[Avodah] is there morality outside of the Torah?

[T613K at aol.com]

>> Without responding to anything specific that anyone has said on  this 
>> thread, I want to say one thing:
>> Derech eretz  kadmah laTorah.
>> [--old TK]

In a message dated 5/26/2010, someone at gmail.com writes [to Areivim]:
> This phrase  is constantly thrown around to "prove" any position that I 
> am trying to  prove.  What does it actually mean and what was it originally  
> referring to in the medrash?

"Derech eretz" has a number of overlapping meanings, somewhat depending
on context. It can mean civilization, ethics, morality, etiquette or
basic menshlichkeit. *Something* comes even before Torah and lays the
ground for it -- some basic feeling for human decency. Some innate human
sense of morality is certainly part of it. Evolutionists try to locate
the innate human sense of right and wrong in some evolutionary process,
"survival of the fittest" but to us it is obvious that Hashem created
human beings this way -- with a conscience, with a sense of right and
wrong. True, yetzer lev ha'adam ra min'urav -- that means the id is there
before the superego develops. Nevertheless the superego, conscience or
yetzer hatov is also innate, and its absence in any given human being
is the sign of a severely dysfunctional and defective human being.
This is true even in a pre-Torah or non-Torah society.

--Toby Katz
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