Q&A: The Spinach Test
The Spinach Test
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I have several questions about David Enoch’s spinach test:
Questions about David Enoch’s spinach test:
- In the spinach example, for instance (lucky for me I don’t like spinach…), why does the fact that the sentence is amusing show that this is not an objective moral question? I understood that it shows that taste is a subjective matter, but the fact that something is subjective does not make it morally valueless (it could be that loving spinach is actually a moral thing because it’s healthy, etc.).
- The question of whether the sentence is funny already stems from that person’s prior attitude toward the issue. With spinach it would amuse everyone, but precisely in the intermediate cases that the test is trying to examine, the question of whether it will make me laugh depends on whether the question I placed into the test sounds to me like something objective or subjective. For example:
- I tried to use the spinach test to understand whether belief in God is an ethical fact. One formulation led to the conclusion that it is, and another that it isn’t: 1. How lucky I am that I wasn’t born 2,000 years ago, because then everyone believed in God, and belief in God is nonsense. 2. How lucky I am that I wasn’t born into a secular family, because otherwise I wouldn’t believe in God, and believing in God is good. The first sentence doesn’t strike me as funny, while the second one does a little, because in any case, if I had been born into a secular family, the assumption is that I wouldn’t think believing in God is good. Can anything be learned from these sentences?
- Whether the conclusion is that belief in God is an ethical fact or not, I have difficulties with that.
If there is no ethical fact here, it comes out that belief in God, and consequently the existence of God, is a subjective matter and not an objective fact. That also creates a difficulty for your claim that there is ethical realism, because only if God exists is there valid morality.
If the conclusion is that belief in God is indeed an objective fact, and we add to that that He is the one who gives morality its validity and that He gave us the 613 commandments (this is not part of the claim in the discussion with Enoch, but it is still part of your view), does that mean that the commandments have binding moral value, or that they are merely binding without moral value? Shouldn’t we assume that everything we observe ought to have some kind of moral value? And if the commandments are moral, how is it that we do not always understand that morality? I also remember, for example, that you wrote that there is no moral problem with same-sex relations, and yet the Torah prohibits it; there is also no moral problem with lighting a fire on the Sabbath, and the Torah prohibits that too…
Thanks in advance.
Answer
1. The spinach test has nothing to do with morality. It is meant to help diagnose whether a given claim is subjective or objective. That’s all. When you apply it to morality, you discover that for most of us morality is objective and not subjective. In my opinion, like Enoch, subjective morality has no validity whatsoever, but that is a different issue and is unrelated to the spinach test.
2. Obviously, the direction goes from the perception to the question of whether it is amusing. But the test helps you make a diagnosis for yourself: if it makes you laugh, then in your eyes it is subjective (because only something subjective is funny).
3. It has no connection at all to ethical facts. The spinach test does not determine whether something is an ethical fact, but whether it is an objective claim or not. That applies to every field, with no special connection to ethics. In my opinion, nothing can be learned from them. In my opinion, neither of them is funny either. Obviously, if you had been born into a secular family, you would not think that believing is good. That is true for all kinds of claims. Still, the question is not what you would have thought then, but what you think today about that hypothetical situation.
4. See the previous section.
Indeed, in my opinion there is no connection between Jewish law and morality. To spell that out would require a whole book. I have entire lecture series about this, and also columns (15, 541-542).
Discussion on Answer
You have not defined the concepts correctly for yourself.
Let’s begin with the concept of “subjective.” Every factual claim is subjective in the sense that I think it. When I think that 2+2=4, that is a subjective thought. But it has an objective root. It is objectively true, but when I think about it, it is subjective.
In the essential sense, “subjective” means a thought that has no root in objective reality. It is not true, but I think it or feel it.
In the first sense of subjectivity, every factual claim is of course subjective. Therefore the spinach test has no meaning with respect to that sense of subjectivity. The test examines subjectivity in the second sense. In that sense, factual claims or laws of science are objective, but taste (like spinach) is subjective.
Now we have a general test for a claim X: is it objective or subjective? I ask myself whether the statement about X — “How good it is that I live at such-and-such a time or place, because if I lived in another place/time then I would think/experience not-X” — is funny or not. If yes, then in my view X is subjective in the essential sense.
Now regarding morality or faith / belief. If X is moral obligation (such as not murdering) or belief in God, and you laugh, that means that in your eyes these are subjective claims in the essential sense.
If that is so, then clearly it is not binding in any way. A subjective claim in the essential sense is not binding. That follows from the very nature of essential subjectivity. Only subjectivity in the technical sense can deal with something binding, because it is subjective in the sense that I feel it, but it has an objective root, and therefore it is binding. But the spinach test is not dealing with that kind of subjectivity.
Think carefully about what I wrote here before you continue. I feel that you do not always examine things all the way through before continuing the discussion.
“In the essential sense, ‘subjective’ means a thought that has no root in objective reality. It is not true, but I think it or feel it.”
According to this definition, it may be that there is nothing subjective at all in the world. I love my wife. If that is not subjective “in the essential sense,” then I don’t know what is. And still, it has a root in objective reality. I exist, my wife exists, my hormones exist, my soul exists, and so on. It is certainly true that I love my wife.
It seems to me that the words “a root in objective reality” are doing too much work. They leave a lot of room for maneuvering. In any case, this does not seem to me like a good direction for thinking about the distinction between objective and subjective. It sounds like it makes a very common mistake: trying to define the subject as something that has no “objective” place, something that cannot be located objectively in the objective world from an objective point of view. But it is trivial that this is mistaken.
Wow! Is this the wording you suggest in order to clarify the picture? I didn’t understand a word.
I don’t see any problem with my wording. I didn’t say there are no physiological factors behind my love for my wife. I said that those factors are subjective (they are in me personally). And so, for example, if someone else comes and says that he does not love her, I will not think that we are having an argument or a disagreement. It is a matter of taste. In my opinion, this definition is simple and clear.
Thank you.
3. It’s a little funny to argue about what is funny, but still,
why is the sentence “How lucky I am that I wasn’t born into a secular family, because otherwise I wouldn’t believe in God, and believing in God is good” not funny? It is exactly like the spinach case, which is funny because if I liked spinach then in any case it wouldn’t be yuck… And why does it not mean anything? Isn’t it supposed to show whether belief in God is an objective matter (like knowing the theory of relativity) or a subjective one (like loving spinach)?
Intuitively, belief, as opposed to knowledge, sounds like something subjective; on the other hand, the very fact that belief in God is subjective does not necessarily mean there is no absolute truth to the question whether God exists.