independent existence—I think that motivation is not a necessary one. One can say that the Holy One, blessed be He, created everything and still understand that the concepts of good and evil have intrinsic meaning. And therefore when you look at the sources Avi Sagi and Statman bring in this context of the thesis, showing that Jewish sources do not believe in the thesis—that is, they think morality precedes the Holy One, blessed be He, and obligates the Holy One, blessed be He—most of them are not conclusive. In other words, most of them are not sources from which one can really prove that thesis, because there is this intermediate formulation I just presented, which fits most of the sources as far as I remember, at least when I read through them in more detail. Most of the sources they bring, if not all of them, fit the thesis I just stated. And this still means that the Holy One, blessed be He, created good and evil, but still they have their own intrinsic meaning. Therefore there is no problem at all in saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, is good and that He wants us to do the good, and so forth, because this has intrinsic meaning—especially in light of the view I presented earlier regarding Jewish law and morality, which says that indeed it is not true even after the fact, even de facto, to identify the will of God with morality. Even after the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed to us that He indeed wants us to behave morally, still there is no identity between the will of God and morality. Morality is only a subset of the desires of the Holy One, blessed be He; there are also religious desires, not only moral desires. Therefore the autonomous or intrinsic meaning of the concepts good and evil remains even after we already know there is God and that He commanded morality and that He created morality. Even after all that, these concepts still have intrinsic meaning. I also said one of the previous times when I talked about moral realism, that we basically—I mentioned this earlier—we basically contemplate the idea of the good, the idea of morality, and from that contemplation we derive our judgments, our classification of actions into good and bad actions. If there is such an object, an idea, an abstract object called the idea of morality or the good, that even more strongly requires that the Holy One, blessed be He, be its creator. Because as I said earlier, even if principles can perhaps exist independently of Him, beings—it seems that everything that exists here, whether abstract or not, is the work of His hands, at least according to the conventional view, let’s call it that. And therefore here I do think that if we are moral realists and we believe that there exists an idea of the good, then that very much pushes in the direction that indeed the Holy One, blessed be He, created it. It may be that He created it in light of principles that are principles of good—principles, not beings. He created this idea here in order to enable us to contemplate it and understand what is good and what is bad; otherwise how would we know? So that does not mean that the idea is what is called good and evil; rather, contemplation of the idea gives us an instrument that helps us distinguish between good and evil. But when the Holy One, blessed be He, created this idea, it may be that He did so according to principles of good and evil that exist independently of Him, yes, independently of Him. Therefore I say that the MTA thesis has some not-bad theological reasons for holding it, and I do not see the good reasons for holding the second thesis, the thesis that morality precedes the Holy One, blessed be He, or is independent of the Holy One, blessed be He. The good reasons for holding that thesis are not all that good. They simply assume an identity that is not correct between the statement that the Holy One, blessed be He, created morality and the statement that morality is nothing but what the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted. Those are not the same thing; they are two entirely different claims. Maybe I’ll bring some example of this point. In the book by Rabbi Shem Tov Gefen called Dimensions of Prophecy and Imagination, he proposes there—he claims that according to Kant, who sees space and time as forms of human intuition, not as things that exist in reality itself, but only as human categories by means of which we organize the phenomenal world for ourselves—then space and time are basically part of us, not part of the world. That is Kant’s conception. So Rabbi Shem Tov Gefen says that according to this, the question of the age of the universe more or less collapses—the dilemmas of faith and science, how old is the world? Why? Because he says that if time is nothing but a form of human intuition, then before there was a human being there was no time. Therefore it makes no sense to talk about a world fourteen billion years old if man—again, who is this man who has concepts of time, I don’t know—suppose he has existed ten thousand years, six thousand years, twenty thousand years, I don’t know how much, something like that. Before that there was no concept of time, because the whole concept of time is only a category used by human beings. It is not really something that exists in the world. That is his claim, and therefore he says that this question is a pseudo-question, the question of the age of the universe. I think he is not right about this. Why? Because it may indeed be that time is nothing but our spectacles as human beings, but now that I’m wearing these spectacles I can certainly use them also to look at the past. Not only at what exists right now. For example, I can ask on what date my grandfather was born, even though I did not exist then. Why? Because with the temporal spectacles I am now wearing, I use them to look at the past and ask questions like how long ago such-and-such an event happened. There is no problem at all, even if I do this with the spectacles of now; with those spectacles I can also look at the past. So I see no reason why I shouldn’t use those spectacles also to look at what happened before there were any humans in the world at all—such as when the world was created fourteen-something billion years ago. There is no problem with that even if we adopt the Kantian view that space and time are only forms of human intuition. That still does not mean we cannot use those means to look at events that happened before we existed here, before human beings existed here at all. For me this is a parable for what I wrote here. Even if the Holy One, blessed be He, was the one who created the concepts good and evil, that does not prevent me from using those concepts to describe Him Himself. It does not become empty of content. Once those concepts exist, they are now spectacles that I can put on and look at the world and classify acts as good and bad, or classify beings or creatures as good creatures and bad creatures, including the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. Every child knows how to use those spectacles, and when you see the deeds of the Holy One, blessed be He, you can certainly say whether He is good or not good—but those are claims that certainly are not mere empty definitions. They absolutely have meaning. Therefore I do not accept this claim that it becomes an empty definition. But now I do want nevertheless to say something in the direction of… the second view. The claim that leads to MTA, not against MTA. Earlier I spoke about the argument for leaving MTA. Now I’m saying what was the argument that caused people to hold MTA itself, the view that everything is the work of the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He. The view is that there cannot be something prior to the Holy One, blessed be He, that supposedly rules over the Holy One, blessed be He, that dictates to Him what to think, what to do, what to command, and so forth. There cannot be such a thing. So here I’m not entirely sure I agree with that claim. Because, for example—and I talked about this not in this series but elsewhere in the past, several times—that logic, for example, can indeed supposedly force the Holy One, blessed be He, to do things or not do things that are not logically possible. So about logic too we could ask exactly the same question. Is logic a category that the Holy One, blessed be He, created? Is something logical because that is how the Holy One, blessed be He, created it? Or did the Holy One, blessed be He, create it that way because it is logical? In other words, is logic a category that exists independently of the Holy One, blessed be He, prior to Him? And there too many people want to claim the MTA-type argument: that logic cannot be prior to the Holy One, blessed be He, because it cannot be that He is subject to the laws of logic. He is not subject to anything; He is the source of everything. He is infinite, omnipotent, the source of everything; He cannot be subject to something that manages Him or dictates to Him what to do or not do. But in this context I do not think that argument is correct. Why? Because the concept “laws of logic,” although it is commonly used, is a very confusing concept. I do not think the laws of logic are laws in the sense that state laws are laws or the laws of physics are laws. They are not laws in that sense. Laws in the sense of physics or even state laws—state laws and even physical laws are laws that are the result of whoever legislated them. That is, they could have been legislated otherwise. The Holy One, blessed be He, could have created a world where G, the gravitational constant, was twenty and not ten. Or He could have created a world in which the Knesset could legislate a law different from the one it has now legislated. Therefore a law is the product of the lawgiver, and it could also have been otherwise. If the lawgiver had decided otherwise, then the law would be different. But the laws of logic are not laws in that sense. They could not have been otherwise. The laws of logic are not the result of legislation by some factor. They are simply the result of the nature of things. When I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot create a wall that stops every shell and also a shell that penetrates every wall—He cannot make both together. Why? Because it is a logical contradiction. If there is a shell that penetrates every wall, then there is no wall that withstands every shell, and vice versa. So even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot create those two entities, those two objects, together. What does it mean that He cannot? That there is a law that forbids it to Him? The laws of logic forbid it to Him? They do not forbid it to Him; there is no such thing. When you forbid, say you say: I forbid a person to steal. That means he has the ability to steal and the legislator forbids it to him. Or with the laws of physics, I say physics forbids bodies from remaining suspended in the air. If they have mass, they fall to earth. That only follows from the fact that the laws of physics could have been otherwise, and then perhaps bodies could have remained suspended in the air. So the physical laws established in our world forbid bodies from staying in the air. The concept “I forbid you to do something” or “I limit you from doing something” has meaning if you had the option to do otherwise were it not for my forbidding you. But in the context of logic, that is nonsense. In the context of logic I cannot say: the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot create the ultimate shell and the ultimate wall because the laws of logic forbid it to Him. Nothing forbids it to Him. It is not a law that exists somewhere, that someone legislated, and it forbids something to the Holy One, blessed be He. It is a result of the very essence of the things themselves. If there is a shell that passes through every wall, then there is no wall that stops every shell. There simply is no such concept. Not that there is no such object in the world—the concept itself is a concept… you are in effect saying nothing. So that the Holy One, blessed be He, “cannot” do this is not inability. Inability is when there is something that in principle exists and someone cannot manage to carry it out. Whereas here, on the level of principle, it is simply empty verbiage; it says nothing. So the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, “cannot,” in quotation marks, do this, is not an injury to His omnipotence. He cannot do it because there is nothing there to do. And similarly the stone question: can the Holy One, blessed be He, create a stone He cannot lift? If He can create such a stone, then there is a stone He cannot lift, so He is not omnipotent. If He cannot create such a stone, then again He is not omnipotent, because there is something He cannot do. What is the mistake here? Think of a dialogue between a believer and an atheist. The atheist asks the believer: tell me, can the Holy One, blessed be He, create a stone He cannot lift? So the believer says: I don’t understand what you’re saying. My definition is that the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent. Okay? Now ask your question. So the atheist asks: can the Holy One, blessed be He, who is omnipotent, create a stone that He Himself cannot lift? Now I ask the atheist: explain this concept to me—this stone that the omnipotent one cannot lift. It’s like an angleless triangle. What do you mean a stone that… If He is omnipotent, then there is no stone He cannot lift. By definition. Not just that there isn’t one in reality. He is omnipotent, therefore there is no such thing as a stone He cannot lift. A stone that the omnipotent one cannot lift is exactly like a shell that penetrates every wall together with a wall that stops every shell. Or exactly like an angleless triangle. Or Quine’s example—the square corners of Berkeley College’s round dome, something like that. There is no such thing; it is nonsense. So what does this actually mean? It means that when I talk about the Holy One, blessed be He, being subject to the laws of logic, we are not talking about subjection in the same sense that I am subject to the laws of the state or even to the laws of physics. Subjection to state law and physical law means there is someone who legislated laws here that determine for me what to do—the Holy One, blessed be He, legislated the laws of physics and the Knesset the laws of the state. No one legislated the laws of logic. There is no need to legislate them. They are simply there. They are not laws at all. It is simply that a triangle is not round. A triangle always has angles, not because some law obligates it to have angles, but because that is its definition. The definition of a triangle is that it has three angles. So the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot make an angleless triangle. He cannot because there is no such creature. Not an injury to His omnipotence. So that is regarding logic. One could expand on this a lot, but we won’t get into it. Perhaps something similar can also be said regarding morality. When I say that morality exists independently of the Holy One, blessed be He, and basically dictates to the Holy One, blessed be He, what is proper and improper, perhaps all I am saying is that moral laws are in a certain sense similar to the laws of logic. It could not have been otherwise, and therefore even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot determine that murder is good. He may perhaps command us to murder, but He cannot determine that murder is good, because murder is bad. And according to this view, the fact that murder is bad is not a result created by the Holy One, blessed be He; rather it follows from the very concept of murder, just as angles follow from the concept of triangle. Therefore even the Holy One, blessed be He, could not have legislated other moral laws. He could have commanded us to behave immorally, but He could not have changed the fact that morality means not murdering and not stealing and helping one’s fellow. In this sense moral laws parallel the laws of logic. They are necessary, and therefore they are imposed on the Holy One, blessed be He—but they are imposed on the Holy One, blessed be He, not because there is some factor above Him that legislated those laws and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, is forced to act in such a way. No. There is no factor that legislated those laws, because they are not laws. There are no laws. These are not some laws that could also have been otherwise. It simply follows from the very nature of those actions that they are bad. It is not because someone legislated them to be that way. Therefore, even regarding morality, I am not entirely sure that the command thesis is so theologically necessary. It is certainly possible that morality precedes the Holy One, blessed be He, just as logic precedes the Holy One, blessed be He, and obligates Him and compels Him. Why? Because both morality and logic are not the product of some other legislating factor, but follow from the nature of things themselves. Just one second. Yes. Obviously, suppose the Holy One, blessed be He, created a world in which human beings greatly enjoyed being beaten—masochistic human beings—He created creatures who really enjoy being beaten. In such a world it would be very moral to hit another person. Blows that give him pleasure; I’m not talking about killing him, okay? Would this be called saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, legislates morality? Could He also have created a world in which there were different moral laws, like the laws of physics or the laws of the Knesset? No. Because He did not change the fact that causing pleasure to another person or benefiting another person is what is called moral. What He changed was simply the physiology, or the physics, or the psychology if you want, to which the principles of morality apply. Obviously, if the world had looked different, then the practical expressions of moral laws would have been different, but that is not a change in moral laws. Moral laws mean caring that the other person have good and not caring that he have bad. Those are moral laws in every possible world. What is good for the other and what is bad for the other depends on his character, his nature, his physiology, his psychology. And here one certainly could have created a world in which there were different creatures, where they would really enjoy it if you stole from them, or really enjoy it if you hit them, and then maybe in such a world it would be moral to steal and moral to hit another person. That is certainly a possible world. But it would not be a world with a different morality from ours, because morality does not say “do not steal” or “do not hit.” Morality says “do not harm another person.” What counts as harming another person? That is a factual question. Let’s see what harms him and what doesn’t harm him. And that can certainly differ from one world to another. The Holy One, blessed be He, could have created a world in which the practical expressions of morality were different, but that would not be a world with different moral laws. I’m trying to show you that morality is like—I think I once discussed this in another context. Moral laws are not the bottom lines. It is not that it is forbidden to steal and forbidden to hit and forbidden to murder and things like that. Moral laws are basically the laws that say one must do the good thing, or benefiting another person is part of the good things—maybe it is all of it, I don’t know. Benefit another person, and it is forbidden to harm another person. Those are the moral laws. Now, to apply that in practice, the moral law alone is not enough for me; I also need to know the facts—what harms another person and what benefits another person. And that is a question of facts. I can ask him, I can examine what harms him and what benefits him. Once I have the facts and I have the moral rule, I can also arrive at the conclusion of what I am obligated to do and what I am forbidden to do. When I say morality is like logic, I mean only the abstract moral principle, not the rule that it is forbidden to steal. The rule that it is forbidden to steal is not like logic. The rule that it is forbidden to steal is a result of the structure of our world. In our world it is necessarily forbidden to steal. Even the Holy One, blessed be He, could not have created a world like ours and have stealing be moral—that He could not have done. He certainly could have made a different world in which stealing was moral—a person would terribly enjoy having his money taken away, or a person would shop at the grocery store using negative money. So if you stole from a person, you’d be doing him a favor, okay? So in such a world it would be moral to steal. But again, that would be a world in which what differs between that world and ours is the factual circumstances, not the moral rules. The moral rules would be the same. Exactly as the laws of logic say: if every X is Y and A is X, then A is Y. Suppose: if all frogs are green, and it is forbidden to paint a creature a color different from its natural color, therefore it is forbidden to paint frogs red. Okay? So the moral law, the moral rule, is not that it is forbidden to paint frogs red, and it is also not that all frogs are green. The law is only the law that connects this to that. The bridge principle, what I called it in moral contexts. The law that says it is forbidden to paint creatures a color different from their natural color. That is true in every possible world; even in a world where frogs were pink, the same law would apply—it would only be forbidden to paint them colors different from the colors that are forbidden in our world. That means there is a very great similarity between moral laws and the laws of logic. In both contexts, the universal, binding, unchangeable law is a law that has no content by itself. It is a law that only says the if-then. If reality is such and such, then the result is such and such. Logic determines, say—logically I say: if all frogs are green and this creature is a frog, therefore this creature is green. Is it necessary that all frogs are green? Is that a logical statement? No. It is a factual claim. Is it a logical necessity that the creature before me is a frog? No. That is a factual claim—I saw it. Is it a logical necessity that this creature is green? No. It follows logically from the first two facts. The logical dimension in the argument is only the derivation of the conclusion from the two premises, not the conclusion and not the premises. That is the logical rule. The logical rule is the rule that derives the conclusion from the premises. The same in the moral context. The moral law is not the bottom line that it is forbidden to steal. The moral law is that what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the moral law. What is hateful to you, and as a result what you are forbidden to do to your fellow, may vary from one world to another. If the Holy One, blessed be He, had created this world differently, the applications would be different. But the theoretical moral principle would remain the same principle. And in that sense there is a great similarity between the rules of morality and the rules of logic, and it is quite possible to speak of those rules as something that precedes the Holy One, blessed be He, and dictates to Him. It dictates to Him simply because that is the definition of morality. You cannot define morality otherwise. What benefits another person is what is called morality. The Holy One, blessed be He, could not have created a world in which what harms another person is the moral thing. It is like creating a world in which triangles are round. Triangles are not round because it is a property of a triangle that it is not round. Therefore I am not so deterred even by the second view, which says that moral rules could have preceded the Holy One, blessed be He, and dictated to Him—even though the Holy One, blessed be He, could have created any world He wanted. And that will of course depend on the question, on the remark I already made with Martin Luther—or really with Ockham—the question whether the Holy One, blessed be He, is also the source of all the principles that exist in the world, or only of all the beings that exist in the world. If He is the source also of all the principles, then seemingly it follows that moral principles too were created by Him. But if He is the source of all the beings, and principles can perhaps exist beforehand, like principles of logic for example, then I see no impediment to saying that moral principles too exist independently of Him. Okay, I’ll stop here, and with this we’ll end this series. If anyone still wants to comment or ask something, then.

[Speaker B] I wanted to let everyone know: this lesson actually marks the end of the intersession break. We were supposed to be on break, but the Rabbi agreed to give classes because the lesson is being given on Zoom. Next Thursday is already Rosh Chodesh Elul, and we’re starting the coming year. The Rabbi will define the topic of the lesson for next week. As I said last time, we’re asking people to pay, because we pay the Rabbi. We’re asking for one hundred shekels a month. You can deposit it into the account of Mishkan Yisrael synagogue, Mizrahi Bank, Hanatziv branch. Send it on WhatsApp, people don’t—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, and there are also people who aren’t here, so I think it’s worth sending it on WhatsApp.

[Speaker B] Okay, absolutely.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You just need to decide, Yitzhak, whether you want to build some separate group for this lesson.

[Speaker B] No, we’re not going to obligate anyone, we’ll manage anyway, but we are asking people to participate in paying for the lesson, and in return they’ll receive a receipt with approval for exemption under Section forty-six. The money is a donation. Okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. If someone wants to—then send a message, send a message, Yitzhak, all right? Good. And if anyone wants to ask or comment about the lesson?

[Speaker B] Actually I may have a question: the topics of ethics / morality and logic are more definitions than the topics…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can call it a definition; I would say more a claim, an analytic proposition, and that follows from the nature of the things. It’s not just some claim; it’s like saying a triangle has three angles. So that’s not something imposed on it to make it have three angles; it’s the definition of the concept triangle.

[Speaker B] So the definition

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] of the concept of ethics / morality is to benefit the other person; you can’t change that, that’s the nature of the concept.

[Speaker B] Therefore it’s different from laws. Yes. Anyone else? All right, thank you very much.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then thank you.