Philosophical Debates: If There Is No God, Everything Is Permitted – Alma, Home of Hebrew Culture
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- Opening of the event, the central question, and Nietzsche
- Introduction of the participants and the structure of the evening
- Rabbi Michael Abraham’s opening argument: from moral validity to moral realism and God
- Rabbi Abraham against “self-legislation” and in favor of moral objectivity
- Rabbi Abraham: ethical facts are not enough without binding authority
- Professor David Enoch’s opening argument: moral realism without God and rejecting the question of “source”
- Professor Enoch: morality does not “come from somewhere”
- Professor Enoch: on “why obey” and the limits of God as a solution
- Rabbi Abraham’s response: validity, not source, and a “lawgiver” behind norms
- Professor Enoch’s response: no axioms, and no need for a lawgiver; a thin god versus a god that actually does work
- The moderator’s questions: Euthyphro, the binding of Isaac, and religious value versus moral value
- The moderator’s questions to Professor Enoch: what are moral facts and how do we know them
- Mutual questions: logic, analyticity, de re and de dicto, and Huckleberry Finn
- Questions from the audience: moral facts versus social agreement, the spinach test, and defining the disagreement
- Conclusion and emphasis on what follows
Summary
General Overview
The evening at “Alma – A Home for Hebrew Culture” opened with the question of whether, without God, everything is permitted, and what the connection is between divinity and morality. Nietzsche’s The Gay Science was used as a point of departure, with the idea that the “death of God” marks the danger of collapse for the old moral values. The moderator poses the question of whether Nietzsche is right, and also brings in Psalms 14, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” as a challenge: does unbelief necessarily lead to corruption, or is there morality independent of God’s existence. The discussion takes place between Rabbi Michael Abraham, who argues that valid morality requires a transcendent source that grants norms their validity, and Professor David Enoch, who defends an objective moral realism independent of God and argues that the demand for a “source” of morality is itself a mistaken presupposition.
Opening of the event, the central question, and Nietzsche
The speaker opens with the question, “Is everything permitted if there is no God?” and frames it as an inquiry into the relationship between divinity and morality. He quotes at length from “The Madman” in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, where the non-believing crowd mocks the seeker of God, and the madman declares, “We have killed him,” describing a loss of direction, falling into an “infinite nothing,” and exposure to “empty space.” The speaker notes that Nietzsche is not presenting arguments for God’s nonexistence; rather, he starts from the assumption that belief in God was fading in the 19th-century West in order to warn that the old moral values rested on God and would therefore collapse without Him. The speaker asks whether, without God, Judeo-Christian morality and Western morality collapse, and sets against that the possibility that morality exists independently of God’s existence.
Introduction of the participants and the structure of the evening
The speaker introduces Rabbi Michael Abraham as a doctor of theoretical physics, former head of the hesder yeshiva in Yeruham, and lecturer at the Beit Midrash for Advanced Torah Studies at Bar-Ilan University, as well as the author of articles and about thirty books in physics, logic, Talmudic logic, Jewish law, general philosophy, and philosophy of science, including Stable Truth and Unstable Truth and The First Existent. The speaker introduces Professor David Enoch as a full professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University, whose work focuses on philosophy of law, moral philosophy, and political philosophy, and who in meta-ethics defends an objectivist realism according to which there are moral facts independent of us and irreducible to ordinary naturalistic facts, as set out in his book Taking Morality Seriously. A format is set: opening arguments, responses, the moderator’s questions, mutual questions, and questions from the audience, and thanks are given to Noam Oren for his contribution to making the event possible.
Rabbi Michael Abraham’s opening argument: from moral validity to moral realism and God
Rabbi Abraham presents a two-stage path from morality to God: first accepting moral realism, and then making the necessary move to belief in God as the source of morality’s validity. He clarifies that he is not claiming atheists are not moral in practice, and that he sees no indication of differences in moral level between believers and non-believers. He also rejects psychological arguments about reward and punishment, or about the need for religious education in order to produce moral behavior. He formulates a conditional claim: “Only if there is God is there morality,” and defines God in this context as a “transcendent source” that gives validity to norms, without committing himself to a “Jewish God,” “the God of the Hebrew Bible,” or any particular religious deity. He even notes that identifying this with his own personal faith is not part of the meta-ethical position.
Rabbi Abraham against “self-legislation” and in favor of moral objectivity
Rabbi Abraham criticizes a distinction Ari Elon makes between “the rabbinic Jew” and “the sovereign Jew,” presenting it as a strange understanding according to which the validity of values stems from the fact that a person legislates them for himself. He argues that self-legislation cannot turn “bad” into “good,” and gives the example of someone who legislates for himself a life as a hitman, as opposed to someone who legislates for himself a life like Mother Teresa, in order to show that the judgment “good/bad” presupposes an objective standard independent of the desires and choices of the individual or of society. He adds that moral arguments themselves presuppose moral realism, because they proceed as though there are right and wrong answers, even if sometimes there may be more than one correct answer. He rejects dependence on society as a basis for validity, because there are wicked societies, and one is not obligated to obey them.
Rabbi Abraham: ethical facts are not enough without binding authority
Rabbi Abraham argues that even if one accepts “ethical facts,” that is still not enough to validate morality, because the question remains: “Why should I obey this ethical fact?” He rejects analytic answers according to which obligation is built into the definition. He gives a Kantian example of tax evasion to emphasize that the direct practical result of hiding a small amount of money has no significance, and yet it is still forbidden. He concludes that appealing to an “ethical fact” does not explain why the individual ought to act that way. He ends by arguing that the only way out is a “transcendent authority” standing at the basis of moral norms, and without it they have no binding validity.
Professor David Enoch’s opening argument: moral realism without God and rejecting the question of “source”
Professor Enoch declares his limited agreement with Rabbi Abraham on the starting assumption that there are objective moral truths independent of us, and emphasizes that not everyone agrees with that, though it is the basis of their discussion. He argues that when people usually ask, “If there is no God, is everything permitted?” they mean a personal, “ordinary” God, and that shifting to some thin “transcendent something” moves away from the ordinary discussion and may even turn the disagreement into a merely terminological one. Enoch reconstructs an argument from alternatives: the individual is not a good source because he is not objective, society is not a good source because there are bad societies, so one arrives at something independent of us and calls it God. He rejects the argument because it presupposes from the outset that morality must have a source.
Professor Enoch: morality does not “come from somewhere”
Professor Enoch compares the question of the source of morality to the question “Have you stopped cheating on exams yet?”—a question that contains a false presupposition. He argues that asking “Where does morality come from?” mistakenly assumes that morality is the kind of thing that needs a source. He offers analogies such as “the number eight” and “the law of non-contradiction,” which have no source and need no source. He says the argument from alternatives cannot even begin unless there is justification for that presupposition, and none has been given.
Professor Enoch: on “why obey” and the limits of God as a solution
Professor Enoch argues that the question “Why act in accordance with moral facts?” is itself a normative question asking for reasons, so anyone asking it has already entered the normative game. He adds that even if this is a difficult problem, he does not see how God solves it, because God is not a “joker card” but itself requires explanation as to how it provides a solution. He stresses that discussions like this are decided holistically, and that God also adds explanatory challenges. He raises the problem of evil as a challenge that cannot be ignored when speaking about an all-good, all-powerful God.
Rabbi Abraham’s response: validity, not source, and a “lawgiver” behind norms
Rabbi Abraham clarifies that his question is not “Who created the laws of morality?” but “What gives them validity?” He asks what “moral facts” are ontologically, and whether they are abstract entities that in practice bring us close to the “thin God” he is proposing. He returns to the example of the categorical imperative and tax evasion, and argues that it is hard to respond to someone who asks “Why not?” if the answer is only “There is an ethical fact.” He generalizes from human examples of normative systems—law, morality, or guild rules—that have a legislator who grants them validity, and argues that the position of “ethical fact” seems to him no better as an “axiom” than the assumption of a transcendent authoritative factor. He says that anyone who does not accept such authority is left with “morality empty of content,” and with a move from a question mark to an exclamation point without justification.
Professor Enoch’s response: no axioms, and no need for a lawgiver; a thin god versus a god that actually does work
Professor Enoch rejects the characterization of normative truths as axioms and argues that there are basic truths that can be supported, unlike axioms. He rejects the assumption that every law must have a source, and offers as an example, “It is not rational to form beliefs through wishful thinking,” a normative law without a source. He warns that dialectical pressure causes Rabbi Abraham to expand God beyond the thinness of his initial commitment so that God can do real work, and argues that if God is only “moral facts,” then Rabbi Abraham is welcome to “join the club,” but if one adds causal powers or additional properties, then God becomes a heavier hypothesis than moral realism itself.
The moderator’s questions: Euthyphro, the binding of Isaac, and religious value versus moral value
The moderator asks Rabbi Abraham the Euthyphro dilemma: is a moral command moral because God commands it, or does God command it because it is moral? Rabbi Abraham replies that the good is in some sense “forced on Him” and is, for God, close to logical truths, but still, without God there is no validity that binds Him to act that way. The moderator asks about the binding of Isaac as a command apparently contradicting a grave moral prohibition, and Rabbi Abraham replies that the story may have been “rigged” from the standpoint of the divine plan, but Abraham’s decision was made as if the command were real. Rabbi Abraham argues that religious commands do not turn an act into something “moral”; rather, they create a conflict in which “religious value” overrides “moral value,” so one must obey, without the act itself acquiring positive moral status.
The moderator’s questions to Professor Enoch: what are moral facts and how do we know them
The moderator asks Professor Enoch what the “Platonic” entities of moral facts are, and Enoch replies that it is difficult to give an informative account of basic moral facts precisely because they are basic, and that they are part of “the normative part of the universe,” not the naturalistic part. The moderator asks on what basis one can know of their existence, and Enoch distinguishes metaphysics from epistemology and offers an indispensability argument from deliberation: practical deliberation itself presupposes that questions have answers, and commitment to normative facts is necessary for the deliberative project just as electrons are necessary for the scientific project. Rabbi Abraham later joins on the epistemic point and argues that moral knowledge is similar to knowing “there is a wall here,” knowledge that stops at “I just know,” while Professor Enoch gives “more respect” to the epistemological challenge and emphasizes the problem created by the lack of causal powers in moral facts relative to our intuitions.
Mutual questions: logic, analyticity, de re and de dicto, and Huckleberry Finn
Rabbi Abraham attacks the analogy to logic and argues that the law of non-contradiction and the law of identity do not “say” anything and therefore do not require justification, whereas moral laws are synthetic propositions that do require justification when facing someone who asks why not act against them. He argues that the indispensability of ethical facts for deliberation is an analytic consideration showing that without them discussion is impossible, but it does not justify their existence in a non-analytic way. Professor Enoch introduces a distinction between de dicto and de re moral motivation, and gives the example of Huckleberry Finn, who is willing to “go to hell” rather than turn in a slave. He argues that sometimes de re justification is enough—grounded in the facts that make the action worthy—rather than in a “moral” description. Rabbi Abraham rejects this as moral motivation and argues that Huckleberry Finn is either a “hidden Kantian” or else this is sheer accident without moral value, while Professor Enoch clarifies that for Kant the question whether an action is permitted or forbidden does not depend on motivation from duty, but only a special “moral worth” does.
Questions from the audience: moral facts versus social agreement, the spinach test, and defining the disagreement
Someone in the audience tries to reduce the disagreement to a terminological question about plurality or unity of the sources of validity, and Professor Enoch replies that the gap lies in what is included under “God,” because he sees moral facts as facts like “someone’s pain is an excellent reason to refrain,” facts that do not express a will, while Rabbi Abraham argues that what is needed is a “legislating factor” that issues a command, and the discussion focuses on whether the meaning of “command” requires intentional properties. The audience also asks whether morality is social agreement like money, and Rabbi Abraham argues that a wicked society shows social agreement is not a sufficient basis for validity, while Professor Enoch says the natural reaction to a society that permits humiliating redheads is that this is still wrong, unlike money whose value depends on agreement. Enoch explains the “spinach test,” in which a joke about a change in personal taste reflects subjectivity, while a parallel version about moral belief is not funny in the same way, and therefore points to a claim to objectivity within moral discourse.
Conclusion and emphasis on what follows
The moderator concludes by saying that the discussion opened the door to metaphysical and epistemological questions about morality, validity, ethical facts, and divinity, and recommends further study through the books of Rabbi Abraham and Professor Enoch. He thanks Professor David Enoch and Rabbi Michael Abraham, wishes everyone, “Do only good,” and closes the evening.
Full Transcript
[Speaker A] Well, ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Welcome here to Alma, a home for Hebrew culture, to this joyful and fascinating event that we’re happy, proud, and excited to be holding here tonight. Is it true that if there is no God, then everything is permitted? Is everything permitted if there is no God? The connection between divinity and morality. And in order to go straight for the jugular on this issue, I want to begin with a quote that seems to me especially relevant to our event here tonight—of course, the death of God as it appears, as Nietzsche writes it, in The Gay Science. “The madman,” Nietzsche writes, “Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: I seek God! I seek God! And since many of those standing around did not believe in God, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on board a ship? Emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed.” The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, forward, sideways, in every direction? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Does not empty space breathe upon us?” What’s the point here? Notice that Nietzsche isn’t coming with arguments that there is no God, the way we sometimes see in philosophy, people who come with arguments. Nietzsche starts from the assumption that people in the West in the nineteenth century are ceasing to believe in God. The madman is speaking to people who don’t believe in God anyway. But what he is telling them is that their values are going to collapse. What he is explaining to them is: if you think you can go on knowing how to direct yourselves morally, if you think you can continue to hold the values you had before the death of God after the death of God, you are gravely mistaken. Because those values were actually sitting on God. He is not bringing arguments that God is dead; he is starting from that assumption in order to warn about the collapse of the old moral values, which in Nietzsche’s view rested on God. That means that for Nietzsche, Judeo-Christian morality, Western morality, collapses without God. And that is really our question tonight: is Nietzsche right? Does our morality collapse without God? Or, to go back to our own sources, Psalms 14: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They have corrupted themselves, they have done abominable deeds; there is none who does good.” Does someone who says in his heart that there is no God necessarily corrupt himself and do evil? Or might there be morality regardless of the question of God’s existence or nonexistence? In order to discuss this question, ladies and gentlemen, I’m very happy, very proud, and very excited tonight. We sometimes present this a bit like a kind of boxing match, so if tonight is a boxing match, then this is the heavyweight division. We have here tonight, ladies and gentlemen, the two most exalted and outstanding people for this task we could have hoped would honor us with their presence. Standing to my left is Rabbi Michael Abraham, ladies and gentlemen. Rabbi Michael Abraham, a doctor of theoretical physics, after several years of research at the Weizmann Institute and Bar-Ilan University, served as head of the hesder yeshiva in Yeruham and taught at Bezalel and at Ono Academic College. Today he teaches at the Beit Midrash for Advanced Torah Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Rabbi Abraham is one of the founders of the university’s Talmudic logic group, has published many articles and around thirty books, ladies and gentlemen, dealing with physics, logic, Talmudic logic, Jewish law, general philosophy, and the philosophy of science, the Talmud, Jewish law, and law. Perhaps especially relevant for us: Stable Truth and Unstable Truth, on fundamentalism, skepticism, and philosophical maturation, published by Yediot Sfarim in 2016, and The First Existent from the trilogy he published not long ago. Rabbi Michael Abraham, thank you very much. Standing to my right, ladies and gentlemen, Professor David Enoch. Professor David Enoch is a full professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He works in philosophy of law, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. In moral philosophy, for our purposes, a significant part of Professor Enoch’s writing is in meta-ethics, where he defends an objectivist, realist position. An uncompromising realism about morality and normativity in general. According to this view, there are moral facts that do not depend on us, that we discover rather than legislate or constitute, and that cannot be reduced to ordinary naturalistic facts. The book in which Professor Enoch presents these claims most comprehensively is of course Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism, or in Hebrew, Taking Morality Seriously, which he published with Oxford University Press in 2011. Professor David Enoch, good evening and thank you very much. All right, we’re using the regular format of our debate evenings: each side will have an opening argument tonight of about seven minutes, then a response to the other, I’ll ask a few questions of our two distinguished guests, they’ll ask each other questions, and then we’ll open it up to questions from the audience as well. I also want, before we begin, to thank our friend Noam Oren, an outstanding doctoral student at the Hebrew University, thanks to whom in large part we are here. Noam Oren, of course, of course. Thank you very much, Noam. And with that, let’s simply begin. Rabbi, seven minutes, your opening argument, please.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hello. I’ll try to stay within this time frame. My path from morality to God is actually made up of two steps. On the first, I imagine—at least based on what I’ve read—there will be agreement between us. On the second, probably less so. The first step is in the direction of moral realism, which Jeremy also mentioned, and from there I argue that one has to move to belief in God. I’ll spend some of the time saying what I am not arguing, because a lot of these things get taken to places or districts I don’t want them taken to. What I’m basically saying is that valid morality is necessarily based on God. That does not mean that atheists necessarily don’t behave morally. Factually that’s just not true. I also don’t think there’s any difference between the moral level of atheists and the moral level of believers—I at least don’t see any indication of that. So that is really not my claim. What I do say is that if there is an atheist who behaves morally, in my view one of two things is true: either he is an implicit believer, or he is inconsistent. But obviously such people exist—that’s my claim. Second, I do not want to argue—the connection to God, or God, serves as the basis for the validity of moral norms. I’m not using God, I don’t mean to argue that God is the stick that makes sure we behave, because otherwise we’ll get punishment or reward or something like that—some kind of psychological view. I’m not speaking on the psychological plane at all; my argument is meta-ethical, you might say, and even meta-meta-ethical, and therefore I don’t need any of those aspects at all. I’m also not arguing a psychological claim of the kind that religious education is needed in order to produce moral behavior. I don’t think that’s true, and I’m not trying to argue it. So I’m taking all of that off the table. What I’m arguing is a philosophical claim, which is basically a conditional, hypothetical claim. What I want to say is that only if there is God is there morality, or that if there is no God there is no morality. Now, you can say there is no God and then indeed there will be no morality—that doesn’t contradict what I’m saying. If you say there is morality, you are implicitly assuming the existence of God. One more thing I want to note: I’m not claiming anything about who this God is. That is, I’m not talking about a Jewish God—obviously not—not the God of the Hebrew Bible, not a religious God in general. I’m talking about some transcendent source that gives validity to the rules of morality. Without such a source, my claim is that they have no validity. That’s it. Everything beyond that—whether he wants us to eat pork or not eat pork, walk on water, turn the other cheek, or whatever else he might want us to do—is irrelevant. Personally, I identify him with the God I believe in as a religious Jew, but that is not part of my position. I want to argue only for the existence of some transcendent factor. That’s another preliminary remark. I’ll say briefly something in favor of realism, even though that may be more David’s role, and more his profession, but something in the direction of moral realism. And I’ll skip the charming spinach test, which I very much enjoyed reading in your article. I’ll present it from another direction. There’s a distinction that Ari Elon returns to in a number of places between the rabbinic Jew and the sovereign Jew. The rabbinic Jew is the one whose rabbis shape his laws, his values, his norms. And the sovereign Jew is the one who shapes his own values, legislates his own values for himself. This argument is a very strange argument. He identifies it, of course, with religiosity and secularity. But it’s a very strange argument, because according to it—or at least according to what it implies—what gives values their validity is that I legislated them for myself. Meaning that, for example, if someone determines for himself, legislates for himself, a way of life of being a hitman, because that’s optimal income for him, then supposedly I cannot criticize him, because he legislated his own values for himself; he is a sovereign person, and he acts according to what he legislated for himself. What’s the difference between him and someone who legislates for himself to be Mother Teresa? I assume Ari Elon would also agree there is a difference. He would say: because this one legislated good values for himself and that one legislated bad values for himself. But then the question comes back: who determines what good values and bad values are? In other words, my legislation cannot turn something bad into good. What determines what is good and what is bad is apparently something objective, not connected to my decisions, my desires, my conceptions. It is something objective. What I can decide is whether I go with it or not. In other words, I obviously have a choice whether to be a good person or not to be a good person. I do not have a choice about what good is. On that question, of course, there can be disagreements, and as David wrote—and on this too I agree—those disagreements prove the objectivity of morality or moral realism; they don’t refute it, because otherwise there would be nothing to argue about. But these are disagreements about what morality says. One person is right and one is wrong. Maybe in some cases there are two correct answers; I’m not committing myself right now to the view that there is only one answer to every question. But at the principled level there are correct answers and incorrect answers. What does that actually mean? That there are standards that do not depend on the choices and legislation I make for myself, and that standard is what determines what is good and what is bad. Now I ask: who is responsible for that standard? If it’s not me, then who is it? And my claim is that there has to be something responsible for it. In other words, the mere existence of such a thing is not enough for me—and here I’m hinting a little at what, at least from what I understood in David, may be the point. The mere existence of such a thing as what is called an ethical fact is, in my view, not enough to validate morality, because the question is: why should I obey that ethical fact? Why should I behave in accordance with it? And analytic answers—that that’s just part of the definition of an ethical fact—don’t satisfy me, but maybe we’ll talk about that later. So what I want to argue is that if I’ve reached the conclusion that there must be standards that do not depend on me, and I also don’t accept that they depend on society because there can also be a wicked society and I don’t think one ought to obey it, then something else, not belonging to the human sphere, is supposed to be at the basis of these standards—of this determination of what is good and what is bad. And without that something, even if I abstractly accept that there are ethical facts, which is what ethical realism says, I still don’t see why I am supposed to behave according to them. The point that perhaps we can expand on later, I’ll just say very briefly. Kant’s categorical imperative, for example, basically instructs us—although people don’t always understand this—to do things not according to the test of the practical result. That is, you’re not supposed to behave in the way that brings about the best result, but in the way that if the whole public were to do it, we would get the best result. That’s not the same thing. For example, am I allowed to evade taxes? If I hide a thousand shekels in taxes, nothing will happen. In the state treasury, a thousand shekels is completely negligible. Consequentially, it has no significance. But clearly, if everyone evaded taxes, our situation would be grim. But not everyone will evade taxes, because if I evade taxes that doesn’t affect the others; they’ll do whatever they’ll do. So the question is: why not evade taxes? On the level of consequences, it’s hard to tell you: don’t evade taxes because something will happen. Nothing will happen. Why is it nevertheless forbidden? I think it is forbidden. Why is it nevertheless forbidden? There is what is called the categorical imperative; that’s what Kant tells us—we have to think what would happen if everyone did it. And now I ask myself—and I bring this only to sharpen my previous point—okay, but why should I do that? No one is harmed by it either. More than that, even in a place where someone is harmed, you can ask why do it; here no one is even harmed. So why do it? In my view, to say that there is an ethical fact that obligates us to do it—that’s not enough for me. There is an ethical fact—almost a naturalistic fallacy, I’d say. Okay, there’s a fact, so what? The question is what that says about me. Even with ethical facts, I think you can raise the naturalistic fallacy. And therefore I think the only way out is some transcendent authoritative factor—and that’s all I know how to say about it; everything I stripped away earlier, I stripped away—standing at the basis of these norms. Without it, I don’t see how one can give them validity.
[Speaker A] Rabbi Abraham, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for that opening argument, excellent.
[Speaker C] Professor David Enoch, seven minutes, your opening argument please. Thank you very much. Thank you for the invitation. So indeed there is quite a bit of agreement at the starting point, and that matters because I feel some obligation to represent the discussion accurately. The discussion is broader than the discussion between us. For example, we both agree that there are objective moral truths that do not depend on us. You may have heard—not everyone agrees with that. So it may be that part of the discussion is conducted under different assumptions. But between us tonight, that will be the assumption. I think it makes the discussion more interesting, not less interesting, but in any case it’s important to understand that. Here’s something else that I think is relevant to the discussion in general, less relevant to what was just said. I think that usually when people ask whether, in the absence of God, everything is permitted, what they mean is whether, in the absence of an ordinary God, everything is permitted. An ordinary God is something like a personal God, all-good, all-powerful, maybe even sometimes with a hobby like providence, something of that sort. To the extent that you give up those attributes, and as you did move toward something like “something transcendent” without committing yourself for the moment to further things, you are moving away from the ordinary discussion. When people ask whether in the absence of God everything is permitted, they mean in the absence of that God, not in the absence of some far more metaphysically clean version, let’s say. I’ll also relate to the points as Miki framed them, but I want that to remain in the background. If you are prepared to call anything God, or everything that doesn’t depend on us God, then you’ve ended the discussion from the start—but not in an interesting way. Okay. Good. I want to address what seems to me to be Miki’s central argument, which also captures, I think, general lines in this kind of thought and was also mentioned here, and then maybe one or two further points—we’ll see. So here is the argument as I see it, more or less. The question is: what is the source of morality? Where does morality come from? Or in the words Miki used here: who is responsible for the moral standard? Something like that. And from there on we move to an argument from alternatives. A number of alternatives are offered: either I am responsible, each person is responsible for the standards that apply to him, or society is responsible, maybe there are some other possibilities. Each alternative is ruled out, and with no other choice we arrive at something else—so apparently God. If one has to find the source of morality, then I am not good enough because that’s not objective enough, society is not good enough because there are bad societies, there are bad social conventions, right? You can give a few more alternatives, and what remains is something radically independent of us, and we call that God. I think that’s the central argument. I’m relying here both on what you said here, but also on what Miki wrote in the book Jeremy mentioned, The First Existent. Now, there are various things one could say about this argument. One thing I already said. For the moment, it says nothing about whether morality depends on an ordinary God. For the moment it depends only on something that is not all those other things, and then Miki still has some distance to go in order to show how that connects to the kind of God we usually have in mind. I should note: thirty books is not a bad way to cover some distance. He doesn’t have to say the whole truth right now, but it’s important for you to see that this is not part of this argument. But here is the point that seems to me more critical and central. The question “What is the source of morality?” in my opinion presupposes a false assumption. It’s a bit like the question “Have you stopped cheating on exams yet?” That’s the example I give my students. It looks like a question that has to be answered yes or no, right? Is it? It’s a yes-no question. But there is no way to answer it yes or no. The student who never cheated cannot answer it either yes or no; he has to reject the question. The question presupposes—we say “presupposes”—that he cheated in the past, and if he denies that presupposition, he has to address the question in some other way. The question “What is the source of morality?” presupposes that morality is the kind of thing that needs to have a source. The question “Where does morality come from?” mistakenly assumes some sort of geographical model, or at least that geography is not a bad metaphor here, that morality is supposed to arrive from somewhere. But those metaphors mislead. Morality doesn’t come from anywhere. Exactly like the number eight. Where does the number eight come from? What is the source of the law of non-contradiction? It has none, and it also doesn’t need one. It just is what it is. The question of source, the argument from alternatives—this isn’t a good source, this isn’t a good source, this isn’t a good source, let’s call what remains God—that argument, for it even to get started, requires the presupposition to be true, namely that morality is the sort of thing that needs a source. And it isn’t. It simply isn’t. No reason has been given for that. So that is the main reason why I reject this central argument. Miki anticipated this move, at least more or less. He then said: so what are you really saying, that there are just moral facts there, and one can still ask: why should I, why should I obey them? So that opens up broader discussions. Very briefly, before Chen yells at me, I’ll say the following. First, the question why obey the facts, or why act in accordance with the moral facts, is not philosophically transparent. That “why” is a request for reasons. The question is not what will I get out of it, right? The question is why—why does it make sense? Why is it a good idea to act in accordance with these facts? But that question itself is a question about a normative fact. To say that it is a good idea to act in a certain way—that is a normative fact. And anyone who asks that question is already playing the moral game, or at least the normative game. “Normative” is the name for the broader family of which morality is a part, yes. So I don’t think that once one takes that question seriously, it receives a simple answer. But perhaps more importantly, even there there is something confused in the thought that it raises some serious challenge—that seems to me a confusion. But—and this is perhaps the main point here—if you think it raises a very difficult problem, I don’t see how God can help solve it. God is not a joker card in war. It’s not something you put down and the problem is solved. It’s something you put down and then you have to see how it solves the problem. Now again, maybe Miki shows this elsewhere, but if there is some problem of why obey that, I don’t see that God can help. And now one last point, which sounds trite but I think is still worth mentioning. Discussions of this kind are usually not decided by a conclusive argument that leaves no chance for the alternative position. They are decided holistically: which position is, all things considered, the better one, which gives us a better explanation of the phenomena we want to explain, which is more plausible. Therefore, God doesn’t only help explanatorily in some places, if he does. God also creates explanatory challenges in some places, including in connection with morality. I think the problem of evil cannot just be brushed under the rug as though it were nothing when one talks about the connection between God and morality. The question whether there is an ordinary God—all-good, all-powerful—and yet there is evil in the world: maybe there are things one can say about that, but one has to say them. It is a serious challenge. And anyone who thinks God is the solution to explanatory problems in morality must, at the very least, deal with that too. I’ll stop here.
[Speaker A] Professor Enoch, ladies and gentlemen, well done, thank you very much. I’d now like to hear from you, Rabbi Abraham, your response to Professor Enoch’s remarks, please, three minutes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, I’ll correct a formulation, because I’m not sure we’re fully synchronized about it. I didn’t ask where the laws of morality come from, but what gives them validity. That’s not the question of who created them. If you’re talking about moral facts, then I really can ask: what are these things, moral facts? Are moral facts some kind of objects? Do they exist in some objective sense like objects, can you quantify over them? Meaning, either they’re properties of material objects or relations between material objects, like numbers for example, as you said earlier. Or they’re, yes, as I said before, some kind of abstract entities. If they’re abstract entities, then we’re already getting very close to the concept of God once I strip it of content the way I did at the beginning. So here I don’t know anymore how much distance there really is. There’s some distance, but I think it’s already very small. That’s the first remark. The second remark: I think that’s why I felt uneasy with the possibility you raised, of who says we need to look for reasons to obey moral laws, and that’s why I chose to present a more concrete example than Kant’s principle, the categorical imperative. Because in my life I’ve met quite a few people—one very close to me, for example, my son—with whom I’ve had endless arguments around this issue. I explain to him: look, you must not evade taxes, or you have to go vote in elections, or whatever it may be, because the categorical imperative says that if everyone did this—even though you yourself have no influence over the matter. And here it comes up, as you said at the end, there’s something almost practical here, but I still think it can’t be ignored. How do you even address such a person and explain to him that he has an obligation to behave this way? Do you tell him: there is an ethical fact? Now, you asked: so why does God provide a solution? Why is God an explanation? I’m saying: usually, when we talk about systems of norms that we’re supposed to obey—law, morality, or all sorts of norms, or the bar association of lawyers, it doesn’t matter right now, the guild’s rules—there always has to be behind them, at least in the cases we know, some source that legislates them, that gives them validity. And now you have to decide whether you are bound by that source or not bound by that source. Now it’s true that I assume that if God—God in that thin sense that I defined earlier—said something, then that obligates me. That’s an assumption; you can argue about it. I’m only claiming that if you argue about it, and I have no way to prove it to you or argue for it, I’m only claiming that if you argue about it, then you’re left with morality empty of content. Because in the end you can always say, okay, we must uphold this because we must uphold this—that’s an axiom. No need for explanations of why. But this solution of presenting something as an axiom—almost what you accused me of with God, that I presented Him as some sort of problem-solver—I feel that the ethical fact suffers from exactly the same problem. You’re basically looking for a solution for grounding a real morality, realistic, a realist meta-ethical theory, which both of us agree on, and you say: no, there are moral facts. Now I don’t know in what way that strange hypothesis is better than the hypothesis I’m raising—one that in my eyes is far better—that says there is a transcendent factor who is the legislator, who commands, and I need to obey him. Someone else may come and say: I’m not obligated to obey him. Fine, then we have a disagreement. But I’ll only claim that if you’re not obligated to obey him, then there is no valid morality from your point of view. That’s all. You can listen or not listen, but I don’t see how you produce valid morality unless you take something you have a question mark about, stretch it out, and turn it into an exclamation point. Basically you say: I have a postulate, some axiom, and that’s it, and about that I ask no questions. That already almost looks like a religious position, meaning… okay.
[Speaker A] Professor Nadav, your response.
[Speaker C] I’ve been accused in the past of being religious, so that in itself is less threatening. I want to hear what religion, yes, but I didn’t say anything about axioms. Axioms have a different status. I think there are truths that are basic, but that doesn’t mean they’re axioms within our system of beliefs, because they can be supported. Axioms aren’t supported, right? Axioms are accepted, and then other things are supported by means of them. So that’s not the status I attribute to normative truths. The assumption that every law has a source is, in my view, a false assumption. One proof of its falsity is moral laws. But that’s a little question-begging in our context. I gave another example, the law of non-contradiction for instance. Now, one can distinguish between different senses of laws and all sorts of things of that kind, but yes, I think it is irrational to form beliefs through wishful thinking. That seems to me like an excellent law, and it has no source. I have no problem with that. There are laws that do have a source, and the thought that all laws have a source is simply a false generalization arising from something like that. Now notice a dangerous move Miki is making. When things get metaphysically difficult, the God he commits to is thin. But on the other hand, when God needs to do some work, suddenly he’s a little less thin. If all we know about God is only that he is some transcendent factor on which morality depends, how exactly does that help give people a reason to obey? For that, that isn’t enough. For that he needs all sorts of other things. I don’t know exactly what—not my usual playing field. But the danger that you’re smuggling additional attributes into God through the back door so that he can do the work you need him to do seems to me a serious dialectical danger. But I think Miki asked an excellent question that’s important to address, and that is: in what way are the entities I believe in better than the entity you believe in? Why— you spoke about a hypothesis, never mind—but why is it better, on my view, as a necessary condition for taking morality seriously, to believe in moral facts like these that are independent of us and so on—why is that better than believing in God? The answer to that question depends on what your concept of God is. If your concept of God is so thin that it is basically exactly the facts I believe in—for example, lacking causal power—excellent, you’re welcome to join the club of the realists, a very prestigious and rather small club. It’s growing, it’s growing—we have evidence that it’s growing. But if you also attribute to God certain causal powers, for example, then that already changes the picture. As for things that have causal powers, we have additional ways of checking whether they exist or not. Right? That’s what science knows how to do well, among other things of that sort. My hypothesis—metaphysically, some think it is scandalously strong—but it is still much weaker than God, at least if he isn’t so thin that you’ve basically found a very fancy way of saying what I say.
[Speaker A] All right, the question stage. I’ll start with you, if I may, Rabbi Abraham. I’ll throw you a problem that presumably you already know; I’ll say it out loud here for all of us. I want to ask you a question based on the famous challenge Socrates asks Euthyphro in the dialogue Euthyphro, and simply ask you: is a principle or command moral because God commands it or validates it, or does God command it because it is moral?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, that’s a question that isn’t directly connected to our discussion. It’s even somewhat connected to what David said later, what other things I’m putting into God so that he can do the work. But I already said that I am putting other things into him. But that’s not what I’m claiming here. Meaning, that’s my personal God. My God—I wanted you to know—as the phrase goes. Meaning, to each his own God. I’m saying that in the final analysis, everyone can do the work however he does it, but you need to reach some factor to which you give authority in order for norms to have validity.
[Speaker A] But Rabbi, the moment God commands something, does he command it because that thing is moral in his eyes, or does the fact that he commands it make it moral?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I—I have a more complex answer to that, and it almost requires a whole lecture, but I’ll say it in two sentences. I claim that the good, in a certain sense, is imposed on Him—what is good and what is not good. And that almost comes close to what David said earlier, that it’s like logical truths. I don’t agree that it’s like logical truths; maybe I’ll comment on that later. But I don’t agree that without God this would have any validity that obligates me to act this way. Those are two different things. It’s a little like what Ari Elon says: there is good and evil, but I need to decide whether I go with it or don’t go with it, and for that, I think, you need a reason. Meaning, I don’t think I decide that simply because it’s an ethical fact. That sounds to me like something that doesn’t feel as though it at least operates on me.
[Speaker A] Because really the practical point of my question is this: if what makes morality moral—if the only thing that makes morality moral—is not that it is moral in itself, but that God commands it, then why call it moral? Why not just call it a divine command and that’s it? No need for morality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s why I said that I don’t accept that thesis in its extreme form. There’s also a book by Avi Sagi that surveys positions in the rabbinic literature, and he shows there that what’s called morality as the command of God—in Hebrew initials, he calls it matza—in the strong sense, almost doesn’t exist in Jewish literature.
[Speaker A] So I’d like, with your permission, to continue and ask: I know that indeed today we’re talking about a thin God, but even so you are also committed to the somewhat chubbier God we meet in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), strong, strong, strong—yes, no body-shaming—robust, corporeality without embarrassing him over diets. The Binding of Isaac, right? The Binding of Isaac. Ostensibly in the Binding of Isaac God asks for something that I think we can all agree is a blatant moral fact: do not murder children. Yours, others’, don’t murder. God asks Abraham to commit a grave crime. Later Kierkegaard of course will speak about the teleological suspension of the ethical. Is murdering Isaac, once God tells you to do it, a moral act? Or is God here asking to suspend morality, and therefore morality is independent of Him?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, I don’t know what the reasons were that God commanded Abraham to kill— to kill Isaac; “murder” already carries a certain connotation. I’m also not sure He really meant it. Because it’s quite possible that the whole thing from the outset was a rigged game. Meaning, He really wanted to test him, but clearly “Do not raise your hand against the boy,” which came at the end, was planned from the start. Incidentally, that changes nothing. It changes nothing because Abraham made his decision as though that were the command, and he indeed decided to do it. Meaning, the fact that God didn’t actually intend for it to happen from the start doesn’t really matter for our purposes as long as we see Abraham as some kind of worthy model. So regarding your question, there are two possibilities here. One possibility: there are various commandments, not only the Binding of Isaac, which is some sort of one-time myth and that’s it—there are commandments that obligate us today as well, and that ostensibly contradict principles of morality. And I have argued in several places, I’ve written about this, that these commandments, these commands, do not make the act moral—this is part of that softening of Euthyphro that I mentioned earlier. The command does not make it moral. Rather, they say that there is a religious value that overrides the moral problem. There is a conflict between the moral value and the religious value, and the religious value overrides the moral value, and therefore one must do it. Now when Abraham heard the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, I assume what he thought was that apparently there is some reason—let’s call it a religious reason for now, because it is not from the moral sphere—that overrides the moral problem, but that does not make the act moral. But it overrides the issue, and therefore he decided to obey. In the end he received an order not to do it, and I already spoke earlier about whether it was rigged from the start.
[Speaker A] Thank you very much, Rabbi Abraham. There’s much more to ask and continue with here, but we’ll continue later. Professor Enoch, I know that you’re one of the great celebrities in the club—you know, one of the leaders of this little club of robust realism—and you also lead it on the analytic superhighway, the analytic philosophy in which we are very occupied with the way our language, let’s say, and our use of moral discourse, actually presuppose this objectivism that you argue for. But in the end what naturally tickles the imagination and perhaps the philosophical hunger of those of us who are more continental is that you do indeed posit those entities, those existents, those atemporal, non-material metaphysical facts. And I feel that this is maybe a layer that is less comfortable for analytic discourse, but I can’t help asking you: what are these things? What are those quasi-Platonic, atemporal, immaterial entities?
[Speaker C] Okay, so
[Speaker C] I’m afraid the answer may be somewhat frustrating, but still. First, a commercial break: analytic philosophy is not only about language. Maybe it started that way, or with a special emphasis on language. I think today when we talk about analytic philosophy, we’re talking about a genre of doing philosophy, or a genre of philosophical discussion. Not about certain topics and certainly not about certain positions. For every claim any analytic philosopher has ever made, you’ll find an analytic philosopher—or analytic woman philosopher, usually an analytic philosopher—who argued the opposite. So it’s not… it’s not just about language in that sense. Analytic philosophers do metaphysics without shame. And what I do when I do the metaphysics of morality is modest compared to what some of them do. Okay, what are these entities? Here I think—who was that bishop who wrote this? I can’t remember now, maybe I’ll recall in a moment—who began his book with the motto, “Everything is what it is and not some other thing.” Yes. Sometimes we can say various things about something. When you ask me about the essence of a cellular phone, there are many answers one can give, right? Some by means of empirical science, some by— I don’t know—an account of the functions it fulfills, things of that kind. But there are things about whose essence we can’t say very much because they are too basic. Maybe fundamental particles, or something like that. We can still say many things around them: we can say things about the interactions between them, about their importance, about laws that apply to them, and so forth. That’s what I think about facts, moral facts. The most basic among them really are the most basic. Michael asked earlier whether there are such objects, or whether it’s only relations, or—well, we already said I’m shameless. I think there are all of those kinds, and that often one cannot give an informative account of their essence, but not in a way that undermines the reasons we have to believe in them. One cannot give that kind of account because they are too basic. They are a basic part of the universe, of the normative part of the universe, not the naturalistic part of the universe. It doesn’t hurt me anymore to say that—perhaps because I’ve trained myself for long enough.
[Speaker A] But then maybe I’ll ask: on what basis can one know of their existence? Okay, that’s…
[Speaker C] That’s another question… another question. You see, we’ve moved from asking a question in ontology or metaphysics about the nature of these objects to a question in epistemology.
[Speaker A] But I’ll distinguish that too, meaning—and I… obviously analytic philosophy is not only language, but if I were challenging you to think—or, well, I’ll hear your answer—and I’d be glad if it were an answer not based only on our use of language. We also say “the sunset rose”; the sun neither sets nor rises. So on what basis can we know that those metaphysical facts exist?
[Speaker C] I think there are… language doesn’t interest me. Yes, in philosophy they always say that unlike, say, politics or certain couple arguments, it’s about what you say, not how you say it. Right? What matters to us is the content, not the language. So that’s true. I think we have pretty good arguments. I don’t know whether they can establish with certainty the existence of such objects or such facts, but on the other hand we’ve already given up on certainty, right? That’s just… that’s part of epistemic maturity. So after we’ve left behind— I mean, it’s nice to want certainty, but understanding that you won’t get it is pretty important. And then the kinds of reasons I offer are either reasons somewhat similar to Miki’s, which begin from what seem to us… what appear to us as moral truths and then reason backward. Right? They ask: what would have to be true in order for us to be able to take these moral truths seriously? In that sense, methodologically we’re in a pretty… pretty similar place. And one of my arguments, a central one—I’ll mention only that one—is the indispensability argument, an argument from the necessity of such facts. Why do you believe in electrons? You believe in electrons, I think, because our best scientific theories require electrons. And the theories are the best because they explain a wide range of phenomena in the best way. Electrons are explanatorily necessary. I claim there are other kinds of necessity that can justify ontological commitment, and in particular the kind of necessity relevant to moral facts, or normative facts more generally, is deliberative necessity. When we try, when we struggle with a practical question, trying to decide how to act, that very struggle presupposes that the question we are asking ourselves has an answer. And I think from here one can—it will take a few more pages in one of my thirty books, just kidding, I have one—but one can show, extract from that an argument that shows how commitment to the existence of such values and such objects is necessary for the deliberative project in a way that makes commitment to them grounded, just as electrons’ being necessary for the scientific project makes commitment to them grounded.
[Speaker A] But the deliberative project from which you want to infer the metaphysical truths—we can carry it out now, you and I can now conduct a deliberative discussion in which we try to find the moral answer to some difficulty we’re facing in our everyday lives. Yes, yes, but the level on which this takes place seems categorically different from the level on which the atemporality and immateriality of those facts lies.
[Speaker C] We can also begin the question of what explains some phenomenon here, but if we ask it seriously enough we’ll find ourselves, willy-nilly, committed to the existence of electrons. Same thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] May I add a sentence? I’ll add a sentence maybe actually to support what David is saying, because here I agree with him. I think that asking how we know this is like asking how I know there’s a wall here. I know there’s a wall here because I see it. Now how do you know that what you see is correct? At some point the “how do you know” stops with the fact that I simply know, period. And this isn’t arbitrary; rather, I really do have such evidence that if I see this wall, then it’s probably there. The claim—and here I agree—the claim David is making, if I understood correctly, is that I see these ethical facts not with my eyes; I see them, for example, through deliberation. But in the end I see. It’s like seeing a wall, just not with the senses but with, I don’t know, the eyes of the intellect, what Maimonides perhaps calls—or whatever—intellectual observation, not sensory observation. And therefore there’s no point asking how you know; I know, just as you know. The claim is that you too are a realist even if you don’t admit it. That’s what he says, and I agree.
[Speaker C] Yes, here—here there really is a point. Miki said at the beginning—we’ll take questions in just a moment—Miki said at the beginning: there are atheists who are committed to morality, which means that either they are inconsistent or they’re not really atheists, they’re hidden theists, deists. And of course I don’t accept that, but here is a certain parallel. I think people sometimes argue against me—there are all sorts of other non-realist positions, or positions less realist than mine, in meta-ethics today—and they say, wait, you say that in order to take morality seriously one has to be a realist like you, so what about all these non-realists, are you claiming they’re not morally serious? And I claim— and I claim a parallel claim.
[Speaker A] So at this stage I’d like to hear questions, or a question, or a mutual challenge. So perhaps Rabbi Abraham, if you want to ask Professor Enoch a question, and then he’ll ask you one.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I’ll respond and ask—this is a question and a response together. You mentioned earlier the analogy.
[Speaker A] Usually they’re responses with a question mark at the end.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sometimes there are questions with an exclamation mark at the end; I don’t know which is better. In any case, you mentioned earlier the analogy to the laws of logic, or arithmetic, or whatever. I think there’s a problem with this analogy; it has bothered me for many years. Because my claim is that the law of non-contradiction, for example, actually says nothing. Meaning, all those who claim that there is an alternative logic that does not contain the law of non-contradiction—there are various statements of that kind—this is nonsense. Meaning, you can define a formal system in which there won’t be a law of non-contradiction, that’s possible. But when you discuss that system, you’ll discuss it by means of a logic that includes the law of non-contradiction, like Łukasiewicz’s three-valued logic—you discuss it in bivalent logic when you build your truth tables. Therefore, in my view the law of non-contradiction says nothing, and so I don’t ask why it’s true; there is nothing here that is true. The law of non-contradiction is neither true nor false; it’s just—like the law of identity. For me, the law of non-contradiction and the law of identity have the same logical status. And therefore I don’t accept this analogy to moral laws, because with moral laws I genuinely believe the sincerity of the person who says to me: listen, categorical imperative or not, why should I do it? I’m losing a thousand shekels here and nobody gains anything from it, so why should I do it? So he says, what do you mean, because saying you should do it is an analytic statement? No, it’s not an analytic statement, it’s a synthetic statement, a statement that asserts something, and a statement that asserts something does need justification. And that’s really the point. And maybe one more remark, if I may.
[Speaker C] Is there a question mark, though?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? No, no, the question mark is about the analogy. I’m claiming that this analogy is unjustified. Second, I want to comment on another remark of yours connected to the issue. I think it’s no accident that you work in analytic philosophy. In my books I distinguished between an analytic outlook and an analytic method. And you too basically distinguished here— not in those terms, doesn’t matter—you distinguished between those two things, and I think that many times the analytic method in a certain sense expresses an analytic outlook, even when people don’t always feel that. And I think the analytic method you present, including indispensability to deliberation—yes, the one who deliberates and therefore presupposes the existence of ethical facts because without them one cannot conduct a discussion or make a decision—that’s basically an analytic consideration. But I, as someone who believes in the analytic method but not in the analytic outlook, repeat what I said at the beginning: okay, I’ve reached the conclusion that there are ethical facts. I completely agree; without that you can’t conduct an ethical discussion. I’m only asking: but what is the justification for their existence? And that is no longer an analytic question. Meaning, that is already a question that is, yes, maybe on the continent they might ask it, I don’t know. But it’s a good question, even if on the continent they might ask it.
[Speaker D] Question mark. Please, Professor.
[Speaker C] How nice that I don’t have to be the bad guy about the continent—it worked out beautifully. I agree with you in the skepticism about alternative logics. I’m not sure about the insincerity of some of the people promoting them. They simply—I simply think they’re mistaken. So okay, because you said something about sincerity.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the lack of sincerity I was talking about was regarding morality, not logic.
[Speaker C] Okay, fair enough. But I also gave other examples. Like the example that says it is not appropriate to base beliefs on wishful thinking. That seems like a normative example par excellence. One can base beliefs on wishful thinking. I can give you a justification; we have empirical studies, fine. Now wait a second. One question is whether it is appropriate to give a justification. I think that often it is appropriate to give justifications. But those are justifications for specific truths, and usually the justifications will be by means of other normative truths. It’s normative all the way down, yes? There are more and more normative truths until at some point there won’t be any more underneath them. I think there are normative truths that cannot be justified by means of other normative truths; they are simply too basic. And also that they cannot be justified by something else, and that they are simply justified without there being something else that justifies them. I don’t see a problem in that, and here’s the point that I think was missing both in the chapter I read and in what you said here, so I want to hear your response to it. It’ll be a bit technical, so hold on for a moment, okay? In moral philosophy we sometimes distinguish between moral motivation de re and de dicto. Moral motivation de dicto is the motivation to act morally under that description, to do—open quotation marks if you like—“what is morally appropriate.” Moral motivation de re is the motivation to act in a way that is in fact moral, but not necessarily under that description. So if, for example, I see someone in the street who needs help, and the fact that he needs help causes me, motivates me, to help him, and as a matter of moral fact that is also what is morally appropriate to do, then I had a moral motivation to do the morally appropriate thing, but not because it was the moral thing, but simply because his need cried out for help. Okay? That’s a general distinction, and there are interesting discussions in the philosophical literature about which motivation is more appropriate, or maybe one is appropriate in some contexts and the other in others, maybe we need both, things of that sort. When you ask what my reason is to act morally, it seems to me that both here and in what I read, you were asking de dicto. You’re really asking: what reason do I have to perform these actions under the description “acting morally”? And that suggests that there is something defective about someone who performs the moral action not because it is moral but because of the facts that make it moral. So I’ll give the example from the literature and then I’ll stop—now from literature-literature, not philosophical literature, though philosophers love using this example; it’s not original with me at all. In the story of Huck Finn, Mark Twain tells us at one very beautiful moment that Huck is deliberating about whether to turn in the slave, to return the slave to the widow. Now Huck Finn is many things, but a moral philosopher he is not. He does not challenge the racist conceptions prevalent in—absolutely not, on the contrary, he accepts them, and he says things to himself like: the widow never did anything bad to me, how can I take her property? And he struggles. Then the slave says something to him like, “Huck, there aren’t any friends like you.” And he can’t bear it, and he says, okay, then I’ll go to hell, I can’t turn him in. That’s the scene. Clearly Huck Finn has moral motivation here. It’s not entirely accidental that he acts morally. He acts morally because he is moved by considerations that really matter morally—the humanity of the runaway slave, the friendship between them, and so on. He is not moved out of Kantian respect for the law, or from motivation of that sort. If you ask him what your justification is for breaking the law, he’ll say, law, schmaw, he’s my friend. But that’s an excellent justification—at least sometimes, not always—at least sometimes all that is required for moral justification is de re moral justification, a justification based on the things that make the action appropriate, not on the fact that it is morally appropriate under that description. And sometimes that is enough. To the question, so why act morally? often the answer will be: simply because she needs help—what other reason do you need?
[Speaker A] A question. Beyond your response to Rabbi Abraham’s question…
[Speaker C] No, I’m offering you the distinction and asking whether it affects the ways in which you present the challenge of why should I act morally?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It affects it greatly, and that’s why I wrote there that I don’t agree with it.
[Speaker C] You don’t accept the distinction?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t accept the distinction? Of course I accept the distinction. There are people motivated by reasons like “he’s my friend,” and there are people motivated by obligation to a command, obviously. As a matter of fact there are these two kinds of people. I just don’t accept that this is moral motivation. And I claim that this is ultimately a motivation that is not the result of a decision.
[Speaker C] Huck Finn is not worthy of moral praise for the act?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I claim he is worthy of moral praise, and the reason is that he is basically a hidden Kantian. Exactly as I said earlier. Meaning, if he is willing to pay a price for it and he’s ready to do so, then there are two possibilities. Either he thinks that the immediate satisfaction this gives him outweighs the price he will pay, in which case he’s a utilitarian in terms of motivation, not criterion. If he is truly willing to do it, then he is a hidden Kantian. Exactly as I said before: the atheist, I say, is a hidden believer. Because this is the only conception of morality; otherwise he is not acting morally. Meaning, I assume…
[Speaker C] So we’ve made progress after all: not only is there no moral conception apart from Kant. Right, okay, right, I’m sharp…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] …in agreement with you.
[Speaker C] Morality is one and Kant is its prophet.
[Speaker A] Let’s just note that presumably from Kant’s perspective the moral act is only one done out of duty to the universal form of the moral law, and not out of inclination.
[Speaker C] No, okay. I’m not doing history of philosophy and I’m not a Kant expert.
[Speaker A] Having said that, not true.
[Speaker C] I don’t agree with that description at all. Kant thinks there is a moral status regarding which what Jeremy said is correct. That’s the concept called in English translations “moral worth,” some especially elevated kind of moral value. But he does not think that the question whether an action is permitted or forbidden or morally appropriate depends on whether the person doing it does it out of respect for the law. That’s a critical distinction, very important. And incidentally, when you’re considering the question, think about a practical moral question, not a theoretical one. You’re considering whether it would be okay to act in a certain way. It seems obvious to me that the question we ask—if we ask it morally at all, and many times we don’t, many times we ask only in de re terms, only in terms of the morally relevant factors, how much does she need help, does that justify my giving up my class, yes, things like that. But if you’re already deliberating morally, you’re not asking the question like this: if I act this way, will my action have moral worth? That’s a narcissistic, fetishistic question. If you’re genuinely morally motivated, what you ask yourselves at most is whether it is morally permissible not to vote in elections, or something of that sort. And that matters. The moral status relevant to us when we ask moral questions in everyday life is the moral status that Kant never says depends on whether you do it out of respect for the law. That’s a different status, and its role in Kant’s theory is different. Its role in Kant’s theory is to help in the inquiry at the end of which we arrive at the categorical imperative. But to the best of my knowledge Kant nowhere says—and the commentators I know do not attribute to him the claim—that…
[Speaker A] You’ll get an email from me. All right, questions from the audience. Please. One second, I’ll do this with a microphone, right? Friends, please.
[Speaker E] Two questions. Louder with the microphone. The first is for Rabbi Michael. Earlier you made some kind of analogy between normative axioms and epistemological axioms, when you said: I have some normative axiom that doesn’t require proof, and the same is true of an epistemological axiom, like my seeing this wall. Now what exactly are you trying to say?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] From the ontological to the epistemological: that I’m right in seeing this wall. The fact that there is a wall is the ontological part.
[Speaker E] Yes, but this wall that I see… I’m saying there really isn’t an analogy here because it’s empirical. You see, if you see the wall, there’s something empirical here, as opposed to something normative which isn’t empirical, so how does the analogy…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who claims this is empirical? It seems to me that on this point we even agree, don’t we?
[Speaker C] I’m not saying it’s empirical.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, I claim that this is empirical. I see it; I don’t see it with my five senses, doesn’t matter. I have eyes in my head. Yes, so I’m like the teacher who has eyes in the back of her head. Meaning, I see it—not with my eyes, but I see that this is the proper way to act or not the proper way to act, and that’s why I made the analogy. I stand by it.
[Speaker A] Another question, please.
[Speaker C] Wait, can I just address that point for a second? Sure, of course. I don’t think—I think the analogy to the senses, to sense perception, to perception, is a good analogy for certain purposes and problematic in other ways. Among other things, I think perception works causally, and I think moral facts lack causal powers. So I can’t fully buy that analogy. What I do think—and I think there are excellent epistemological challenges to a position like mine; that doesn’t mean there aren’t answers—is this: where I do come close to the analogy to perception is that I think we have moral intuitions or something of that sort. I don’t think they are caused by the facts, because these facts have no causal powers, but I do think they nevertheless give excellent reasons to believe, often justify belief, can ground knowledge both in morality and in other contexts. That leaves me with a challenge, and the challenge is to say: if they are not caused by these facts, because these facts have no causal powers, then how do these intuitions or these initial judgments nevertheless ultimately bring us closer to the truth rather than farther from it? And here I have some kind of story, which of course one can dispute. But I do see here—Miki said earlier, “in the end there is no meaning to the question how do you know, just as I know there’s a wall”—I give more weight to the epistemological challenge here. I think there are things one can say, but I definitely think there’s a challenge there.
[Speaker A] Another question, please.
[Speaker F] For me, if we use the analogy to chess, then what happened is that the whole beginning went through the Maroczy, and then you came down from the real discussion and moved on to eating pawns that you had sacrificed from the start.
[Speaker C] We’re doing boxing, not chess.
[Speaker F] Maybe NBA. In any case, what happened there, I—
[Speaker C] I don’t like my chances.
[Speaker F] No, so there’s no doubt, yes, that in my view beneath the important and focused discussion that took place here about the source of obligation and the entities—the transcendent entity or the entities that make it binding—there seems really to be, as David Enoch somewhat hinted, an agreement that in the end the whole discussion boils down to this: okay, in someone’s view there is a single transcendent source that is the source of the validity of obligation. Is it single?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t have to be.
[Speaker F] Ah, so from the moment it doesn’t have to be single—because I thought since you referred to it as one, and he says there are several sources—meaning, one could formulate it as a rule: for every moral law, for every moral command, there is something that determines its validity. You’ll tell me no, it’s the content of the command, and in my view that’s just wordplay, nothing more, because obviously I can logically distinguish between that—
[Speaker A] Don’t learn from me to ask questions that aren’t questions.
[Speaker F] Yes, a question, please. I’m really trying. Everything has validity; every command has moral validity of its own. Of course, in my mind I can separate between moral validity in itself—its moral validity, so to speak—and the content of the command, and we’re discussing abstract entities here. You can do that, and in fact you both agree. If you say there can be several such things and you say there are several such things, then I don’t understand the dispute. So, like, what is the dispute? Thank you very much.
[Speaker C] You start, Professor Enoch, maybe you can open. What’s the dispute? You thought the dispute was between a monotheist and a polytheist? That was kind of the—because I…
[Speaker A] He’s willing to accept polytheism, but have we found a dispute here?
[Speaker C] No, but I…
[Speaker A] One thousand, one thousand—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Certainly, I’m not—
[Speaker C] saying…
[Speaker A] God is dieting today.
[Speaker C] Yes, exactly.
[Speaker C] From my perspective, if there’s a gap between us, there are all kinds of gaps that you’ve seen, right? For example, there’s a question about the source of validity that, it seems to me, I think, already presupposes a false assumption, and Mikhi takes it very seriously. So there’s one difference, for example, right? But if you ask for the bottom line, the final position, what the difference between us is, the answer is: if there is a difference between us, the difference is in what gets included in God. If you tell me moral facts—moral facts aren’t some fancy thing, they’re things like the fact that if something hurts someone, that’s an excellent reason to avoid that behavior, or that generally it’s a bad idea to humiliate people, facts of that sort. If you tell me, ah, you think these facts don’t depend on us and don’t depend on society, so those facts are God. Then I say, fine, in my opinion you have a somewhat strange use of terminology, but as I said earlier, what matters to me is what we’re saying, not how we’re saying it. So if you chose… you chose to say in a strange way what I say all the time, I’ll agree with you. But that’s not what’s really happening, because sometimes through the front door in other parts of his thought, and sometimes through the back door, and certainly in other discussions of the question whether morality presupposes the existence of God, people build much more into God. At the very least they build causal powers into God. If you’re willing to give all that up and get to what I’m talking about, then I’ll agree with you. It’s another way of agreeing with myself; I do that quite a bit. But if you want to say something more interesting with your concept of God, then there’s quite a large gap there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All right, that’s a good question, I think, because it really focuses us on what we’re arguing about, since I almost suspected from the outset that we had too much agreement, and that’s why I wanted to do some clarification first, to see where the point of disagreement is. So we’re doing that now. I’ll sharpen a little what David said; maybe it’s a bit different. I don’t—meaning, it’s true that facts—I said that the gap narrows מאוד if you accept the existence of ethical facts, and I too thin God down to the point of death in a way that he can even be many and not one. I’m not saying anything about him. I also don’t know what one and many even mean in an entity of that sort; it’s not clear that numbering is even well-defined there. So still, I think there is one point where there is nevertheless a disagreement. Because I claim—and I think this is what you also meant to say—what I want to claim is that a moral fact as such, standing there in some way, existing there in some form, is not a motivation that will cause me to act. And I think that behind these facts there has to stand some abstract thing that I can hardly say anything about in this context, but it has to be of the commanding kind. That is, it has to be some kind of legislating factor. And in that sense it isn’t just an ethical fact.
[Speaker C] Wait, a bit—does it need to have a will? What? Does it need to have a will?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, I’m not even sure of that. You say, of the commanding kind, right?
[Speaker C] Even that seems crucial to me for understanding the difference. What is required so that—what are the job-description conditions of a commanding agent?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’ll put it this way: it’s hard to define it completely, but let me say this. Whether it has a will or doesn’t have a will is a claim about it. I have no idea. Okay. What I do know is what it does in relation to me. That is, it expresses desires with respect to me.
[Speaker C] Wait, wait, hold on, it expresses desires. So it has to be the kind of thing that can express things? Yes. I don’t buy that. Okay, it has to be able specifically to express desires. I think you can’t express desires unless you have desires. But that seems to me meta-analytic.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, yes.
[Speaker C] Yes, so for example it has to be an intentional creature. It has to have mental states with content. The facts I’m talking about don’t have mental states.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not sure, not sure.
[Speaker C] Otherwise how can it generate a command? A command is something that has content.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the command has content, but the question is what happens before that command comes out of its mouth, or from whatever, I don’t know, its means of communication. I have no idea what goes on there in the system.
[Speaker C] I want to say that what I think confirms one of the concerns I raised earlier is that in order for God to do the work Mikhi assigns to him, he has to build much more into him than the thin God he officially says he is committed only to. Because right now, for example, under the pressure of having to point out the distinction here, what he says is that God has—that God is the kind of thing that can express a desire, for example. Okay? The fact that it is forbidden to humiliate people is not the kind of thing that can express a desire, it has no mental states, no intentional states, no desires, and it expresses nothing. Okay? So here, wait, we can still argue about which position is more plausible, and you know where I stand, but we can no longer argue about whether there is a difference between the positions. There is a difference, and it concerns what Mikhi, willy-nilly, has to include in his concept of God so that it can do the work that, in my opinion, no one is needed to do.
[Speaker A] But Dr. Fuxman, if we’re basically conducting a discussion here about the weight of metaphysical entities in some way, about the weight of God, the weight of your moral facts, I think what perhaps makes them—what makes joining the realist club difficult—is that you’re really talking about a phenomenon that is entirely human. You and I are talking and we both experience this agreement that you must not humiliate people for no reason. But you’re actually talking about something pre-human, post-human, super-human. That is, this fact existed long before we were born—you and I as individuals and we as a species. Long before there was even a planet Earth, yes? This fact existed, and it will exist after humanity perhaps becomes extinct someday in the future. How do you get from the human—a thing that is so human, like not humiliating, not causing that feeling of humiliation, which is entirely a human feeling—how do you get from there to this super-human layer? I think that would be my difficulty.
[Speaker C] First of all, I’m not sure humiliation is only a feeling. I think there’s a much more objective sense. Actually that question seems pretty easy to me, and the answer is simply to distinguish between metaphysics and epistemology. To distinguish between questions about what exists and which existing things depend on which other existing things, and so on, versus questions about how we know various things. I know of the existence of Mount Hermon. Mount Hermon existed here long before me, I assume also long before people in general, and who knows, maybe it will exist afterward as well. But my reasons for believing in its existence are connected to things like what I see, whom I spoke to, what movie I saw, and what I read. Right? Similarly, the deliberative necessity of moral facts is not what metaphysically explains their existence. Their existence does not depend on our being here and being forced to look for answers to questions we ask ourselves. But our reason for believing in their existence, the way we can know epistemologically that they exist, that does depend on us. And in that respect there is no difference at all between our relation to morality and our relation to empirical facts, or our relation to mathematical facts as far as I’m concerned, or our relation to anything else.
[Speaker A] I have a question here and I have several more over there, please.
[Speaker H] You said that one has to accept as a postulate—or you spoke about this—that one has to fulfill what is commanded. And you say it’s preferable to accept that rather than the postulate that one must do what is moral. What exactly makes you accept that one and not the other?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You get roughly to the bottom command—it’s turtles all the way down, this is the bottom command. That is, I don’t know how to justify why this is preferable to that, just as I don’t know how to justify starting points or foundational assumptions. What I can tell you is that my intuition from life—and it seems to me that for many people, I don’t know—is that things that simply exist in some sense are not supposed to move me to do anything. They’re there because they’re there. That’s basically Hume’s is-ought, right? Well, it’s there, so it’s there—so what? By contrast, if there is a legislating factor and I recognize its authority—of course that’s an assumption not everyone has to accept—then I can understand why that moves me to act. How can I convince you that this commanding factor has authority? I have no way to convince you. But one thing I do think is this: if you don’t accept that it has authority, there is no alternative. That is, you have to give up the validity of morality. That’s all. But I don’t know how to convince you why God has authority.
[Speaker C] Okay. You also argued, both here and in writing, against Ilan on the point that if this is a matter of personal conscience, then one can ask what makes his conscience better than hers, and so on. Now you say that the authority of God’s words over me depends on my having accepted His authority.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no. What do you mean, I accepted His authority? That’s epistemic. Essentially, He has authority, period. If you don’t accept that, then we have an epistemic dispute.
[Speaker C] No, no, okay, fine. That’s different; it sounds different to me from what you said a moment ago. Okay, so there’s no dependence on… there’s no… when you say it’s something personal, you mean the way you know it is personal. Of course, of course. But there’s no… meaning that in the end you obligate everyone, in my view. Remember I said earlier: if there’s a problem here, God won’t solve it? That’s your question; on that point I’m with you.
[Speaker A] Where was the hand? Here, please.
[Speaker C] I have to ask for a second—just a moment—don’t the women have questions? Only men? Here, a woman. The next question is… no, no, I’m listening, it’s fine.
[Speaker I] Yes. You mentioned earlier the distinction between de dicto and de re, and more generally regarding the fact that acts can be done not out of commitment to a command, but simply out of, I don’t know, a personal feeling, and in the end the act is in fact moral because it corresponds to some code of laws, never mind which one right now. The question is: what value, if one can even ask, does such an act have by virtue of the fact that it happened to hit upon some code that the person acting wasn’t even thinking about, maybe wasn’t even aware of, and if that is called moral, then what בכלל is the… I don’t know, why are we here, why are we even entering into a discussion of what is supposedly moral—what difference does it make?
[Speaker C] I think your question assumes a dichotomy that I want to reject. That dichotomy says that either an action is moral because it is motivated by respect for the moral law—what I called de dicto moral motivation—or else its connection to morality is accidental. And I want to say there are other options. And Kant says there are other options too, by the way, though I think he doesn’t characterize them well. The example of Huckleberry Finn is supposed to show someone for whom… it’s not accidental that he acts morally. It’s not someone who acts according to what his friend tells him, and by chance when his friend tells him something moral, it’s moral, and when not, not. It’s not… it’s not accidental! He is systematically sensitive to what matters morally in the circumstances. You can play the quantitative game. If you find yourself on a boat, whom would you prefer to be with—Huckleberry Finn or Kant? And it could be that Huck Finn is the better candidate… I’m with Huckleberry Finn.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Is that your view too? But Kant is moral and he isn’t.
[Speaker C] Fine, hold on, but that’s another point. It’s not a point because of accidentality. If you say that for an action to have moral value, or moral value of a certain kind, it has to fit morality in a way that is not accidental, in a systematic way, I agree with you. If from that you infer that therefore it has to be motivated by respect for the moral law, by de dicto moral motivation—there I disagree with you. And again one can ask of such an action how valuable it is.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One more sentence I’ll add here, just a second. I only want to claim that one of two things must be true: either Huckleberry Finn is a hidden or unconscious Kantian, and then it’s not accidental that his desires or sensitivities coincide with moral duties, or this is really accidental. Now if it’s accidental, then it truly has no moral value. If it is not accidental, then he’s a hidden Kantian. That is, there is no option—I don’t see a third option. That is, okay.
[Speaker A] A question here at the back of the room, please.
[Speaker G] I wanted to ask why, a priori, you assume that morality is a fact and not a social agreement. I mean, tomorrow humankind won’t exist anymore, and until the stage of advanced Homo sapiens, if there were no moral laws until then, if we didn’t see morality among animals, among plants, maybe it’s just a social agreement like money, for example, where money is basically worthless but a social agreement. That is, human beings with their consciousness can agree on morality, can develop morality, and it’s not an existing fact.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Do you want to answer? As you wish. So I’ll begin. Look, first of all, that really is the starting point of the discussion, as David said, and on that basis we’re trying to see the differences. You’re asking about the starting point. On that starting point it seems to me we are in complete agreement; first of all it simply doesn’t fit the phenomenology of our thinking. But yes, the Euthyphro test—you’ll present it better than I will—that’s one test. But the claim is: if this thing is a social agreement, as I mentioned earlier, if this thing were a social agreement, then there are wicked social agreements too. Are those also binding? If you think not, then you’ll have to explain to me what the difference is, because this too is a social agreement and that too is. Rather, there is some criterion that is not…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And there are no murderers. No, I didn’t say there aren’t thieves, but I’m asking about social agreements: if you take them as a basis that is sufficient to grant validity to moral principles without referring, without resorting, to the content of the agreements, then social agreements of a wicked society are equally binding. And if you say they are not, then that means it is not enough to say there is a social agreement; it also has to be good or correct. But then I’ll ask who determines that it is good. Okay.
[Speaker A] With reference to the Euthyphro test.
[Speaker C] It came up twice, so I’ll propose the test. It’s long. So here we really agree, but maybe I’ll just say: you gave an interesting example—money. If our society systematically over time did not attribute value to kindness, would kindness have value? No. Good. If in our society people did not attribute negative value to humiliating certain people—say, humiliating redheads—would there be no negative value in humiliating redheads? Or would that simply be a mistake of our society, that it refuses to attribute value to what does have value, namely that humiliating people is indeed bad? Even you hesitate to answer. If the second position you presented were an attractive position, you should have answered without hesitation, just as you answered in the case of money. After all, if our society did not attribute value to money, it would have no value. Similarly, if our society thought there were no problem humiliating certain people, there would be no problem… no, no, it would still be wrong. And that is some evidence, and there are others, that this kind of thinking about morality runs contrary to the ways we think. My article in which I propose these things is called “Why I Am an Objectivist About Morality” and then in parentheses “And Why You Are Too.” Or “you” feminine as well. It’s written in English, so it means both. Because I really think that somehow we’ve been educated to think that relativism is self-evident, and in my opinion it’s simply a non-starter, it’s a position—
[Speaker C] a very basic position about morality—which suggests that commitment to objectivity is something one has to begin with. By the way, maybe I’ll just add: in the meta-ethical literature in analytic philosophy, which is my home territory, which… of course there is no consensus about anything, or almost anything, certainly no consensus on this realist position about morality, but there is consensus on this:
[Speaker C] at least the pretension to objectivity in morality is something that has to be explained. That is, either you take it at face value, say like my position, and if not, then you have quite a task in explaining how you can mimic it and get something close. That at the level of appearances morality does not behave like money—that seems fairly clear. The spinach test? What, the spinach test? The spinach test begins with a joke that whenever I tell it in class I discover it’s less funny than I thought. Don’t build up excessive expectations. Philosophically funny, exactly. First you have to lower expectations enough, and then the joke begins like this: a child says he doesn’t like spinach, and he’s very happy that he doesn’t like spinach. They ask him, why are you happy that you don’t like spinach? And the answer is: because if I liked spinach I’d eat spinach, and that’s yuck. Okay? There’s something amusing there; clearly he’s confused in a certain way. When you talk about it a bit more, you can try to diagnose what he’s confused about, and it’s pretty clear what he’s confused about. He’s confused because he doesn’t understand how disgustingness works. To say of spinach that it’s disgusting is to say something about the fact that I hate it, or something related to my hating it. And then
[Speaker C] we imagine a world in which he likes it; you’re not supposed to preserve the disgustingness of spinach when you think about that alternative scenario. In that world it’s no longer disgusting. What he doesn’t understand is that the disgustingness of spinach is not an objective matter but depends on him. Now one can show that in objective matters a parallel joke is not funny. For example, I say: the Earth revolves around the sun. I’m very glad I grew up after Copernicus, because if I had grown up before Copernicus I would have thought the Earth was the center of the universe, and that’s nonsense. That’s not amusing in a parallel way—even the earlier one, I saw people didn’t exactly fall out of their chairs—but yes? Right, there is no parallel confusion here. And the reason is that we do not think that when Copernicus formulated his theory, the Earth jumped from the center of the universe and started running around the sun. We think the Earth and the sun didn’t care; Copernicus simply discovered something that existed all along… So when I imagine alternative scenarios in which I believe other things, it is perfectly sensible to preserve the fact about the relative motion of the heavenly bodies, because it doesn’t depend on me. And now we have a test for objectivity—the punchline. You can’t take me to the punchline.
[Speaker A] Yes, yes, I’m explaining that it’s…
[Speaker C] A test for objectivity. That is, you can tell a parallel story to the spinach joke about a certain kind of discourse, and ask whether it feels like the spinach case—amusing, with some confusion about over-objectivizing hidden in it—or not, in which case the discourse really is committed to objectivity. So let’s play the game. I think gender hierarchy is morally wrong.
[Speaker E] I also think that despite
[Speaker C] my many virtues, had I grown up in a very different environment I would not have been so good at seeing that. I’m glad about the environment in which I grew up, because otherwise I would have supported gender hierarchy and that’s terrible. Funny like the spinach? No. So that’s some indication of the objectivity of morality. There are other things one can say here, but that’s the test.
[Speaker A] One last question please. Microphone.
[Speaker J] Thank you very much, Menachem and Lauren, thank you very much, Menachem and Lauren, thank you very much, Adam and David. A question about ethical facts. If I understood correctly, if you place the validity of morality in a transcendent source, it becomes transcendent. Ethical facts—the validity of morality derives from their necessity.
[Speaker C] No, their necessity gives us a reason to believe in their existence. The question about a source of validity is, in my opinion, not a good question; it already presupposes a false assumption. It’s no better a question than the question, “Have you already stopped beating examiners?”
[Speaker J] Okay, so then ethical facts as necessary. That is, if we’re like electrons. Electrons—not only because they’re observable, because it’s clear they exist, but because they explain things; electrons are necessary.
[Speaker C] But let’s distinguish between the question of why electrons exist—I have no interesting answer, and I’m not sure science does either, but on that I certainly won’t argue with you—and the question of why we have reason to believe, why think there are electrons. Now, electrons do not care about our theories. Electrons certainly do not exist because our theories require electrons. The electrons really don’t care. Similarly, moral facts do not exist thanks to the fact that we need them; they don’t care. But our reason for believing in them is that they are needed for the work they do in deliberation. So the distinction between ontology or metaphysics and epistemology is a critical distinction there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe one more sentence? One sentence, please. Regarding just one point that really remained, which I wanted to sharpen, although I already spoke about it—how much more I need to load onto the thin God I defined here. So I said this at the beginning and I want to sharpen it because it’s a point I think is very important. For the purpose of justifying or granting validity to values, a thin God is enough for me. That doesn’t mean I believe in the thin God or that I’m a polytheist. That is, as I said, afterward, after I reached the conclusion that he exists by virtue of the necessity or by virtue of the fact that he grants validity to moral values, I connect this with the concept of God in which I believe for other reasons. Okay? Regarding what you added, when you said that even for this point I still have to add that he can express a desire and things like that—in my view that’s built in. When I speak about a transcendent object that grants validity to moral rules or that legislates moral rules, to legislate, loosely translated, is to say: I want you to act this way and I do not want you to act otherwise. Therefore I admit the facts and deny the charge. Okay.
[Speaker K] Maybe if it’s not too utilitarian.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s already a question because there are many entities here—I didn’t get into Occam’s razor here. How many entities are there over there with the facts, and how many… but that’s hair-splitting.
[Speaker C] Occam’s razor is supposed to work on kinds of entities, not on entities.
[Speaker K] There was a kind of entity here that wasn’t necessary, there didn’t need to be several more; in his view, in David’s view, those are primitive basic entities, whereas for you they are derived entities. But they’re derived from an entity whose type does not exist in David’s theory. Okay. So I don’t know who is more parsimonious ontologically here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s why I didn’t bring in Occam’s razor, because in my view that’s hair-splitting. You can argue about it, but that’s not—I’m not going in the direction of Occam’s razor.
[Speaker A] Well, ladies and gentlemen, at this point we really do have to start wrapping up. There is still much more to discuss, much more to think about, many ontological and epistemological deliberations, but I think that in this discussion we did get to hear these positions, even if it was only a door that was opened. As stated, thirty books; as stated, one book that makes thirty-one, yes, thirty-one. But books that are very worth your reading in order to deepen your understanding of the fascinating things we heard here this evening. I want you all to join me in thanking Professor David Enoch, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Honorable Rabbi Mikha Abraham, thank you very much. Do only good, good night, and we’ll be in touch. Thank you very much.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] With the right motivations.