If I understood your answer correctly, there is no contradiction here—and therefore there is no question!
If I understood correctly, it is definitely a convincing answer!
They surrendered to their impulse and therefore deserve every condemnation!

I’ll continue the thread anyway, and ask a question.
If we assume that the Nazis believed deeply in racial theory, and for the sake of the question ignore the great abuse involved in the murders, and focus only on the systematic murder of the Jews;
were the Nazis’ actions moral? Seemingly the motive really is moral: to prevent the damage the Jews do in the world. In addition, it seems that the acts do indeed meet the demands of the categorical imperative; it is plausible that there were people who murdered Jews and believed that this was the correct universal law.
So then, to shorten my question;
with regard to Nazi people who believed that the Jews brought only harm to the world, did not abuse Jews, and believed that what they were doing was fit to become a universal law—can one say that their actions were moral?

If there were no other way to prevent the harm caused by the Jews, or if they saw them as an evil that had to be eradicated, then yes, by their own view they were moral. Absolutely.

I don’t know whether my comment belongs here, because the respondent’s implicit assumption isn’t clear to me.
But it may be that in this case a distinction is missing between the factual definition of morality as such—that is, a meta-ethical determination of what “morality” is—and the normative determination of how one ought to think and/or act morally.
From a factual meta-ethical standpoint, it may be that the Nazis’ view and/or actions do indeed fall into the category of “morality.” I’m not sure of that, but let’s assume it. But even if so, it still does not follow that their actions are correct normatively (worthy actions).
If I understand Michi’s answer correctly, then in his opinion their outlook/actions are worthy even on the normative plane. His reasoning, seemingly, is that they meet the formal requirements of the categorical imperative.
The root of the mistake, in my opinion, is ignoring the non-formal side already at the meta-ethical level. A valid philosophical definition of morality may be grounded in the formal side, but it must also add another layer of “content” (concrete judgments). Ignoring that layer already at the meta-ethical level necessarily spills over into the normative level. It seems to me that that is what is happening here.

But Doron, the claim here is that you can’t expect a person to act against what he thinks is right, and therefore there is no basis to judge him for actions that accord with his values. And you can’t judge him for holding the values themselves, since that is a semi-factual matter that is ultimately imposed on a person. All that remains is to judge him for failures by his own standards of the weakness-of-will type. That is a completely solid argument. How could you justify judging content? That is, how can you expect a person to think other things are right than what he in fact thinks is right?

Personally, I actually agree with you that judgment is indeed also according to content. Except that for me the judgment is only a shell, and its content is description and nothing more: there are principles that in my opinion are not correct, and there are people who hold them and act on them (and I also have a jar of pickles in my pantry). And in my opinion it would be like that even if I held to the idea of free choice. This whole business of judgment seems very odd to me (and really, I’m never interested in a person by his own standards except for purposes of bargaining when his actions affect me. I’m interested in the person by my standards).

I don’t expect a person to act against what he thinks is right. I do expect him to act subject to what is rational, and the concept of rationality is broader than the principle of consistency. The Nazis may have been “consistent” by their own standards (even that is not entirely certain historically, but it doesn’t matter for our question), but they certainly were not rational. Or are you claiming otherwise?
What is implicit in Michi’s claim above is exactly this—that consistency is enough for us. That is a mistake.

What does “rational” mean? To hold a principle that says one should cause suffering to the maximum number of animals—is that not rational? I’m not familiar with this use of the term. And what do we gain by introducing this concept? Say instead (like me) that you “expect” every person to conduct himself according to your principles (mine); I don’t see the difference.

It is not implicit that consistency is enough for us. It is explicit that conceptually one can “judge” only actions that are inconsistent with the values, because the other things are not under his control (the choice of values), or they are symmetrical in my case as well (acting according to the values).
[And I say that really this concept of judgment is problematic and it is preferable to give it up altogether. And even without judging the person by his own standards, I would prevent him, if it were in my power, from acting in a way that contradicts my values].

Doron,
That does not meet the formal requirements of the categorical imperative, because clearly it is not fitting that the whole world should want to kill Jews. It meets the requirements of the categorical imperative according to the Nazis’ perception.
As you wrote, I distinguish between the act itself and judgment regarding the person who does it. The morality of the doer depends on his own conceptions, not on mine. The act itself (murdering Jews as such) is of course not moral in my eyes. It isn’t clear to me why, after you understood my position on this point very well and even repeated it, your words still carry a scent of criticism or disagreement.

Tolginus,
Do you really not hold that some positions are more rational and others less so? Are they all the same to you? I find that hard to believe. And in the context of our discussion I asked you a question: does the Nazi ideology seem to you exactly as rational as the other ideologies you know? If your answer is yes, it will be fairly easy to undermine it with principled philosophical explanations and empirical historical facts (which place Nazism as a link in a steadily degenerating chain in the history of the modern West).
In any case, I did give a general criterion (which certainly is not sufficient in itself) for a position being worthy of being called “rational.” This principle was the specific combination of form and “content” (while preserving the hierarchy in which the former precedes the latter). Kant, by the way, tried to provide morality with precisely this combination. I think he failed completely, but that doesn’t belong to our issue.

Michi,
You are apparently once again entrenching yourself in the principle of consistency (the Nazis were consistent by their own standards—that may be true) and not in the principle standing behind it—the principle of rationality. If the Nazis had really sought to be “moral,” they would have had to subject not only their perverse path to criticism, but also their very commitment to “consistency” with that path. Not only did they never dream of doing such a thing in practice, but more importantly: their principled position does not allow such a move.
In short, if you really are entrenching yourself in this problematic position (in my view), then of course you will get criticism.

As for smells and fragrances—well, we talked in the past even about that subject. Maybe we should go together to an ear, nose, and throat doctor?

Doron, apparently at this point we’ve already crossed the boundary of understanding (as expected).
I am the last person to emphasize consistency as a criterion for truth. I’ve devoted books to opposing that view. What I’m arguing is something entirely different: that moral judgment of a person should be made by his own standards. Not because that is the truth, but because that is the criterion for his morality.
By the way, the same applies to your discussion with Tolginus: rationality too is measured by the person’s own standards. There really is no criterion for the rationality of claims or goals. A person’s rationality is measured by the means he adopts to achieve the goals he has set for himself. And again, that is not a criterion for truth.

Your claim that moral judgment of a person may be made by his own standards does not solve the problem. The books you devoted to the matter are also irrelevant if you are not faithful to what you said there.

First, your claim is trivial, at least in the sense that we are all subjects, and therefore our moral judgment comes from within us and not from someone else. Who said otherwise?

Second, your description is incomplete and therefore flawed. The point is that the standards that enable us to decide rationally and morally are not found only within the subject or within “his method,” but also outside him. In the final analysis their source is God. As I said, this is a combination of form and content. In that sense the subject’s morality necessarily rests, albeit only partially, on objective truth.

Paradoxically, only such a position allows us to defend the idea that our morality is not absolute (at least not absolute in every sense, for there is a sense in which it is absolute). Therefore our moral decisions are never certain.
This is in contrast to your position, which places morality entirely in the subject alone. If the source of morality is only man, then in principle everything is permitted and every value judgment is necessarily correct.

To my mind this is a simple and clear argument. One can either accept it or try to reject it. I do not see a third way.

Indeed, we’ve crossed the line. I see no connection at all to what I said, even though everything was explained. This is the stage to part as friends. 🙂

Well, that’s Your Honor’s usual tactic. I accept it with love.?

After the moving farewell, I’ll wander back into the area and ask—is there a column that deals with the issue of moral judgment of others (or of myself)? I didn’t find one, although I clearly remember reading from you a three-headed argument (that there is no criticism for choosing values because it is coerced; no criticism for conduct according to values because of symmetry; only weakness of will remains, and on that moral judgment and various pastries come to rest).
With your permission I’d like to discuss this topic when I find the appropriate place where your method was presented (since I don’t really know what this judgment is, and what I do know I apply by my own standards and his standards don’t interest me at all).

[As far as I can tell, there is also no difference between someone who is mistaken about physical facts and someone who is mistaken about spiritual facts (that is, values). Suppose I think there are snakes and scorpions in the pit and therefore Joseph must not be thrown into it. Reuben comes and throws Joseph in because he is mistaken about the facts and thinks there are padded pillows and cushions in the pit (falling on which causes supreme delight). Simeon comes and throws Joseph into the pit because he has a vile principle to try to kill people. Levi comes and throws Joseph in because he has a principle I accept—that one ought to kill evil people—and by his lights Joseph is an evil person. Judah comes and throws Joseph in because he has a desire to see people fall into pits, even though he admits that this is a bad thing. As far as I’m concerned, this quartet—Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah—is completely and totally equivalent in every respect]

I recall a few such discussions. In columns 29–30 I dealt with a complex evaluation of people and positions, but that is a different matter. There I spoke about how a person can have positive sides and other negative sides, and one need not let these overshadow those. As for a discussion of judging a person by his own standards, I haven’t found one so far. There is a bit of that in column 152, but not really. So maybe I really will write about it later, unless you find something like that here.

Doron, there is no evasion here by Rabbi Michi from your claims, because you are conducting a dialogue of the deaf. You argue that morality is absolute. Rabbi Michi agrees with you. You argue that there are moral acts and acts that are not. Here too Rabbi Michi agrees with you. But Rabbi Michi argues in addition that if you judge a person for his morality, you must judge according to his definitions of morality. According to that, a person can be moral and do immoral acts. (I’m not saying one of the methods is correct; I just felt that there is a dialogue of the deaf here.)

Doron

Honestly I don’t understand what the discussion here is. As Yishai said, the Rabbi says that a person who acts according to his moral standards, but those standards are not considered moral in your eyes (there is a dispute about what is moral and what is not), is not considered immoral, but mistaken. But of course that doesn’t mean you aren’t supposed to fight the Nazis. At the end of the day they cause harm.

You can ask: but what if someone doesn’t understand that murder is evil? Here there is an issue of understanding. If he doesn’t understand that it is evil, then he is not immoral, but lacking understanding. He is like an animal. And by the way, that is worse than being wicked (immoral). Because a wicked person can still repent. An animal can be killed without a trial.

For my part, I actually do see the evil that the Nazis saw in the Jews. The problem with the Nazis is their emotionalism and madness. They acted irrationally even by their own standards. Their hatred of the Jews (because of things that really were bad among the Jews) drove them insane. Aside from the fact that this evil did not justify murder (though it did justify separation and keeping away from the Jews—if not expulsion), they also harmed their own war effort and in the end themselves. And in that sense they did indeed choose to be animals, and here there really was evil. After all, this was not a primitive nation. They distinguished very well between good and evil just as we do. It was only the evil they saw in the Jews that drove them crazy and made them lose their sanity. So in choosing to turn themselves into animals, that was a choice of evil and immorality. And from that point onward they were already animals without choice.

By the way, that is also my view regarding the evil in Rabin’s murder. What was really evil was Yigal Amir’s lack of judgment (and maybe also mental derangement—I don’t know, though my impression is that not) and not the motive itself (which may or may not have been correct. But it can be understood—from his point of view—and it very well could have been correct—Rabin was a danger to the Jewish people, and from his point of view this was defense of the Jewish people). That is, before carrying out such a thing one has to be a million percent sure that the truth is with you (and for that one should consult a million different factors; this is an act like going out to war), and in Rabin’s case it was very far from that.

By the way, that was also the most terrible thing about the Oslo Accords. In themselves they were an issue one could debate—peace agreements and land for peace—there are gains and risks on each side. So there was logic to them. The problem was the blindness (and megalomania) of the left that accompanied that whole process. It seemed that nothing would convince it that this move was a mistake, even if it really was a mistake. All those killed at the beginning were called “victims of peace.” It is strange that you make peace agreements and then a war begins. So they said those were the extremists. Well then, it was with the extremists that these agreements should have been made, not with the mainstream. And if they don’t want it, then as they say: “there is no partner.”

Yishai,
Broadly speaking I agree that Michi’s position is fairly close to mine. That is usually the case with him, but sometimes, like here, the little relativist inside him slips out and he forgets everything he preaches. Not terrible; it happens to all of us sometimes.

As for the matter itself, the claim that morality is judged according to a person’s subjective definitions is of course correct in my view. But that is only if one understands that this subjectivity is from the outset in interaction with objective laws. Both-and. Otherwise you slide into the claim that subjectivity is the only criterion for defining morality and for evaluating moral decisions. That, for example, is what happened to Nietzsche, to the postmodernists, and of course it characterizes a very popular folk position in the public over at least the last several decades.

I also remember such discussions 🙂 but only briefly about when there is room for moral judgment, without clarifying what moral judgment even is, why it is interesting, and whether it has implications (maybe connected to your mysterious view that punishment has a component of recompense), and whether this phenomenon exists only under the assumption of free choice.

Emanuel,
You wrote many things, so it is hard for me to understand from them how they relate to my central argument.
It seems to me that in your view there is no problem with the exclusivity of the subjective criterion of morality, but then you say that one must nevertheless fight someone who reached a “bad” subjective judgment. So how do you know that what he did is “bad”? In my opinion you can’t know that….
If you nevertheless insist on claiming that, it is because intuitively you feel within yourself that morality is not only subjective.

There is no exclusivity here and no subjectivism. Morality is completely objective. It is a reality unto itself (moral reality). The thing is, this reality (like natural reality) is complicated and complex, and what one sees from here one does not see from there, and vice versa. So there is room here for judgment and for mistakes. But there are also things that are not a mistake but lack of understanding. There are three things: truth and justice, error (legitimate), and lack of understanding. (As in logic: a proposition can be true, false, or undefined—nonsense—the good, the bad, and the ugly.) Toward error (the bad) I have tolerance if one arrived at it through judgment (albeit mistaken). What Rabbi Michi calls “being within the radius of tolerance.” And toward one who has no understanding (the ugly) I have no tolerance (he is outside that radius). And just as this applies in natural reality, it applies in moral reality.

I think now it is clear. I understand the Nazis a bit—I see the evil they saw in the Jews (and that is the legitimate part of their overall mistake, that is, the part that is correct). I stepped into their shoes and saw things through their eyes. And I do not justify the Nazis—in the part where they continued onward and gave that evil a weight disproportionate to the true assessment of the Jews. That was assigning weight out of lack of understanding (lack of weighing), or more precisely, out of derangement.

In short: one who errs is not immoral, and one who lacks understanding is immoral. He is like an animal. And there is no other kind of immorality. That is, a person who knows that what he is doing is not right will not sin. And the only way he will sin is if he chooses to ignore what he knows. That is, he chooses lack of understanding. That is, he chooses to be an animal.

Again, I’m not managing to understand what you are saying. Do you agree with me? With Michi? With both of us…?
For the sake of the discussion I’ll lay out again my claim about what morality is:
An interaction between objective lawfulness and subjective decisions. Whoever acts on this assumption (or at least tries to act according to it) meets the necessary conditions for moral thought and/or conduct.
Of course this is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one…. We will always remain uncertain regarding the moral question in general and specific moral decisions in particular.

Please try to address my claim briefly and don’t scatter. Do you understand it? Agree? Partially agree? Reject it completely?

I just read column 152 that you mentioned, and found myself a friend of Klon in a gang of emotional fools marching in a parade of hypocrisy and stupidity (in my defense, I’m only a member there de facto in the sense that in my view it is proper to behave exactly as those marchers behaved, but I’m not sure their reasons are also what I think. This looping irony is quite something). To say that this excellent barrage increased my desire to discuss the issue would be a magnificent understatement.

There is no importance to the question of whom I agree with. Or for that matter whether I agree with myself. It seems to me that Rabbi Michi too would sign what I wrote, though I’m not sure. I don’t understand you (the wording is too complicated), to tell the truth. And for my part I think I was quite clear. The proper question here is whether you understand it? Agree? Partially agree? Reject it completely?

To Doron

The last response, corrected a bit:

There is no importance to the question of whom I agree with. Or for that matter whether I agree with myself. It seems to me that Rabbi Michi too would sign what I wrote, though I’m not sure. I don’t understand you (the wording is too complicated), to tell the truth. And for my part I think I was quite clear. The proper question here is whether you understand me? Agree? Partially agree? Reject me completely?

Emanuel,
Since you responded to my words, the strange idea naturally occurred to me that you wanted me to understand what you were saying. So far that has happened only partially. If you want to help me with that, all the better; if not, that’s fine too.

With God’s help, 6 Adar 5781

The fact that a person invents for himself a “moral method” according to which not only is it permitted, but it is a “great commandment,” to kill those he hates, does not turn him into “moral by his own standards,” but into a “double villain,” harnessing intellect and moral reasoning to serve as tools for ideologically grounding the evil in his heart.

That is far worse than a predatory beast acting from natural instincts. Here all of man’s advantages are taken—the ability to determine and define values, and the ability to plan and carry out sophisticated moves—and all of this is turned into a tool in the hands of evil.

There was nothing moral at all in Nazi behavior. What had those poor Jews whom they murdered and tortured cruelly done to them? The only “sin” of those Jews was that they carried in their “spiritual DNA” the Jewish “slave morality,” which so long as it exists in the world causes “pangs of conscience” to the blond wild beast and does not allow it to rampage as it pleases.

Accordingly, we celebrate the victory over the Nazis’ spiritual forefathers—the Hamans and Amalekites who arose in every generation to destroy us—not only with “feasting and joy,” but with the reading of the Megillah, which publicizes the faith that the world is not a human jungle in which the strong devour the weak. Rather, “there is a Master of the palace,” who saves the oppressed from the hand of his oppressor.

And together with publicizing the faith, we perform acts that reinforce moral values: sending portions, each man to his fellow, to increase love and unity, and “gifts to the poor,” in order to internalize that the obligation of the strong is to help the weak. Publicizing the faith and strengthening fraternity and concern for the weak—these are the ideological struggle against the ideology that turned evil into a “moral imperative.”

With blessing, Menashe Fish"l Halevi Zuchmir

The question has to be a bit different.
Had an average Jew today been born and raised in that same environment and with that same family and education, would he have supported them or opposed them?

From my investigation of this question, the answer is quite grim. A great many Jews in the State of Israel would have gone after the dominant approaches and supported them.

Does that belong to some special inborn corruption? Not sure. Because the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Apparently it is connected to the need to be part of something and the tendency to avoid raising doubts and asking questions.
It is very hard to develop independent thinking. It runs against many needs. And it involves discomfort.

A very interesting thread has developed.
Just to agree and understand what was said a bit better, simply because there’s one small point I’m missing.

When we say of an act that it is moral, do we mean that the person who did it followed the categorical imperative, or do we mean that the act really does meet the requirements of the categorical imperative? (According to our view.)

The fact that a person did a moral act has no significance. It is like a person performing an act of eating because of hunger. It simply stems from an emotion or a need. Just as with the act of eating, so too with the moral act. The fear of feelings of guilt.

What matters is whether the person benefited the world or harmed the world (at least in his intention, because it doesn’t always succeed).

This whole business with the categorical imperative is ridiculous and absurd, and its application can be postponed until the era when robots rule the world.
After instructing the robots to act only according to the categorical imperative, all the robots will unite in the name of the categorical imperative to destroy humankind. Just as the Nazis too could, in the name of the nonsense imperative, destroy the Jews.

In summary: the moral act suits someone who has feelings of guilt. The categorical imperative suits someone whose feelings of guilt are not so strong and who can behave like a robot without too many feelings.

The correct act is for someone who cares about the world and tries to improve it. And that is the act that matters. Everything else is just psychology.

Decisor, in short, according to what you’re saying there is no obligation to be moral.

To Doron

Okay. If I understood you, you are saying that there is objective (absolute) morality, and a person is called moral if he “1. knows this morality. 2. acts, or tries to act, according to it.

So here’s how I see it: morality is objective, but its application is not equally simple for everyone, because people see different parts of reality and rank moral imperatives differently (moral decisions are decided differently for each person as a result of weighing the moral aspects differently). 2. Indeed. Except that I claim this necessarily happens if a person is aware of the moral truth. The only way a person will not act according to it is if he removes what he knows from before his eyes. That is, he acts without understanding. Then he is crazy and an animal in this respect at least.

I’m sorry to tell you this, but slave morality (of the Jews, in the Nazis’ view) really is a bad thing. It is not really morality. (The proof is that the one who coined this term—Nietzsche—was not against morality. He was in favor of a “master morality.”) And indeed the Jews (German Jews at least, but really one can say all the Jews then, and most today) suffer from this. Slave morality is manipulation by a weak person (and one lacking morality on his own part) and a clever one, directed at someone stronger than he is so that the stronger one will not harm him—while at the same time and in the same breath he himself would have no problem using force to harm someone weaker than he is. In such a case, plain bullying is (at least aesthetically) in a better position than such morality, because at least the bully confronts face to face (“like a man”) the one who wants to harm him or the one he himself wants to harm, and does not hide behind deception and falsehood (fake morality). Morally there is of course no difference, because when there is no morality, what difference does it make which method one uses in order to profit. In nature (which is amoral) there is no difference between force and brains. Indeed, at the beginning of their exile the Jews were forced to use deception and falsehood against gentile bullies in order to protect themselves, but over the generations they fell in love with this deception and falsehood, and it became a kind of second nature to them, and they began using it among themselves (community against community, as we see today also in the Haredi public, but not only there). The Nazis grasped this matter very well and for aesthetic reasons (hatred of what is ugly and damaged) wanted to eradicate it from the world as part of their social-Darwinist method. Only this was their mistake—that you cannot destroy this evil by destroying human beings, just as their euthanasia program (the elimination of the disabled, the terminally ill, and the mentally ill) among themselves did not succeed.

Part of our movement from exile to redemption is to move from slave morality to master morality (a morality that stems from strength and from fear of God). This already began with the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel, but the road is still long and this is deeply ingrained in us. Even in Israelis who fight. (And in me too, to my shame.) It is harder to take the exile out of the Jew than to take the Jew out of exile. Perhaps it is impossible. We need to turn from Jews (the weak Kingdom of Judah) into Israelites (the kingdom of the twelve tribes of David and Solomon), so that we will no longer be called the children of Jacob (the heel-grabber) but the children of Israel, “for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

“Decisor, in short, according to what you’re saying there is no obligation to be moral.”

A moral obligation is a fictitious concept invented by people who are ashamed to admit that they are afraid not to do the “moral act.” That is, obligation is not something that exists; there is no obligation. What there is, is fear. But cowards also tend to deny the fear, so as usual they invent sanitized terms.