Q&A: Why Not Moral Anti-Realism?
Why Not Moral Anti-Realism?
Question
To Rabbi Michi,
I very much like your distinction between Jewish law and morality. These are two completely different domains, and in any case all the difficulties about “morality in Jewish law” fall away. But it seems to me that your belief in objective morality creates a serious problem: you are forced to assume the existence of two systems, both originating in God, which for some reason sometimes conflict, without any principled way to decide between them (you wrote that Jewish law will prevail in most cases, but it seems to me that even you do not have a clear procedure). So… why not moral anti-realism? The gain is obvious: there is no need to say that God’s command does not accord with God’s will, and there is no need for any procedure to decide in a case of conflict. There are no “moral facts,” and Jewish law expresses religious values (and if I were observant, I would try to formulate something along Hobbesian lines, contractarianism). Another advantage is that there is no need to insist on the motivation to be moral as a “first intuition” or axiom; morality is a rational matter, and the question “why should I be rational?” is meaningless.
So why, really, the insistence on objective morality?
Answer
A. You are conflating the divine source of morality with moral realism. They are really not the same thing. David Enoch is a moral realist and does not see God as the source of morality.
B. Even if I am not a moral realist, I think God is the only possible source of valid morality. So your question still stands even without realism, and even if you adopt anti-realism.
C. I do not see any difficulty in this question. He also created the value of Sabbath observance and human life, and those two values sometimes conflict. So what? The same is true regarding Jewish law and morality.
I really did not understand your remarks at the end. What does it mean that morality is a rational matter and not axiomatic? Are the arguments for it not based on axioms? This is news to me—that there are arguments that do not rest on axioms. Descartes and Anselm already tried that, and failed.