[Aspaqlaria] Aspaqlaria

Thu Nov 2 02:37:04 PST 2006

Aspaqlaria

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Ethics and Morality

Posted: 01 Nov 2006 11:00 AM CST
http://www.aishdas.org/asp/2006/11/ethics-and-morality.shtml

Everyone else in the frum blogosphere is dealing with the questions Richard Dawkins raises in his book The God Delusion, and whether morality is possible without religion. So why shouldnt I?

Morality is defined in term of conduct. Its from the Latin moralis, meaning custom or manner. It is therefore possible to be moral just because one is doing the right thing.

Ethics is from the Greek ethos, which describes a persons character. A person can only be ethical if he believes he was created for a higher purpose, and aspires to live for that higher calling.

(An interesting tangent is what this says about Greek culture vs. Roman.)

The contemporary atheist, like Dawkins, believes their higher calling is merely that a particular kind of self-replicating molecule replicates well with all the baggage of producing a Dawkins to provide the right soup.

What then is the resultant ethic? To do anything possible to make your genes, those molecules, propogate. But the result is paradoxical: The higher calling, is itself life, the thing it is supposed to be higher than!

It also leaves one a victim of Humes is-ought fallacy. People tend to confuse the is with the ought. They are different in kind. How does one define what ought to be from observations of evidence of what is?

I suggested in an earlier blog entry that it takes the notion of our existence to have a purpose and a goal in order to avoid Euthyphros Paradox. (To convert the paradox to Jewish terms: Is being good an arbitrary choice of Hashem, and therefore of no inherent meaning? Or are we saying that Hashem is subject to an externally imposed morality?)

My resolution (which I recommend reading in full, rather than relying on this excerpt) was:

I would argue that HQBH created the world with a tachlis, a purpose, He placed each of us in it with a tachlis, and what is righteous is righteous because it is in accordance with furthering that tachlis. This fits Rav Hirsch’s etymology for “ra“, being related to /רעע/, to shatter. It also explains why the word “tov” means both good in the moral sense (not evil) as well as in the functional sense (not ineffective, as in “a good toothpaste prevents cavities”).  Moral tov derives from the functional tov. Hashem chose “Do not steal” over “Take whatever makes you happy” because that’s what makes us better receptacles.

So yes, HQBH did choose good vs evil without being subject to external constraint, and yet still the choice was not arbitrary. Socrates gave Euthyphro a false dichotomy — there was a third choice. Hashem has a reason, but that reason wasn’t conforming to a preexisting morality.

Here the same issue holds. Without asserting that mans existence is for a purpose, one can not define an ethic.

And yet There have been atheists who died to defend their nation or their civilization. That requires a motivation for such extreme moral behavior; someone wouldnt sacrifice so much without a noble motivation. Where would it come from?

Perhaps this question is only because everything above presumed that everything man does is reasoned. In other words, all I have argued is that man can not define an ethic, he can not explain why he would be moral. But many people do things they can not justify intellectually, or for which they have an imperfect line of reasoning. Someone could value freedom or democracy because they enjoy having them, not because they have a logical reason why their DNA should be provided one environment rather than the other, or even why replication of a particular variant of DNA has any value over any other chemical reaction (to refer back to the is-ought fallacy.

Where does this moral drive come from? Freud saw choice as being between the Id, the desires with which we are born, and the Super-Ego, recordings of all the rules our parents and society have placed upon us. But in Jewish thought, there is a soul. Its not only repression of natural desire to conform to a higher calling, its also the satisfaction of an equally innate human need, the desires of the soul. Not believing in it doesnt mean one cant hear its call.

Perhaps this ties in to the answer Hillel gave one of the people who approached him to convert. In the post  the Rest is Commentary I discuss his answer to the impatient convert (which again I recommend reading in full):

What you hate, do not do to your peer: that is the whole Torah, the rest is the commentary. Go and learn it.

Is there a natural morality, an innate sense of right and wrong? Somehow all of humanity labels theft and murder as evil. Everyone has a yeitzer hatov calling him to good and yeitzer hara pulling the other way.

Natural morality is based on empathy. “What you hate, do not do to your peer.” In a somewhat flawed way, it drives the Notzri Golden Rule, as well as the Hindu concept of Karma. I know something is wrong because I wouldn’t like it — and I am aware of another’s pain when I do it to them.

But that morality from empathy is limited. It gives general guidelines, but no tools for navigating the grey areas and the questions that involve conflicting values and priorities. Therefore one needs commentary to explain further. And that commentary one must “go and learn”. It goes beyond the innate.

The Torah is therefore in agreement with the general thrust of innate morality, even to those who deny the former and have no explanation for the existence of the latter. But the steps between the first principles innately known and the dictates of the Torah often make it impossible to deduce the terrain of morality without following the map Hashem gave us.

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