Question

Hello Rabbi,
First of all, I want to thank you for this wonderfully invested site. You really are doing amazing work here—and in your books. You’ve taught me a great deal (let’s just say that when I first came to the site I was semi-Hardal), but I feel that more than giving me information, you gave me a new methodology for questions of faith and philosophy: reason. I think the main thing I gained from becoming acquainted with your work is that I began using tools like logic, conceptual analysis, empiricism, and in general clarifying this whole area, which for me had previously rested mostly on vague concepts and things I had taken for granted. Thank you.
I’d also be glad if you could pass on thanks to the site editors for making it so convenient and pleasant to use, which is a pretty rare quality among intellectual blogs, at least from what I know.
And now to the question. I recently finished the book Truth and Not Stable, and at first I was very persuaded by the thesis presented there (that is, the synthetic position), but little by little I became convinced that this thesis is not correct. I’ll try to present both the considerations that led me to that conclusion and the alternative I’m proposing, and I’d be happy if you could respond.
The difficulties:
A. From the outset, the idea of relying on intuitions in matters of morality seems very unreliable to me, even if we accept the thesis as a whole. In the book you mention that using intuitions is an imprecise tool and more prone to error than other tools, but it seems to me that in this area its reliability is close to zero. When I came to your site I had very strong intuitions on certain issues, and in not much time they simply evaporated, and I believe it easily could have gone the other way as well. Moral intuitions are, in my opinion, influenced mainly by habit and culture, and as such they do not teach us about genuine cognition, aside from a few basic and very general intuitions—for example, that murder without cause is wrong, and similar universal conventions. But that is more of a side point, and I understand that you more or less lean in that direction too.
B. And to the main point: the whole idea of sensory perception of the world of ideas is very implausible. It’s very clear how we are able to see—by receiving light waves, and similarly with sounds or smells. But how exactly do we see the world of ideas? How does that work? It seems completely speculative, no better than assuming that demons are transmitting dreams to us. (Of course, later I’ll address the statistical proof you gave for intuition; for now I’m only trying to show how implausible this view is a priori, so that without the statistical proof—that is, if it turns out not to be correct—it ought to be abandoned immediately.)
C. The very existence of a detailed world of ideas such as the one presented in the book seems highly far-fetched to me. In the chapter on the dispute between Aristotle and Plato (if I remember correctly), it is described that according to the synthetic approach one can “see” the idea of every object, and thus classify them into groups. Is there really a “tableness” idea hiding behind every table? When the microwave was invented, was an idea of microwaveness suddenly born? And when a different microwave model was invented, did it get an idea of its own too? It seems to me much more plausible to suggest (as Jordan Peterson argues) that we ourselves classify the world into objects and kinds according to their use. And when people argue about what democracy is (the example brought in the book), they are indeed not merely having a semantic dispute—but neither are they arguing about some idea of democracies; they are simply arguing about “what kind of government properly reflects the will of the people and improves all our lives.”
In addition, the book gives the example of intuitively “seeing” a witness’s reliability. Must we really say that behind every person there lurks some kind of “reliability” that can be sensed? Isn’t it much more plausible to assume that our mind simply knows how to weigh reliability data on the basis of past experience? When someone solves an equation in an instant, or a more common example—when a rabbi grasps the essence of a Talmudic passage at a quick glance—is that due to metaphysical vision, or to automatic brain processes trained by all the passages the rabbi has studied up to now?
D. And now I come to the statistical proof. The proof says—if I understood correctly—that one can prove (not with certainty, of course) the correctness of our intuitions by way of negation: if all our intuitions—for example, induction—were false, then the generalizations we have made throughout history—for that matter, science—should not have succeeded so many times. What is important for me to emphasize about this proof is that it does not prove that our intuitions are correct because they are grasped by metaphysical vision, but only that they are correct, with no evidence at all as to why they are correct. And in my opinion—and here I come to the heart of the matter—there is a much simpler and more “Occamist” explanation for the correctness of our intuitions: evolution. Evolution instilled in us through natural selection true facts about the world, such as the principle of induction or that two parallel lines will not meet, so that we could survive better through familiarity with the world, just as certain animals (I think monkeys) are born with an built-in fear of snakes. And evolution also instilled in us many moral intuitions through kin selection and group selection, as Jonathan Haidt describes, for example, in his book Why You’re Always Right, which was recently published in Hebrew. It seems to me that grounding intuitions in evolution is immeasurably more plausible than claiming that we are capable of “seeing” certain truths, and certainly fits much better with Occam’s razor. (Which, as far as I know, is also intuitive, or at least based on induction.)
And if so, the alternative:
A. If we accept the claim that intuitions come from evolution (or from God; that’s not critical), then we should distinguish between two types of intuitions: factual intuitions and normative intuitions. Factual intuitions—such as induction and causality, geometrical axioms, physical axioms, etc.—are probably correct, based on the statistical proof you brought in the book, because if those intuitions in fact work and help our survival, then they probably correspond to the real world. That is, when evolution instills in us information about the world that aids our survival, it is probably objectively true, otherwise it would not have been useful for survival. By contrast, normative intuitions—for example, that it is forbidden to steal—were implanted in us solely because of their survival value (again, through group selection and the like), and therefore there is no reason to assume that they are normatively correct—that stealing is really bad—but only that it may indeed often damage the survival of the group or of one’s relatives.
B. If so, then why should we really accept moral rules as binding? I think the required answer is: according to the Torah. That is, by means of factual intuitions (which have been shown to be correct), we can arrive at the existence of God and the truth of Judaism, and on the basis of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)—that is, God, who is always right—we can learn the moral rules that bind us, not only “Torah morality,” meaning Jewish law, but also the correctness of human morality, which too (in my opinion) is written in the Hebrew Bible.
 
To be honest, I’d really be happy if you disproved my claims. They raise a number of problems—for example, why there is a moral demand in the Hebrew Bible of generations that preceded Mount Sinai—but somehow it seems to me that objections from the Hebrew Bible would bother you less specifically. Besides, I think I broadly have answers to problems of that kind. But my main problem is that this argument actually pulls the rug out from under any demand for morality from atheists, and personally I would want it to be refuted, but unfortunately it seems to me to be the truth.
 
I apologize for the length, but this really is a question that is very important for me to clarify, and I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time. I tried very hard to divide the question into focused sections to make it easier to read. If you can invest some of your time and answer me, I would be very grateful. And again, thank you for everything I’ve learned from you.
Have a good week.
 
P.S. – Full disclosure: in keeping with the book’s central metaphor, I really am in adolescence.