Question

Hello Rabbi,
I listened to lesson 43 in the faith series—fascinating as usual, thank you very much.
I wanted to ask a question that may seem like it has already been asked in other variations several times on the site, but I’d still be glad to ask a similar question with a certain nuance:
The Rabbi presented his position regarding moral facts and their significance for obligation or the concept of what is “proper” or “ought” to be done. Despite my long familiarity with the Rabbi’s position on this issue, it seemed to me that perhaps there is something here—forgive me—a kind of linguistic cleverness that would not have embarrassed those Frenchmen you loathe. I mean the insistence on defining the source of obligation as the existence of a fact. It seems clear that despite the test of Enoch and the like, our conception of different kinds of facts is intuitively very different from our conception of moral facts. The Rabbi explained several times that this is similar to contemplating an idea, and that whoever does not grasp the obligation that automatically emerges from recognizing this fact suffers from blindness. In a certain sense this feels like begging the question (not in the analytic sense that the Rabbi speaks about): there is some assumption that the concept of “ought” has meaning—an assumption whose source itself is seemingly psychological! We feel that a person who murders is doing something bad; we have no proofs or logical arguments for the matter—and therefore we must assume that there is some source in the world that contains this plane within it. I wanted to ask the Rabbi about a somewhat different position, based on things you have written many times regarding the place of emotion in the religious sphere.
Although the Rabbi rightly argues that the naturalistic fallacy applies to psychological-evolutionary explanations and the like regarding the source of morality, it seems that our viewing of the “idea of the good” also involves psychological considerations. It is not pure, in the sense that even if one assumes the understanding of the ethical fact as the source of morality, that understanding is made up of several different layers, and it cannot be dismissed by saying that whoever understands, understands everything, and whoever does not is blind with respect to morality. In the example of murder there is also revulsion (evolutionary?) at the possibility of potential harm to me, there is recognition that murder destroys life, etc.—in other words, contemplating the idea that “murder is bad” is also composed of psychological materials. Maybe instead of dismissing this with a claim about facts (which are almost in no way similar to facts in the ordinary sense) that contain obligation within them, and the blindness of one who does not recognize this, one could propose the opposite position: emotion alone is what produces moral recognition, and whoever lacks moral emotion (I hate murder, and by contrast—I love God and therefore feel obligated to observe the commandments) suffers from blindness with respect to morality. The Rabbi’s illustration regarding the psychopath who lacks moral understanding (although ostensibly it is not exactly clear what he lacks—this requires a clearer definition in order to know how to distinguish it) could be applied to a person who does not feel obligated to God by virtue of love, gratitude, awe, and so on—without any consideration of moral realism.
I hope the question and the suggestion were clear. I did not want to go on at too much length, but I did want to emphasize the points briefly. I would be glad if the Rabbi could address mainly the fundamental question—the definition of ethical facts (which seems very unintuitive) as opposed to moral emotion as the source of validity. And indeed, perhaps there is no validity in the strong sense of a bare “ought”; rather, the feeling that there is—“murder is bad”—is simply a side effect of the development of moral-evolutionary emotion, and so on.

Thank you very much in advance!