That does indeed seem to follow from “I do not desire to engage in forbidden relations,” etc.

But some have argued philosophically that the practice contradicts human nature or natural law, and actions that contradict those are immoral by definition. And it may be that the very act of thumbing one’s nose at the Holy One, blessed be He, embodied in such behavior, is not only irreligious but also immoral, because He has a natural moral authority over a person, like the authority of parents over their small children. And one could also think that each side causes the other a kind of natural human harm (that is, beyond spiritual harm), even if done with consent, in the sense of “do not place a stumbling block before the blind” (one of the rational moral commandments).

One could ask a similar question: is there a moral problem with idolatry?

As for idolatry, it really does seem similar. Except that at least in its cruder forms it is just nonsense. Alongside that, there is also a problematic dimension here of ingratitude (at least ontologically; see my article on philosophical gratitude): the Holy One, blessed be He, created you, and you worship wood and stone in His place.

Preferring one person over others is an immoral act.
In other words, love is not moral. And the hidden assumptions underlying the question collapse, and the whole question is void.
The questioner should accept the fact that human beings are not moral creatures.

Copenhagen, there are a few things in your remarks that I don’t understand,
A. What is this “human nature” that a romantic relationship with multiple partners supposedly contradicts?
B. Why is contradicting nature an immoral act?
Seemingly morality itself contradicts our nature (the biological-instinctive side of the human being).

The Last Decisor,
If loving one’s wife (or loving any other object) causes one to ignore other people, that does not harm the morality of love itself; the neglect is a different moral defect in the soul.

Love is a good trait, because love is the desire to benefit the beloved and give to him or her, so if a certain person has difficulty loving all human beings and focuses only on one, I don’t see a moral problem with that.

What harms the morality of things is first of all their cause. The cause of love is emotional, and therefore it cannot be moral to begin with. Add to that the special element in love whereby one person is preferred over another, and that already makes it opposed to morality.

Morality is not about giving and generosity, but about rebuke and correcting character traits so that they conform to certain principles. In other words, a moral person is a kind of robot that acts according to rules.

Rabbi,

Indeed, there are several issues here. Ingratitude exists both in light of His being the Creator and in light of His being a natural authority whose words a person’s personal good lies in obeying (as the Torah says, “for your good all your days”), yet sometimes a person prefers to harm himself while insulting the Benefactor rather than come to terms with his existential condition as a created being standing before his Maker.

As for the cruder forms, there is of course an element of foolishness in them, but Isaiah’s words suggest that a deeper psychological motif is also at work there—pride. A person’s preference to bow down to the work of his own hands is a narcissistic result of an unwillingness to subordinate his mind and desires to the good that stands above him, even if he may pay lip service to it. A person imagines that he is in control when he worships his own creation (whether material or intellectual) and conducts a manipulative relationship with it, but not when he stands before the true God, who shows no favoritism and takes no bribe. In my opinion, this may be what underlies the modern admiration for the pantheistic god.

Shai,

A. The matter follows from the essence of good and evil. Notice a strange linguistic phenomenon: your friend watches from afar and sees some orange object (let’s call it x). From him you know that x is orange. Another friend watches x up close, but because he is color-blind all he can tell you is that x is a ball. From this you conclude, rightly, that x is an orange ball.

By contrast, what happens if you learn that y is a basketball player, and also that y is good? Can you conclude: y is a good basketball player?

B. This would become clear if I took the trouble to answer A fully, which probably requires several pages of text. As for the claim that morality itself contradicts our instinctive nature, in my view this is not an intrinsic contradiction, though such contradictions do exist in particular cases. That does not mean morality may stand in contradiction to human nature as a whole, when one takes into account man’s intellectual and spiritual nature, and the natural hierarchy between those and his instincts.

I don’t agree with what you’re saying.
I don’t think love is only an emotion; the love I’m talking about is a rational act that can also be expressed through emotion.
Love is an act of the will toward closeness with some object.
If a person loves his friend because he is “cool” or “nice,” I don’t regard that act as having value, but merely as a need for pleasure.
By contrast, a person who loves another because of the virtue in him (what is called “Platonic love,” free of lustful self-interest)—that is a value-laden act, because love expresses connection and a desire for the “good” in the other.
If so, when a person loves his fellow on account of his human virtue, there is virtue in that.

My remarks are directed to The Last Decisor.

Copenhagen—
I claim that a person has two inclinations, and both are natural.
Therefore, saying that what is not natural is not moral makes sense to me.

With God’s help, Sabbath eve, “And I will dwell among them,” 5779

Living with several partners is not “polyamory” [= multiple love], but “auto-amory” [= self-love]: exploiting the desperate love of the partners, who for lack of choice are forced to share the love.

“Abundant love” in the positive sense is to be like Aaron the Priest, who “loved people and brought them near to the Torah,” as Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook of blessed memory emphasized—that he loved even those who were distant, and through the greatness of his love brought them near to the Torah. And we saw this trait in Rabbi Elisha Vishlitzky of blessed memory, who knew how to love, listen, and understand, and even those with whom he had sharp disagreements felt that he had an “understanding heart.”

And specifically in the High Priest, who stands in Aaron’s wake representing the collective, the Torah emphasized: “and he shall atone for himself and for his household”—one household, not two. Precisely when there is full love and complete faithfulness to one single woman can the heart open itself to love of the community and its individuals.

With blessing,
S.Z. Levinger

Shai,

It seems you didn’t try to think through the examples. If you want to understand why, in my opinion, acting against human nature is acting against morality, you’ll need to think about how it is that there are ordinary properties you can know about without needing to know what the thing is in which the property inheres (as in the example above where x is a ball and x is orange), whereas you can never know that something is good without knowing *what* the thing is to which you are attributing the term “good” (as in the example where x is a basketball player and x is good).

Try to examine this: have you ever seen someone who could not tell whether what he was seeing was a car or a horse, or something else entirely, and yet was still able to know—from his raw perception alone—whether it was a good thing or not? (A good car, or a good horse?) Examine many examples and you may reach the conclusion that the “naturalistic fallacy” is nothing but a fallacy in the thinking of a few neo-Kantian philosophers, and nothing more.

Copenhagen—
So in other words: you assume that “good” means “what exists” and “evil” means “what contradicts what exists”?

From your standpoint, is the statement “he is a successful person” equivalent to the statement “he is a moral person”?

Am I worthy of praise simply by virtue of existing? That doesn’t sound reasonable to me… what is moral about existing? I didn’t do anything.

When I say “a good deed” I mean an action that it is fitting for me to perform according to certain criteria embedded in me; what actions it is fitting for me to perform—that is already another discussion.
But as to the matter itself: good is connected to a person’s choice of some thing.

Shai,

I wasn’t talking about the relation between a thing’s goodness and its existence. I only pointed to the fact that none of us has the ability to see *whether* something is good without knowing *what* the thing is about which the question is being asked. This seems to be a unique phenomenon of the concept of good, and it may teach us something necessary that exists within it, distinguishing it from standard attributes.

For if you think of other random properties, you can discover that you definitely can know, at least in principle, whether something is orange, hard, fragile, soft, round, edged, liquid, salty, sweet, and so on and so forth, even without knowing what it is (as I tried to illustrate with the example of the orange ball seen from afar).

So first I’ll ask only the following narrow question, without jumping to any further conclusions: do you see and understand, and is it clear to you, that it is impossible to perceive whether something is good without knowing what it is?

Assuming your answer is yes, I’d be glad if you would explain why, in your view, that is so. What compels the world to be such that you must know what the good thing is in order to know whether it is good?

I think the answer is fairly superficial: I know that A is “good” and B is “bad” from a gut feeling.
Just as I know what is “beautiful” and what is “ugly” from my gut feeling without being a philosopher and defining the properties of “what is beautiful.”
In my opinion, understanding “what is beautiful” does not come through analyzing the object’s properties, but through generalizing from the particulars that arouse in me the feeling of beauty.
I try to gather from all the objects that arouse in me the “feeling of beauty” general characteristics.

Shai,

You didn’t answer the question. I didn’t ask how you know that something is good or bad. The question was only: is it clear to you that it is impossible to perceive *whether* something is good or bad unless you know *what* the thing in question is. (“What” in the sense of what it is, what sort of object it is: a car, a plane, a horse, a computer, and so on.) I suggest you go over the explanations again, because from what you’ve written it seems possible that you didn’t understand them correctly.

Love is not just an emotion, but a collection of emotions that together drive a person out of his mind to the point of madness.
Love deceives a person into thinking that the beloved figure is something like God and that the act of love is a rational act, when in reality the beloved figure is simply one that arouses the instinct to desire it, nothing more.
Love is composed of several emotions, and jealousy is one of the central ones. The desire for closeness is an activity of the instinct of jealousy. Wanting to be near someone with qualities better than your own—that is the instinct of jealousy.
When jealousy comes with affection, that is love. When it comes with anger, that is stinginess and hatred. In any case, it is all a matter of emotions and instincts. There is nothing in this madness worthy of being called rational.

Love is about satisfying instincts. Morality, in contrast, is about suffering (not satisfying instincts) in order to stand by moral rules.

Your desire to unite love with morality is identical to Copenhagen’s desire to unite one’s very existence with morality.
That is, a cognitive trick aimed at seeing oneself as a moral and good person without actually being one.

Copenhagen—
I still stand by what I said: I have no need to know all the properties’ characteristics in order to infer whether something is good or bad. I need to “encounter” the object and listen to my intuition as to whether it is good or bad, beautiful or ugly.

Shai,

Let’s be precise. I didn’t ask whether you need to know all the characteristics of the properties. I asked only this: is it possible for you to encounter the object without knowing what the object is (you don’t know whether it is a tennis ball, a horse, a dishwasher, a person, and so on), and nevertheless perceive whether it is good or bad?

Copenhagen,

For me, an “encounter” is an experience, not an intellectual act.

So, then what? Still, you surely understand that even if you have a very powerful experience, you still won’t be able to perceive whether a certain thing is good through the experience alone unless you also know what that thing is. In general, it seems that the Torah is suspicious of experiences that are not anchored in understanding (“and do not stray after your hearts,” etc.).

Think about the following verses:

“The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in an earthen furnace, purified sevenfold” (Psalms 12:7)

“And I will bring the third part through the fire, and refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested. He shall call on My name and I will answer him. I will say, ‘He is My people,’ and he shall say, ‘The Lord is my God’” (Zechariah 13:9)

What is shared by a refined saying, refined silver, and a refined person? Of course—that they are better. Scripture attributes an identical function (though not an identical property) to a saying, a person, and silver, connected with their being good.

Copenhagen, for me an experience is not just some chaotic emotion.

Experience is aided by a person’s faculty of will in order to judge evaluative situations (ethics and aesthetics).
A person with a developed aesthetic sense will feel, even without intellectual speculation, whether something is beautiful or not; he has a “sense” for it.
Similarly, a good person identifies the good through his sense (for example, he is appalled by things that contradict his good personality’s tendency), even without philosophical skill.

Therefore, seemingly, in order to know what “the good” is, it is not enough to engage in philosophical speculation, but rather to be a good person, something that depends on the will and not on logic. Then a person identifies by his gut feeling whether something is good or bad.

The question was simple: are you capable of inferring from some encounter with x whether x is good without knowing what x is?

Indeed, in order to judge whether x is good or bad, I have to encounter x.

(But my moral judgment does not come through the encounter with x itself, but from the feelings that arise in me following the encounter.)

__Rabbi Michi, I hope it’s okay with you that we’re having this conversation here and not on WhatsApp__

Just think for yourselves: do you see exclusive partnership, and the special bond created in it between partners, as an exalted value such that deviating from it is a deviation into a way of life that is ethically flawed, or not? What is there to discuss here? It’s a matter of intuitive value-perception.

Shai,

You’re evading. That’s not what I asked. It’s a yes-or-no question.

Roni,

Why not continue along the same line and say that the whole question whether some diet or medicine or drugs are healthy or harmful is also “a matter of intuitive value-perception”?

Copenhagen, I answered yes.
In order to know whether an act x is good, I need to know what the act consists of.

Copenhagen, I didn’t understand your question. Health and diet are investigated through experiments. Evaluative knowledge is not attained by experiment, but through the knowledge of the heart (“the eyes of the intellect”).

Shai,

The question was about good as characterizing some object, not about good as characterizing an act. As in the examples that were given: a good dishwasher, a good person, a good carpet, a good horse, a good computer, and so on.

Roni,

In order to conduct an experiment, you first need to have defined what health is. Maybe health means dying an early death at 27 like Kurt Cobain? Being in a self-harming bodily neurosis, or being a vegetable? There is no experiment that gives you a result in the words “healthy” or “unhealthy,” so by your reasoning one would have to say there is nothing to discuss.

Common sense indicates that health is an objective matter, even though there is no experiment that tells us what health is. One should discuss diet, a solitary life in the forest, productive life or constantly drugged life, a life of polyamory or a life of marriage, in accordance with the objective fact learned as a result of answering the question what health is—or what the good life is.

Copenhagen, clearly if opposition to polyamory stems only from facts—for example, because it creates conflict within the family—then there is a need to conduct factual research: does it really cause that? Does it necessarily cause that? etc.
But in my opinion, what bothers most people about polyamory is not its factual outcome. If you (like me) conceive of the worthy life, among other things, as a life that includes faithfulness and exclusivity toward one’s partner, then there is no further need to discuss the facts (because polyamory is by definition lack of faithfulness and lack of exclusivity).