Question

Hello Rabbi,
The following is a summary of my thoughts on the subject of morality. I’d be happy to hear your response, and at the same time: sorry for the long ramble.
If I understood your view correctly (the synthetic and essentialist one), then morality is an abstract concept with real existence.
That is, morality is not just the proper or optimal thing that should be done in any given situation according to some social convention, but rather there is an actual “reality” of morality, or of good and evil, and we are required to be moral because of that real existence (of morality, or more generally, of a divine being).
Years ago I eagerly read your (first) trilogy, and I couldn’t help agreeing with this assumption. My intuition indeed confirmed for me that these ideas were correct.
Despite upheavals and changes of position on many fundamental issues, I still feel that morality is something real, except that there is no need to adopt an essentialist position for that purpose.
I’ll take as an example the following three sentences:
This person is good.
This drill is good.
This ice cream is good.
All these sentences make sense to us (in other languages too), except that the first is connected to morality, the second to efficiency, and the third to pleasure. Seemingly, the word “good” is a general term indicating an optimum among possible states.
But, as stated, we have a strong intuition that the concept of good is connected mainly to morality. And so this creates a difficulty for our intuition: how do we use such an important word for things that are so different? Efficiency is one thing, but pleasure is perceived by many as connected to sin…
That is, the concept of good, as we intuitively understand it, is connected to good feelings. And this is certainly something very real: when we examine the brain of a person who feels joy, we will see certain neuro-hormones there that cause him to feel good. A person who eats ice cream will experience a flow of chemicals that give him a pleasant feeling, and a person who received a defective drill will feel the opposite.
When we discuss moral situations on the social level, what usually enters the picture is the complexity of choosing between states in which there is a mixture of good and bad consequences (and indeed, there is often no absolute resolution to such questions). But in practice, moral discussion ultimately amounts to weighing positive emotional value against negative emotional value.
In short, good and evil are connected to emotion, and if we take a person and neutralize the biochemical mechanism that causes him to feel, he will completely lose his moral intuitions. Likewise, in a world in which all people were devoid of emotion, the concept of morality would cease to exist.
As an aside, I’m used to people with high analytical abilities looking down on emotion. Emotion can certainly mislead people, but without the existence of emotion, it is hard to see any meaning in human life as we perceive it.