​ Moral Philosophy Meets Judaism

1. Bavli Tractate Shabbat 31a

Another time a non-Jew came before Shammai and said, "I will convert if you can teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot." Shammai pushed the non-Jews aside with the ruler that was in his hand. The non-Jew came before Hillel and Hillel converted him saying, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor, that is the entire Torah, the rest is just commentary, now go and study."

2. David Hazony, B'ha'alot'kha: Spiritual Authority in Judaism in Jewish Ideas Daily

Human beings need law to survive. We need courts and police, we need coercion to enforce a minimal standard of behavior. The Talmudic Rabbis caution Jews to pray for the welfare of the state, for without it, "man would eat his neighbor alive." Laws, moreover, must be fair and right if we want to create the conditions in which humanity can thrive. And so, God Himself gives such laws through His servant Moses.

3. Jonathan Haidt's harmless taboo stories (The Righteous Mind, 3-4)

1. A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cup up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.
2. A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. [Nobody sees him do this.]

4. The Basis for the Liberal Western Morality (Haidt, TRM, 11-12)

"Children recognize that rules that prevent harm are moral rules, which [psychologist Elliot] Turiel defined as rules related to 'justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other'. . . young children don't treat all rules the same, as [psychologists Jean] Piaget and [Lawrence] Kohlberg had supposed . . . They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal. And this realization, Turiel said, was the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong.

Turiel's account of moral development differed in many ways from Kohlberg's, but the political implications were similar: morality is about treating individuals well. It's about harm and fairness (not loyalty, respect, duty, piety, patriotism, or tradition.)

5. Is Morality Only About Harm and Fairness? (Haidt, TRM, 14-15)

"I began to see the United States and Western Europe as extraordinary historical exceptions - new societies that had found a way to strip down and thin out the thick, all-encompassing moral orders . . . Nowhere was this thinning more apparent than in our lack of rules about what the anthropologists call 'purity' and 'pollution.' Contrast us with the Hua of New Guinea, who have developed elaborate networks of food taboos governing what men and women may eat. In order for their boys to become men, they have to avoid foods that in any way resemble vaginas . . . It sounds at first like arbitrary superstition mixed with the predictable sexism of a patriarchal society. Turiel would call these rules social conventions, because the Hua don't believe that men in other tribes have to follow these rules. But the Hua certainly seemed to think of their food rules as moral rules. They talked about them constantly, judged each other by their food habits, and governed their lives, duties, and relationships by what the anthropologist Anna Meigs called 'a religion of the body.'"

"If Turiel was right that morality is really about harm, then why do most non-Western cultures moralize so many practices that seem to have nothing to do with harm? Why do so many Christians and Jews believe that 'cleanliness is next to godliness?' And why do so many Westerners, even secular ones, continue to see choices about food and sex as heavily loaded with moral significance? . . . Even if Turiel was right that children lock onto harmfulness as a method for identifying immoral actions, I couldn't see how kids in the West - let alone among the Azande, the Ilongot, and the Hua (tribes with obscure practices that they deem moral) - could have come to all this purity and pollution stuff on their own."

6. Thick Morality vs. Thin Morality

Part I: Richard Shweder's Questionnaires to People in Orissa, India

Americans condemn while Indians approve:

• A young married woman went alone to see a movie without informing her husband. When she returned home her husband said, "If you do it again, I will beat you black and blue." She did it again; he beat her black and blue.
• A man had a married son and a married daughter. After his death his son claimed most of the property. His daughter got little.
• A man in a serious car accident is transported to a hospital where he is refused treatment because he cannot afford to pay.

Indians condemn while Americans approve:

• In a family, a twenty-five-year-old son addresses his father by his first name.
• A woman cooked rice and wanted to eat with her husband and his elder brother. Then she ate with them.
• A widow in your community eats fish two or three times a week.
• After defecation a woman did not change her clothes before cooking.
• The day after a man dies his firstborn son gets a haircut and eats chicken.

Part II: Eastern and Western Peoples in Conflict (Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, 36, 146, 20, 265)

1. "India's most famous thinker of that century (a Hindu monk), Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), articulated a widespread moral revulsion among Asians for their European masters:

'Intoxicated by the heady wine of newly acquired power, fearsome like wild animals who see no difference between good and evil, slaves to women, insane in their lust, drenched in alcohol, from head to foot, without any norms of ritual conduct, unclean, materialistic, dependent on material things . . . the body their self, its appetites their only concern - such is the image of the western demon in Indian eyes.'"

2. "Writing in 1895, the writer and translator Yan Fu described the differences between China and the West as stark:

'China values the Three [family] Bonds most highly, while the Westerners give precedence to equality. China cherishes relatives, while Westerners esteem the worthy. China governs the realm through filial piety, while Westerners govern the realm with impartiality. China values the sovereign, while Westerners esteem the people. China prizes the one Way, while Westerners prefer diversity . . . In learning, Chinese praise breadth of wisdom, while Westerners rely on human strength.'"

3. "[`Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti] (an Egyptian Muslim cleric) generally found French practices distasteful, even barbaric:

'It is there custom', he wrote, 'not to bury their dead but to toss them on garbage heaps like the corpses of dogs and beasts, or to throw them into the sea.' 'Their women do not veil themselves and have no modesty . . . They [the French] have intercourse with any woman who pleases them and vice versa.'

"Al-Jabarti's limited experience of political institutions made him misunderstand French revolutionary ideals: 'their term "liberty" means,' he concluded too hastily, 'that they are not slaves like the Mamluks'. He sensed the hostility to his own Islamic values in Napoleon's claim that 'all the people are equal in the eyes of God'. 'This is a lie, and ignorance, and stupidity,' he thundered. 'How can this be when God has made some superior to others?'

4. "But the vast majority of people in Muslim countries never stopped believing in Islam. They also failed to develop the habit of seeing Islam as a purely religious phenomenon, separate from economics, politics, law and other aspects of collective life."

7. Richard Shweder's Three Big Ethics (Haidt, TRM, 116)

1. The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concerns such as rights, liberty, and justice, which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other's projects.
2. But as soon as you step outside of Western secular society you hear people talking in two additional moral languages. The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect . . . In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous - a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions collective entities upon which everyone depends.
3. The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted. People are not just animals an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody's rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass, he still shouldn't do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity's baser instincts.