Q&A: Two Sufficient Reasons: Jewish Law and Morality
Two Sufficient Reasons: Jewish Law and Morality
Question
A. Does it have any significance that one thing has two sufficient reasons?
In practice, the question is this:
Can I claim that when I fulfill a moral command (for example, “Love your neighbor as yourself”), I am acting morally? After all, even if it were not moral I would still fulfill it because of God’s command. And conversely, can I also claim that by doing so I am fulfilling a commandment, since even without the commandment I would fulfill it because it is moral?!
And in general, regarding what Maimonides called rational commandments, on the one hand he writes in the Laws of Kings that we must fulfill the commandments only because God commanded them at Sinai, etc., while on the other hand in Eight Chapters he writes that in the case of rational commandments we should fulfill them because reason itself decides in their favor.
In short, what is the meaning of doing something because of two separate motivations?
B. I didn’t understand how, with the separation-of-authorities thesis between Jewish law and morality, you solve the following problem raised by philosophers:
How can it be that God, as a good and perfect being, would command non-moral commandments? And even if it were in order to achieve religious goals (as you argue), after all, He is God! He could have commanded something else (to achieve those same religious goals) in a way that would fit with morality, no?
Answer
Absolutely yes. If each of the reasons would suffice on its own (that is, I would do the act even if the other reason were absent), then it can be said that each of them is sufficient.
The religious goals are no less binding on Him than the moral goals are (He could not have achieved the religious goals in any other way). See column 457.
Discussion on Answer
Correct, and I answered that conceptual question. If you would fulfill it even without there being a moral issue here, then you are committed to the word of God, and likewise with morality.
I’m running into the following difficulty:
In a number of places (see column 297) you explain that there is no active providence because the concept of double causation is impossible. There is no double causation, since a cause is at the very least a sufficient condition, and if cause A is sufficient then there is no need for cause B.
In short, there cannot be two different, parallel, and independent explanations for the same phenomenon.
If so, it is easy to see: how does that fit with what you say following Maimonides, that one must fulfill a commandment because of a religious motive, meaning God’s command (otherwise I am not religious but merely “one of the wise men of the nations of the world”), and also because of a moral motive (otherwise I am not a moral person)?
There is a difference between an explanation/cause and a motive. There is no principled problem with claiming that act X has two motives. This is explicit in the Talmud: for the sake of Passover and for the sake of a peace-offering. And from everyday life: I donate money because it will give me a reputation as a righteous person, and also because I want to contribute to that cause. These are everyday occurrences. The meaning is that either one of those motives by itself would have been enough for me to do the act. By contrast, an explanation or a cause claims that in actuality this was the cause. But there are not two independent causes for the same thing.
So when I say that an act should be done because of morality and because of the command, the meaning is that morality alone, without a command, would have been enough for me to do the act, and the command alone, without morality, would also have been enough.
A related discussion exists in the topic of coercion and consent (a point made by later authorities from the passage about modest and non-modest women at the beginning of Tractate Ketubot). If I am threatened in order to make me do an act that I had intended to do anyway, am I acting under coercion or not?
I didn’t understand. Where is the answer? Yes, both are sufficient. That is obvious.
Now, can I say that I am fulfilling God’s command when even without God’s command I would still do it anyway? That is a conceptual question.