Q&A: The Purpose of Morality — A Properly Ordered Society?
The Purpose of Morality — A Properly Ordered Society?
Question
I don’t quite understand this argument. You claim that it cannot be that the Holy One’s intention is for us to be moral because morality creates a properly ordered society.
Isn’t that a huge logical leap?
After all, one can imagine a normative society in which everything functions as usual, except that every family is obligated to sacrifice its firstborn son. That is an immoral society that could still continue to function and reproduce wonderfully.
How can you be so sure that this is not the goal, just because it creates a society that is good to live in?
It could be that the Holy One’s will is that you behave in a certain way that He implanted within us, and that this behavior also creates a properly ordered society.
If anything, I have a different intuition that is even stronger:
A God who creates a world that fulfills His will using only the laws of physics, without any need for revelation, is more perfect than a God who creates a world in which He needs to reveal Himself in order to convey His will (and the revelation is not certain enough, to the point that books need to be written to prove that it is real).
Answer
I’m not sure you understood what you were quoting. My claim is that morality cannot be the purpose of creation, because morality is a means for creating a properly ordered society. But there is also the option of not creating a society, in which case there would be no need to fix it. Therefore, a means for fixing society cannot be the purpose for which society was created.
Your idea at the end seems to me to be mere hairsplitting.
Discussion on Answer
Then someone still has to tell us that itself: that there is a goal that we should repair things. That is still a goal beyond merely moral behavior.
The very act of fixing is the goal, not the result.