Q&A: Morality
Morality
Question
First of all, I have to tell the Rabbi that I was exposed to you only recently through your YouTube channel, and I was amazed by the tremendous project going on there right under everyone’s nose. It’s really changing the way I think. God willing, I intend to watch all of it, and I hope you’ll keep uploading more lectures and that it won’t stop because of the welcome exit from the coronavirus period. I also plan to read the books, but I was told they’re heavy reading for a beginner like me. Thank you very much.
From what I understood about your approach to morality, we apprehend the idea, and from generation to generation we develop and understand it more and more. In one of the discussions at the end of the lesson you gave someone an example (roughly—I can’t find it now for some reason): “In the past people didn’t know the theory of relativity; today physics has developed, and the same is true in morality.” So my question is: could there be a situation where in another 200 years morality will continue to develop, and our descendants will think we are terrible? For example, over things like minimum wage or even democracy? And could the opposite happen too—that they will do things that seem terrible to us? I mean that morality will ‘advance,’ and for example they’ll discover that there’s actually nothing wrong with bullying at school.
My second question is about non-moral commandments, such as slavery—which is not exactly a commandment; let’s call it permission to do something that in our time is not moral. Why does the Torah permit things that we look at anachronistically and say, ah, that’s immoral? Because when it comes to science, we don’t attribute error to the scriptures; rather, we try to interpret them in accordance with new discoveries. But in morality it seems that this is not the case; instead, we admit that the Holy One, blessed be He, permitted a moral mistake appropriate to the period and relied on us to correct it later.
Thanks again.
Answer
In principle it could be, but I very much doubt it. In my assessment, the things that developed over time were not a substantive innovation. I assume that no one ever thought slavery was a commandment, but at most that it was a necessary evil. Today people understand that it is not a necessary evil. I don’t recall something that was once thought to be a positive value and is now understood to be a moral wrong. Even things like the status of women—where in the past people thought a woman was supposed to stay at home, whereas today people advocate equality—everyone understands that there is a certain value in having one of the spouses at home, and nowadays, when there is equality in abilities and opportunities, a symmetry is created.
As for morality, I explained this briefly in Column 15, and in more detail at the beginning of the third part of my trilogy. In matters of science, the scriptures are not supposed to be mistaken, because the Holy One, blessed be He, is supposed to know everything that exists in nature. But morality changes and develops over time. Beyond that, as you’ll see in Column 15, Jewish law strives toward other goals, and therefore there is no fundamental problem with contradictions between it and morality. If you’re listening to my series on morality, I explain this there as well.
Discussion on Answer
I’m trying to understand what it means that morality changes and develops over time. It doesn’t seem likely that the idea itself is by nature an idea that changes, because if I understood correctly, an idea is something that never changes. Like with the correctness of the theory of relativity, which was always true and did not develop over time.
If we stick with the answer that the permission of slavery was a necessary evil, then of course everything works out, because slavery really did go against the idea even in that period; it’s just that, what can you do, it was necessary and therefore it wasn’t forbidden. Today, when we’ve discovered that it isn’t necessary, it is forbidden. But morality itself did not change or develop—only our understanding of what morality is.
There is no such thing as “morality.”
If you mean feelings of guilt regarding certain actions, those are things that can be conditioned through education. In other words, those feelings have always existed; what changes is the worldview, or awareness of things. This happens naturally because of the development of science and technology, which allow human beings more comfortable lives and much more information, and then today’s fools are able to start thinking about things that the wise people of the past already knew.
In short, morality does not develop; rather, awareness of things grows, and this happens mainly thanks to communications technology.
Gadi, as in science, so too with morality: our ability to apprehend the idea and understand it improves. That is more plausible than a development of the idea itself (though even that is not entirely far-fetched).
It seems to me that slavery really was a necessary evil, and today it isn’t.