Q&A: Discovering the Laws of Morality
Discovering the Laws of Morality
Question
Hello Rabbi,
In your book ‘The First Existent’ in the discussion about morality, I didn’t understand your position. I agree that a person who claims that morality is valid assumes that there are objective moral laws and that their source is God. The question is how do we discover what the concrete laws are? How do I know that murder is an immoral act? Because that’s whatmy conscience tells me? And if it had told me that it is good to murder then would that have been okay?
In addition, you sometimes write that it says, “And you shall do what is right and good,” but it does not spell out what is right and good; rather, it is assumed that the Holy One, blessed be He, holds that our conscience is capable of knowing what is right and good.
If subjective conscience is the criterion for morality, how do we avoid moral relativism?
Answer
What connection is there between the questions? If you agree that morality comes from God, then everything is clear and agreed upon. How we discover what morality is is a completely different question. In my view, it comes from our moral intuition. If your conscience were to tell you that murder is permissible, then it would be misleading you. You are conflating the way we learn about something with the question of whether it is true. If someone fails to grasp geometry, does that mean the sum of the angles in a triangle is not 180? It is 180; that person simply does not grasp it.
As for relativism, it depends whether you mean factual relativism (that people have many different moral positions) — that is an obvious fact. What do you want to do about it? Why is that connected to what I said? And if you mean essential relativism (that there are many different correct moral positions) — that is simply not true.
Discussion on Answer
How is all this connected to what I wrote in the book? You started with questions about my book.
As for your actual point, it seems you didn’t read what I wrote here. I explained to you that you keep conflating the question of what morality is with the question of how we can know it. In your question here too, you are again conflating them.
So I’ll repeat once more: even if I have no way to convince you, or you have no way to convince me, that does not mean there is no correct morality; it only means that one of us is wrong and there is no way to convince him. If I have no way to prove to you that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180, does that mean it is not true that the sum is 180?
And still, to your question: it is not always possible to decide, and therefore sometimes we will remain in disagreement. Usually, when there is a dispute, one is right and the other is wrong (there are rare cases in which there are two morally correct answers), and therefore the existence of a disagreement has nothing to do with the question of moral relativism. Sometimes such an argument can be settled with various arguments (which themselves are always based on moral intuitions), and I assume you have more than once experienced an argument in which one side was persuaded. That sometimes happens. In such an argument, people show you the implications of your position, suggest practical differences, connect it to other moral intuitions, and so on. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Okay, let’s focus the question — how do we discover what morality is? If two people use their moral intuition and arrive at two different conclusions, how can we move forward and decide which one of them is right?