Q&A: Several Matters
Several Matters
Question
With God's help,
Hello Rabbi!
A. Sartre, in his short book Existentialism Is a Humanism, writes about the famous moral dilemma of the student who is torn between staying with his lonely, sick mother or going out to fight the Nazis. Sartre notes that in this clash of values, Kant's categorical imperative also offers no answer. Does the Rabbi think the dilemma can be resolved through the imperative? (By the way, Sartre himself answers that in such a case a person has to "choose"—that is, constitute his moral values himself. In my humble opinion, that answer is, at best, a euphemism for moral nihilism, and at worst complete nonsense.)
B. In his book Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon, the Rabbi argues that Russell and Whitehead's "theory of types" does not really solve self-reference paradoxes. Does the Rabbi think there is any satisfactory way to answer paradoxes of this kind?
C. In the past it was possible to download the Rabbi's audio lectures to a computer. Now, unfortunately, that is no longer possible because of the new platform to which the lectures are uploaded. Is there still some way to download the lectures?
Thank you very much, and more power to you for your time!
Answer
A-B. I completely agree that it's a euphemism. But I don't agree that this is a paradox that needs to be solved. What we have here is a clash between two values that creates a conflict on the practical plane (there are two unresolved options as to what to do), but it is certainly not a paradox. There is no contradiction here whatsoever. At most, both options are legitimate. What's the problem with that? You are assuming that there must be one correct answer to every question, and that is not so.
Beyond that, I explained in the third book of the trilogy that there is a way to decide a value conflict (just as there is a way to construct a hierarchy of values). This is based on the assumption that there is a common measure even for values that appear different, and even between Jewish law and morality (all the more so between two moral values, as in Sartre's case). Our intuition is supposed to choose and rank them. And perhaps that is what Sartre meant, except that then the person is not constituting his values but deciding what the correct ranking is (in his view). A subtle difference, but a very important one.
C. I'll pass it on to Oren.
Discussion on Answer
With God's help,
Hello, Last Decisor,
To say that morality comes from conscience, and that if not then a person is corrupt by nature, is to say that a person is a robotic machine to the same extent, subject to the tendencies and emotional drives within him (namely, conscience). Real morality is the kind that comes from reason.
One has to distinguish between the source and the result.
The source of morality is conscience, which causes a person to suffer when he does something "not good," meaning something not in line with his conscience. A person who does not have that function does not have the suffering, and therefore cannot be moral. "I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid."
But from that one cannot derive any moral theory. There is no turning human beings into robots running the same moral theory, as the great charlatan Kant demands.
Morality originates in feeling, not in reason. Of course reason is involved in the whole matter, but it is not the source of morality; the source is emotional, not rational. Like "and you shall love," or "that which is hateful…" If there is no hatred, we are dealing with a robot.
You can download the lecture files from SoundCloud through this site:
https://sclouddownloader.net/
A person does not stay with his lonely, sick mother because it is a value. And a person does not go fight the Nazis because it is a value.
He does those things because that is what he wants to do. Why? For a great many reasons.
If he were doing them because they are a value, then he would not be a human being but a robot.
Kant's categorical imperative too is robotic nonsense in the spirit of the German machine. It is an imperative of domination, not a moral imperative.
In practice, morality comes from conscience, and if there is no conscience then a person is corrupt by nature.
When trying to decipher sentences like "This sentence is false," the result is an infinite loop that jumps between truth and falsehood at each cycle. That is not a paradox.
Or take the barber paradox: what will happen is that the barber will reach the numbers toward his hairs, and then remove them, in an infinite loop. There is no paradox here.