Q&A: Aristotelian Ethics: Is It Proper to Inject mRNA Vaccines?
Aristotelian Ethics: Is It Proper to Inject mRNA Vaccines?
Question
I apologize in advance for the length, but I haven’t found any discussion of this anywhere, so I’d appreciate a response.
It seems there is an ethical problem with the use of mRNA vaccines such as the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines distributed in Israel. In order to be able to take the argument seriously, I’ll first lay out a few principles underlying the Aristotelian-Maimonidean-Thomistic distinction between good and evil.
“Good” and “evil” differ from most other natural properties in an interesting way. When speaking about standard properties, one can usually know whether some object exhibits the property without knowing what the thing is in which it inheres. For example, if one is trying to verify the statement: x is spherical and x is red, one can in principle tell that x is red even without knowing that it is a ball (say you are looking through a wet window on a rainy day and can’t make out the object’s shape). By contrast, you cannot identify that the thing lying here on the table is good (say it is a good computer) without knowing that it is a computer, nor can you conclude whether some basketball player is good without knowing that he is a basketball player.
The reason for this, Aristotelians would say, is that the concept of good and evil changes its meaning depending on what it is applied to. It does not directly signify some specific property present in the thing, but rather the way or degree in which a set of properties arising from its nature is expressed in it with greater or lesser perfection. The relevant properties differ from case to case. A bad washing machine, or a defective one, is one that fails to realize the set of essential properties that make up the concept “washing machine” — it does not wash well, efficiently, or conveniently, or it displays some other flaw in its capacities. A good heart (as opposed to a defective one) is a heart with high endurance, normal medical indicators, and so on with all artificial objects or natural organisms. That is, evil is an absence, flaw, or defect in a thing’s proper natural functioning or abilities. From this one may go on to show that there is an equivalence between the concepts of “good” and “being” that allows one to be converted into the other. But this is not the place to expand on that.
With regard to all objects and organisms in the natural world, the question whether they will realize the properties and achievements unique to a thing of their kind — that is, whether they will be good — depends solely on initial conditions (such as genetics), environmental conditions (for example, where the tree is planted), and various events they undergo during their development. Man is the only creature on the planet for whom the answer to whether, or to what extent, he will be good also depends on him and his choices. The distinctive achievements characteristic of a human being, as distinct from other creatures, derive from his being a rational organism with free will. His rational capacity to grasp the essence of things and think accordingly in a logical way naturally serves the attainment of truth, while the potential inherent in the will is the choosing of actions that accord with the truth as disclosed by reason — and specifically, actions that accord with the knowledge attained about human nature and human functions.
From here morality arises, requiring habitual rational choice of actions that promote the full realization of the functions that stem from human nature. Without aiming at precision, one may say that a good human act is an act that has a rational source, includes no defect in the judgment and decision-making process preceding it, is undertaken from habit and moral or professional skill (virtue), is carried out correctly, and does not directly create any absence or defect — bodily, mental, or spiritual — in the person performing it.
How does this play out in practice? Take the famous trolley problem. Most people would agree with the Aristotelians that although it is permissible to divert a trolley with faulty brakes onto a track where it will run over only one person instead of five, it is forbidden to throw a fat man standing on a nearby bridge onto the trolley track so that his body will serve as a barrier preventing it from running over five people. Why? After all, in both cases the outcome is the same! The answer is that the very act of throwing a man onto the train tracks is an act of murder, and a good person never performs an act that is evil in itself, even if that means that the world will, on a general consequentialist calculation, be worse afterwards. By contrast, diverting a trolley to another track is an act of defense, an act good in itself, even though it contains the undesirable side effect of killing.
In order to generalize cases of this sort, the scholastics formulated a doctrine in the past known as “the double effect,” which states that given certain criteria, a person performs an ethical act when he acts to achieve a good or morally neutral effect, even if the action is expected to have certain bad consequences, provided that those bad consequences are in themselves unintended.
The doctrine is traditionally formulated roughly as follows:
- The act itself must be good, or at least morally neutral.
- The person performing the act must not intend to bring about the bad effect.
- The bad effect may not be used as a means for achieving the good effect.
- The good of the good effect must outweigh the badness of the bad effect, and there must be no reasonable alternative way to achieve the good effect.
As an aside, one may note that accepting or rebelling against the moral principle expressed in clause 3 — namely, that a good end (such as the public good) does not sanctify invalid means (such as depriving individuals of natural rights) — is what determines whether a society remains free or is on the inevitable road to dictatorship.
The doctrine of double effect clarifies many things. For example, using a beneficial medicine may be permissible even if it has harmful side effects, if the medicine causes the healing effect, provided clause 4 is satisfied. It also follows that under certain conditions it is permissible to provide painkillers to a suffering terminal patient even if they increase the risk of death, provided the aim is not to give them to him in order to bring him closer to death. For relieving pain is an act good in itself, and under certain conditions the cessation of chronic pain in a terminal patient is a good that outweighs the harmful side effect (a statistical shortening of his lifespan). But it is forbidden to use a bad effect such as “euthanasia” as a means of achieving the good (stopping pain).
What about very extreme cases? If, for example, throwing a man off a bridge would somehow save the entire Jewish people from certain death? Murder is an act evil in itself, and as we have seen, one must not use an act evil in itself as a means to achieve good. About cases of this kind I would say that perhaps the rabbinic principle known as “a transgression for its own proper sake” might apply (and this is a positive concept), as in the case of Lot’s daughters, who thought they had to sleep with their father so that there would be human beings in the world, and other similar cases. The Jewish law of natural morality is that it is forbidden; you act on your own responsibility and will have to answer for it when you stand before God in judgment, and yet it is still possible that your deed will be classified as “a transgression for its own proper sake.”
How does this bear on mRNA vaccines? It seems that mRNA injections create an intentional defect in the body’s normal proper functioning as a means of achieving the good, and are therefore invalid under clause 3. The injection is meant to redirect, by coercion or deception, the protein-production factories inside the cell — which are meant to receive human mRNA codes on the basis of the information in the cell nucleus and accordingly produce the various proteins the body needs — toward the opposite goal: producing non-human proteins by means of mRNA foreign to the body, which the immune system by nature, were it not for the stealth coating attached to the mRNA strands, would immediately identify as invaders and destroy.
Let us emphasize: the purpose of injecting the vaccine is to produce an effect contrary to the purpose of the protein-production system in the human cell, whose nature is to produce proteins with human DNA encoded according to mRNA instructions coming from information in the cell nucleus itself, and not foreign proteins belonging to a lower life form — with viral DNA injected from outside.
In addition to the said defect, when one forces the body to produce DNA belonging to a non-human life form, perhaps one can say that in that respect it becomes, to that extent, non-human. Why? One may define an object as assimilated into the body once there is a causal connection between the object and the body’s systems that produce something else from it. For example, when a person eats a steak, and it is broken down into amino acids, the amino acids become part of the body after the body turns them into proteins or fats. In the case of mRNA injection this is in a certain sense even clearer, because what is involved is causing the body to produce the virus’s spike protein from amino acids that were already beforehand part of the body, and when this happens those proteins simply remain part of the cell or the cellular production mechanism, just as they were before. It therefore seems that the act of injection causes an additional defect — the vaccinated body becomes to some extent, albeit minutely, non-human for a while.
What is the ethical difference between this and an ordinary person catching the flu and the virus beginning to take over his body’s cells involuntarily? Simple: the defect imposed on the body is not the result of a human action. In the end, even when infection occurs, the virus uses the protein-production systems in the body’s cells in order to reproduce, thereby making them non-human (although those cells are ultimately destroyed), and if it encounters an immune system defective enough for it to succeed long enough in its activity, the body may indeed become wholly non-human, as a dead body in the process of decay. This does not undermine the insight that such a human action is invalid.
Apparently this does not apply, at least not clearly and not to the same extent, to traditional vaccines in which dead viruses are injected into the body. Dead viruses are a foreign body and not part of the body; they do not threaten the body’s cells; they do not take systems out of their proper functioning but merely train them — that is, they do not use a bad effect in order to achieve a good effect, but rather use a neutral effect intended to activate the immune system. There is no violation of clause 3.
A question that may be asked is: “If what is good is what is natural for man, does it not follow that everything we do is therefore good, since everything that happens in nature is by definition ‘natural’?” The answer, according to what we have seen, is clear: the nature of a thing is what truly answers the question what it is — namely, its essence. Even if as a result of a nuclear explosion or some other apocalyptic event it turns out that severe bugs have been created in the genetic code of all the cats in the world, that does not mean that actual bugs in the genetic code are part of the nature or essence of cats. On the contrary: a bug is a defect, some failure of the code to match its form or nature, because of which it does not fully succeed in being good feline genetic code. The fact that many bugs may actually exist does not make those defects any less unnatural for cats, in the relevant sense.
Another question: “If it is invalid to go against nature, why is it not invalid to wear glasses, to fill a tooth, and so on — which are not natural interventions but artificial ones?”
Suppose there is some defect in a person’s eyes that makes his vision blurry. In that situation, wearing glasses is not contrary to the natural function of the organs of sight, but on the contrary restores the functioning of the eyeballs to their strength — their ability to carry out their natural purpose, the act of seeing, clearly. For the function or final cause of the human eye is to enable us to see. When a researcher looks through a magnifying glass, this is an extension of, rather than a violation of, the eyes’ ability to perform their normal operation in an optimal way. To the extent that one can improve the immune system (for example by increasing vitamin D levels in the blood, as studies suggest, or by drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and the like) in a way that does not involve an evil means — such as using human cells in a way contrary to their nature — this would truly be equivalent to wearing glasses: an act neutral or positive in itself.
These remarks are presented only for the sake of discussing the argument itself, and are not meant to encourage either getting vaccinated or not getting vaccinated.
Answer
There is a lot to comment on in what is written here.
- I do not agree with the entire Aristotelian analysis. The term “good,” in my view, is not an adjective at all (but rather a meta-adjective), and therefore the distinction is unnecessary. The term good is the result of comparing the act or object to some ideal (the perfect act or the perfect object). Therefore, of course you cannot determine that X is good without understanding what X is, because only then do you know to which ideal you should compare it. You compare the computer to the perfect (good) computer, and the person to the perfect person, and so on.
- But all this is irrelevant to the question. In your question you assume that introducing some component into our protein structure is bad because it contradicts our human essence. I did not understand the basis of that assumption. To me this is exactly like glasses. When the eye does not see well, you equip it with glasses. And when the system does not correctly produce the proteins needed for us to survive, we equip it with a vaccine. The fact that the vaccine changes it rather than merely being added onto it (in a layered assembly) does not seem to me a substantive difference. Especially since this does not touch the essence of the human being, as you assume. The essence of a human being is not his protein composition. And from this it follows that there is no “bad” act here at all, so there is no need to discuss whether the gain outweighs the royal damage or not.
- One should also note that unlike the trolley dilemma, where one person is sacrificed for the sake of others, here the danger threatens all the people, including the vaccinated person (not that everyone is likely to die, but that each person has some chance of dying). This is similar to a distinction I made in my article on separating Siamese twins, between handing over one person in order to save others, and the Jerusalem Talmud in Terumot where gentiles demand that one person be handed over to them, otherwise they will kill everyone. In the second case, the person being handed over is also in the same danger, and therefore there is no principled prohibition (I explained there what the prohibition written in the Jerusalem Talmud and in Maimonides actually is).
Discussion on Answer
To the Rabbi,
I did not notice any relevant disagreement in your words here with Aristotle (or the Aristotelian analysis). For present purposes it’s not such a big deal if we call it a “meta-adjective,” and as you noted that probably won’t affect the argument itself. The goal is to show that good is nothing but proper realization of essence, and evil is a defect in the realization of essence, in a way that shows how definitions of good and evil regarding a human act such as injecting mRNA follow from this.
The issue is not that “introducing some component into our protein structure” is a bad act (that is not necessarily a bad act if it improves the functioning of cells, or alternatively destroys cancer cells), but rather that what is bad is the very suppression of the cells’ natural activity by mRNA strands engineered to do something else that we choose to inject into them. The problem with contradiction to human essence is only in the sense that it contradicts our rational nature to choose an act that reason grasps as bad in itself. What underlies the problem in the act is that there is currently proper functioning of cells and we intentionally impair it as a means of achieving some other good (training the immune system), which is not consistent with the principle of double effect. The difference from glasses is that glasses themselves improve the visual function of the eyes, and in any case do not create a bad effect in any sense (except perhaps some laziness of the eyes — a side effect permissible under the principle of double effect).
It is not correct to say, as you claimed, that the system “does not correctly produce the proteins needed for us to survive,” since the injection attacks perfectly normal cells that were never meant to produce such non-human proteins, and forces them to produce them. The fact that the cells are not the essence of the human being does not remove the problem: intentional suppression of other organs or systems such as the heart, lungs, reproduction, and the like is also invalid, since they are included in the hierarchical system of essences on which human essence is built, unless they are a side effect of some good effect in accordance with the clauses of double effect mentioned above.
I did not understand exactly what the parallel is regarding the point that here the danger threatens everyone, including the vaccinated person. What is the practical implication for our issue?
The Last Decisor,
Reading text from pixels is not unnatural in the relevant sense. The act of reading itself does not impair or suppress anything in human nature as a rational creature or in one of the body’s systems (it is clear you did not bother to go through the whole argument).
Agreed that this is also a problem — one day someone will program a vaccine that will cause problems. There is no need for malice, since this seems fairly likely in light of the fact that the vaccine is by nature intended to disrupt the activity of the body’s cells.
Reading from computer pixels (for the stricter ones, even by candlelight) harms the eyes. Natural radiation originating from the sun, under whose light the eyes developed, contains a broader spectrum of radiation, some of which is healthy for the eyes. That doesn’t exist in computer screens or candlelight.
And in general, for some reason you took upon yourself some kind of authority to determine what is natural and unnatural, what is good and bad. And that’s just arbitrary and doesn’t stem from any binding principle, just because you felt like it. And the proof is simple: if what you said were correct, it would have been enough to write it in 2-6 lines.
Honorable Last Decisor,
Again, you did not bother to go through the whole argument. In order to argue that reading from computer pixels is immoral, you would have to prove that clause 4 in the principle quoted above is not satisfied:
“The good of the good effect must outweigh the badness of the bad effect, and there must be no reasonable alternative way to achieve the good effect.”
As for this supposed “taking of authority,” the argument shows that determining whether something is good or bad is objective like any other fact and does not vary from person to person.
Copenhagen, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes and ask from there. Where does the idea come from that there is something wrong with using things contrary to their essence? Is it the nature of a tree that it should be chopped down and turned into paper on which a grocery list will be written? The body’s systems are inanimate just like the tree. According to this idea, would it be forbidden for a person to pull out his own tooth in order to plug a dam and thereby save himself from death? It seems as though this discussion is being conducted without any consideration of the insignificant factor of suffering and pleasure.
And because of “do not make yourselves disgusting,” I’ll also add my humble opinion that someone who doesn’t throw the fat man from the bridge is a filthy murderer (just like someone who pulls out a gun in the street and kills four innocent passersby). In addition, you wrote: “The distinctive achievements characteristic of a human being, as distinct from other creatures, derive from his being a rational organism with free will” — what do you mean by tying those three words, “with free will,” to achievements?
I definitely do not agree with Aristotle, because in my opinion this is just wordplay. Your description of him (I do not know his own writings) ignores the fact that you are supposed to picture something complete before you judge. He seems to claim that it is enough to understand the essence of things in order to determine whether something is good or bad, instead of the alternative where you picture something complete and compare to it. And I claim that this is just wordplay. Therefore the definition that good is the complete realization of essence is just words. It is like saying that good is doing the good. And this is exactly the point for which good is not a description. This is like the words of Chaim Perelman (a Belgian Jewish philosopher of law), who says that to say you should do X because X is good is simply to say the same thing twice. And one can sharpen this.
I did not understand why introducing some component into the proteins the body creates is bad. Is suppressing the desire to speak slander bad? Of course you can say that slander is not part of our essence, but that only reflects what I wrote above, that you are playing with words. Instead of defining good and bad, you define the good as essence and say that the good is supposed to fit the essence. As long as you have not defined the essence of the thing in an independent way, you have said nothing. In the end, you are really assuming that the essence is the good, and then defining the good through the essence.
Tolginus,
I’ll just note that in my opinion you ignore the prohibition against performing an act of murder on a person, even to save others. You are focusing only on the consequentialist consideration. I have written more than once (mainly in my article on organ donation, and also a bit on Siamese twins) about the importance of the consequentialist consideration, but it is definitely not exclusive.
Tolginus,
Nowhere was it claimed that there is a principled problem with using things outside the human organism contrary to their essence. The moral obligation to act not contrary to human nature is an obligation placed on the human being with respect to himself. As described above, only in the human creature does the question to what extent he will be good or bad also depend on him, and that is what gives rise to the concept of moral obligation. Of course, this does not permit causing evil to lower life forms unnecessarily. But the principle does not impose on man responsibility to act for the realization of natural essence in non-human things. At least not in a direct and immediate way.
The possibility that a person could save himself from death by first pulling out a tooth is very, very remote. Usually a person will use other organs of his in order to save himself in the midst of danger, even if they are badly damaged as a result, and this is permissible from the outset according to the principle of double effect. In any case, for this reason I raised the subject of “a transgression for its own proper sake.” The fact that a person performs the act of extracting a healthy tooth in order later to use it to save his life does not turn the act of extracting the tooth into a good act. The act remains bad to the same extent (to a moderate or small extent). But we would say that he probably did what he needed to do. The daughters of Zelophehad who thought that without them there would be no continuation of humanity did not thereby perform a good act when they slept with their father. The act of incest was still morally invalid to the same degree. But (to the extent that the transgression really was “for its own proper sake”) that is what they had to do.
In my opinion it is really the opposite of what you say. Most people would recoil from the very thought and would not agree with you: someone who throws an innocent man off a bridge in order to use him to stop a train that is on its way to kill even 100 people is still a despicable murderer. You are apparently a consequentialist, which is a mistaken moral outlook that caused most of the historical injustices, and the murder and death of hundreds of millions of innocent people in the twentieth century.
The achievements reached by man as a rational animal are naturally bound up with his unique nature as an intelligent being. This nature is connected to free will, which is able to command the body to perform the best action recommended by reason.
From everything you wrote, I understood that in order to understand you one must first assume the following things, which are not natural to human language:
“The essence of a thing” = whatever Copenhagen decides is its essence.
“Good” = whatever Copenhagen decides is good.
“Bad” = whatever Copenhagen decides is bad.
Once you assume these hidden assumptions, you can understand what you are writing.
But it’s not interesting.
Rabbi Michi,
What can I do — in my opinion the consequentialist consideration always rules the hierarchy, and wherever it appears there is nothing besides it that can limit it. And in my eyes only states of affairs matter and not actions (and life has no value, only sensations do). The truth is I’m not really worthy enough to stand and wrestle with topics like these, and I also don’t have anything to say that isn’t trite and predictable, etc., but if there is one topic that makes my insides churn, it is deontology.
Copenhagen,
1. The distinction between flesh and blood over which human consciousness has control and trees in the forest over which human consciousness has no control is not clear to me. Maybe you have a reference to someone who proposed this distinction?
2. I didn’t understand what you answered regarding the tooth. Of course I deliberately chose דווקא this example and not sticking a finger in the dam and the like. If in the end it is permissible to extract the tooth (to plug the dam or to give it as ransom to bandits so they won’t beat my brother), then I no longer understand what is forbidden.
4. I don’t know very much, but you are the first person I’ve seen who ties free will to (technological) achievements, and I really don’t understand — as distinct from disagreeing — how you connect them. If this is your own idea and you’re willing to expand on it, please do. And if someone has established this claim, I’d be happy if you’d refer me to them (if it’s online, even better).
To the Rabbi,
Aristotle also holds that in the end you form a completed abstract concept and compare the objects in the world to it. However, the complete finished thing is an abstraction that the intellect grasps only after observing particular things in the world that exemplify it, after which you know what the thing is by means of a universal intellectual concept, which exists both in the intellect as a concept and in the material thing perceived as its form. One grasps the intellectual abstraction as the pure universal concept, and according to it knows whether and to what extent there are deficiencies in the way a given object exemplifies the form to which it belongs, and therefore whether it is a good or bad instance of that essence.
I do not think this is merely wordplay. The intellect grasps the essence of the thing after it grasps particular instances of it. Consider, for example, a father showing his daughter a boy giving a flower to his beloved, a mother making sure her daughter crosses safely at a crosswalk, a child giving way to another child, a father blessing his son or kissing him on the forehead, and so on. He calls all these acts, so different at the level of sense perception, by the name “love.” The girl of course understands this. More than that: she will know how to apply the concept also to sensory situations completely different from those her father demonstrated to her. There is here a non-sensory abstraction of something capable of being expressed through the senses in countless different ways, and therefore wholly abstract. If we want to describe the abstraction in other terms, we may say that to love someone means to will good for him — that is the abstraction, Aristotle would say.
And similarly regarding “good.” You ask a child what good is and he answers: pizza is good, ice cream is good, friends are good, sports are good, understanding something that interests me is good, and so on. All these are examples of “good” relative to the child. Their common denominator is an intellectual abstraction, but this time not from sensory data but from another essence, which is itself an intellectual abstraction. For all these things are good for the child as a human being; they contribute to the realization of the potential that stems from his essence.
You are trying to argue that perhaps this is circular. But in Aristotle, unlike Plato, the grasp of essences is not a priori but a posteriori. The intellect has no built-in definitions of essences, only the potential for such definitions given a proper cognitive encounter with objects in the external world. Cognition first grasps sensory objects, and then the intellect abstracts them from their unique individual data and grasps the general essence they exemplify. After that it is capable of grasping the extent to which they realize themselves, that is, their essence — whether an object is a good instance of the essence to which it belongs.
Tolginus,
I’m not speaking about a prohibition in the action. In my opinion, even consequentially, the option of pushing the fat man is not preferable. The reason is that one result concerns him and the others concern other people, so there is no possibility of comparing outcomes here. Even if I myself were not the one pushing the man but only deciding what would be done here, it is not clear that it is preferable to decide in favor of the one. For example, if that one person (the fat man) himself is supposed to decide, do you think he is obligated to push himself? It seems obvious to me that he is not. But in a pure consequentialist calculation according to your interpretation, apparently he would be.
Of course, if you bring emotions into it and give them weight, then the discussion is over.
Copenhagen, even if Aristotle says that one knows the ideal from the thing, that is nonsense. How do you decide what the perfect variation is? You necessarily have to arrive at Plato. And in particular it is nonsense when he gives the ideal moral weight, because there is a naturalistic fallacy here. He observes a thing and generalizes from it (that is a factual process), and now gives that generalization a value-status (that one may not harm it or deviate from it). And if you say the generalization is evaluative and not merely factual, then you have smuggled the Platonic ideal in through the back door.
To the Rabbi,
The fact that there are no inborn ideals, and that form is not actually realized in perfection in perceived things, does not mean that the intellect is incapable of grasping what the form is that is not perfectly realized in perceived things. For part of perceiving a thing is also perceiving the potential latent within it, and the potential is determined by the essence. Potential is not non-being, but a kind of being that resides in actual things, and it too is an object of intellectual apprehension. The intellect itself is also not a blank slate, but an immaterial organ with the power to grasp the essences of things in the world.
As for the “naturalistic fallacy,” an unbridgeable gap between “facts” and “values” can exist only given a mechanistic-nominalist understanding of nature of the sort taken for granted by some modern philosophers such as Descartes and the neo-Kantians, who built a world devoid of all objective essences or natural ends. No such gap, and therefore no “fallacy” of deriving normative conclusions from ‘merely factual’ premises, can exist given an Aristotelian essentialist and teleological view of the world.
I am not familiar with a theorist in the classical natural-law tradition who tried to “derive” ought from is. Morality begins with the first principles of practical reason, which are basic and underived axioms. One then uses these principles together with an understanding of the essence of the thing under discussion (as was done above briefly regarding the body’s cells, which the mRNA vaccines are intended to suppress) in order to arrive at moral conclusions.
Bottom line, you arrived back at the existence of ideals. You just call them the essences of things embedded in things or behind things. In practice there is something here to which you compare the thing, not something that you extract from the thing itself.
I am not inclined to believe in the existence of Platonic ideals, since it is not clear what “ideals” are supposed to mean without an object that realizes them or an intellect that grasps them. Nor is it entirely clear what it means that the ideal “takes part” in the material object, or when and how the baby came to know them before birth.
In Aristotle, essence is an immaterial form that causes the actualization of the potential principle in the thing, except that it cannot be seen sensibly but only intellectually. When an object is perceived by the sensory cognitive system (“phantasm”), the data received are in principle contingent with respect to the object’s essence and are not by themselves enough to provide insight into it; therefore he posited an “active intellect,” in which all forms exist actually, acting upon the human passive intellect and bringing its ability to grasp the form characteristic of the thing from potentiality to actuality, like light bringing colors in objects into actuality. The forms exist there in the things themselves, only they are not seen at all without the illumination of the active intellect.
As for the question whether intellectual illumination makes it possible to grasp both the pure form and the degree of its exemplification — within the object — or only to compare it to the pure form that is received in the (passive) intellect following the activity of the active intellect separately from the perceived object, it may be that different answers can be given (though the second possibility would create a miniature Platonization of Aristotle). I tend to think that within an intellectual apprehension of the object one also apprehends to which universal (perfect) form it belongs, because the form in its perfection is indeed found in it — that is the thing’s essence — though not wholly in actuality; and grasping potential is an inseparable part of a full apprehension of an object.
I do not see how you escape the two horns of the dilemma: if there is something beyond the object itself and I observe it — that is Platonism. And if there is nothing at all except the object itself — then what do you see? Only the object, and therefore the perfect object you speak of is nothing but your invention, with no ontic status whatsoever.
What you see is only the object insofar as it is a visual object. Sight is by nature limited to the sensory impressions the object transmits to visual perception. One cannot visually see a universal immaterial essence. On the other hand, what is grasped by the intellect is the essence of the object (the immaterial form). The essence is the form of the object itself — not something “beyond the object.”
As in Aristotle’s parable of light (= the active intellect) illuminating colors (= essences): the colors exist in the object, but without the illumination of light they are not apprehensible.
Of course eyes can see only visual objects, but what does “grasped by the intellect” mean? Is there something out there that is “grasped”? Or is this an invention created inwardly in the mind?
With God’s help, 12 Adar 5781
A discussion of the medical aspects, the advantages, and the concerns regarding the new vaccine may be found by the interested reader in the articles of Dr. Gil Yosef Shachar, “Corona Vaccine — Part I: Can We Be Calm That It Really Is Safe?”; “The Corona Vaccine — Part II: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Information Regarding the Vaccine” (on the website “The Center for Maimonides Medicine — Health, Nature, Science”). In Dr. Shachar’s articles, and in the articles linked there, the interested reader will find a variety of arguments and approaches — for, against, and ‘in the middle.’ This may perhaps help someone who is undecided to do some homework before consulting a professional.
Best regards, Yaron Fish"l Ordner (vaccinated twice 🙂 )
To the Rabbi,
At one time I came across a few articles by a researcher named Daniel Povinelli. I don’t know how aware he is of the issue, but in my opinion his experiments prove that the cognitive difference between chimpanzees and other animals and human beings is bounded in accordance with the Aristotelian definition of intellectual apprehension of form. You can see a glimpse of the issue in this short video here:
To “Discussion of the practical aspects,”
I’m reading the article you suggested, and it’s interesting that it uses Aristotelian functionalist reasoning, for example:
“The answer is that when there is a foreign protein in the bloodstream, the cells that will incorporate it into their membrane are the cells of the immune system, because that is the role assigned to them: presenting foreign proteins to the antibody-producing cells.
The antibody-producing cells know that these are ‘our own forces,’ and they do not produce antibodies against all the proteins of the presenting cell, but only against the foreign protein presented to them.”
And in several other places.
But by the same token one could interpret the difference as an ability to perceive ideals. I find it very hard to believe that one can decide between Plato and Aristotle by empirical means.
Copenhagen, you’re missing the whole problem.
The problem isn’t the vaccine or intervention in nature. That’s actually good. (Or maybe in a minute you’ll argue that reading text from computer-screen pixels isn’t natural and therefore bad?)
The problem is that one day someone may, in good faith (or maliciously), make a vaccine that causes cancer or other problems for all the vaccinated after a number of years.
And then we enter the question of risk versus benefit across the whole range of possibilities.
The problem begins with the fact that genetic code can be beneficial, can be harmful, and can do nothing at all.
And the order of frequency is that most often it does nothing, after that most often it is harmful. Only if it is designed very carefully can it be beneficial. And it’s very easy to make a mistake.