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A Lot of Tov! Podcasts to Share

I've gotten so behind on posting each new Tov! podcast here!

So here's a way to find all the ones you haven't heard yet. The most recent one features two college students, Sadie Meltzer and Lela Spira-Savett!

 

College: Wrapping Up "Justice"

For much of Justice, certainly the last many weeks of the course while I was a freshman, my main interest was finding a good philosophical justification for distributive justice. Both of my papers were critiques of libertarianism, attempts to buttress the politics I had (and have). The choices in the class were between a Rawslian justification and a communitarian one.

The Rawslian view is that people with and without egalitarian values personally would choose, in the “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance”, that it would be in their interest to choose a system where property rights would be qualified by the need to make the worse off better off whenever the wealthy gained. The communitarian view, exemplified by Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice, is that people like us, in order to be true to our own actual understandings of the nature of exchange and property and the idea of equality, could realize our social ethic only in a society egalitarian in a variety of ways. Those would include certain social welfare policies, certain ways of limiting the market in the spheres of health and education, certain limits on the translation of financial power into the political sphere.

Walzer was trying to answer the question of how a society of libertarians and social-welfare liberals ought to act, and he appealed to a thick common ethic. That seems to be the ground of his argument, even though of course the libertarians don’t share the ethic. (I think Walzer was arguing that unreflective conservatives and probably religious conservatives ought to recognize his egalitarianism as their own if they thought about their own actual values.)  

In any case, back in college the communitarian approach seemed to me more persuasive. Partly I’m sure because the course set it up that way, as the last stage of a dialectic Professor Sandel was guiding. Also because Rawls’ ingenious move to make egalitarianism independent of any substantive ethic just rings wrong or maybe feels a bit off, like it’s an intellectual alchemy of turning self-interest into something else.

Looking over my last few weeks of notes in the course as me now, I find myself engaged mostly with a different question. Why would someone choose a democratic politics over one that advances one’s own or one’s group’s substantive social ethic? Why are values of democratic process and pluralism the kinds of things that someone with a strong ethical position should support as a matter of principle? Why would someone give higher priority, even just at times, to considerations that would legitimize another competing ethic “winning” for a time, an ethic that you think is morally wrong?

And I ask that thinking mostly about the Christian right today, but also wondering what a committed egalitarian would say given what has been going on in our own American politics. Sandel’s own critique of Rawls is that he latter’s philosophy is built on a concept of human nature that isn’t real for anyone: that there is a “self” who can experience a separateness from one’s own “ends” or conception of the good, who views those things critically and can see why another would choose a different set of ends or goods. That kind of “self” isn’t universal; it is the preferred self-understanding of people with a certain philosophy, or who are in certain social groups like the ones who study ethical philosophy and not just their own group’s ethics. If Sandel’s critique holds, then on what grounds would we expect a “narratively situated self” to surrender or subordinate their conception of the good, particular when what’s at stake is a core belief like the equality of people or the right to have enough to live on?

And I still don’t have a great answer. In section, Benor suggested that a truer picture is that a person has attributes and convictions and they can be arrayed on a scale from complete commitment to able-to-detach-from. I didn’t remember that and it seems like it would add to the picture. I think in the notes from Sandel (and I didn’t remember this either), Rousseau suggested that a civic republican version of democratic politics would educate people toward more of a common sense of the good and toward the ability to look more critically and deeply at their own values and to engage with the values of others. Those are the best case, but still not an answer to why someone would enter that politics in the first place.

Lately I’ve been listening a bit to Professor Danielle Allen, who adds a more Aristotelian layer, which is that all people need to engage in public matters to flourish truly, and that engaging in political debate in certain ways itself cultivates the self. Again, I would like that to be true. Professor Allen has a genius idea that such a view allows for the choice to sit back and opt out, which would be a particular civic posture, not an individualist withdrawal. I don’t know what she says about people who hold a strong ethical view and don’t acknowledge that others do too, even after being willing to engage with such others.

So while I can argue against a Christian view of America, and certainly a Christian-nationalist view, I don’t have a good answer for why those people ought in their frame of reference to put democratic values high up.

I listened to an interview with Dr. Yuval Levin, who in a way flips my question around and says that there is really no alternative to being a classical liberal if you hold a committed conservative viewpoint. I think I have to go back and probe that more, and understand why his argument might make sense on the right (or the left).

I have to myself thought at times that a more liberal-egalitarian or even just classic liberal response might be that even people who live by right in insular communities that don’t let in other ideas are only able to do so in the first place because of the (Rawslian?) social contract that lets them set up such enclaves in the first place. Neither this idea, nor Levin’s, is anything like Sandel’s or Walzer’s. I don’t think it answers the distributive justice question at all.

So that’s where I am, still. I think I have one more thing to write before the "end of the semester", about the books I wanted to read after taking the course.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #8: War and Peace

The word Shalom is probably the most widely-known Hebrew word, among Jews and also people who aren’t Jewish. Shalom means peace, and because of that Shalom is also the word for greeting someone and saying goodbye. Shalom means not just peace but wellbeing and wholeness, so when we see someone we are expressing our hope that they are well and whole, and we leave we wish them a blessing of peace.

Shalom is even part of the name of our holiest city, Yerushalayim, Jerusalem, the City of Peace. Shalom is central to the Jewish view for humanity and for our holy land.

And at the same time, Judaism is not pacifist. War is sometimes unavoidable and sometimes necessary. One question we can ask is how Judaism views that necessity.

One response is in the midrash about the reunion between Yaakov and Esav. Yaakov returns toward home after 20 years of separation from his brother Esav, who at the time wanted to kill him. So Yaakov is afraid this is still the case, particularly after hearing that Esav has 400 men with him. The Torah says that "Yaakov was very afraid and he was troubled", vayira Yaakov m’od vayeitzer lo (Genesis 32:8).

The midrash picks up on the two descriptions for Yaakov’s fear, and explains it like this: Yaakov was afraid that Esav might kill him, and he was troubled that he might have to kill Esav.

Between this verse and the brothers’ actual reunion, there is the famous story of Yaakov wrestling at night with a being. This being is often called an angel, but in one midrash, the being is described as a representation of Esav and his might. In the course of the fight, Yaakov is given a new name, Yisrael, which has inside it the word sar which means "power" or "rule." And at the end of the fight, in the morning, Yaakov is limping.

These two midrashim suggest a view of war: that being powerful is necessary, and that even justified killing is wounding to one’s soul. War can be necessary for survival, and survival is important not just in itself but in order to continue the covenant the Jewish people are charged with following. Killing in war is never desired, whether the people who die are innocent or enemies. Going to war ought to be sobering, never triumphalist, even when it’s unavoidable or the cause is just. A people who fights will be defined by that fighting, as Yaakov was renamed Yisrael, and they will always have something to heal from, as Yaakov did.

And shalom must remain a goal and a hope, embraced even when shalom between particular nations isn’t likely in the short-term. That is one of the reasons why the essential part of every Jewish service, the Amidah, always concludes with prayers of shalom.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #7: Competition

The story of Yaakov and Esav is basically about an unending competition, which begins even in the womb over who will be born first. Esav wins, earning the birthright which would be relevant for inheritance way later -- but Yaakov manages to get it from him in a deal for some lentil stew. The brothers compete for their father Yitzchak’s blessing, which is about both a spiritual legacy and an easier life for the blessed one and his descendants. In between these two stories, Yitzchak himself is in a competition with his Philistine neighbors over control of a series of wells that his father Avraham had dug and the Philistines claimed for themselves or tried to block Yitzchak from accessing.

These competitions are all in Parashat Toldot, a single Torah reading. And these stories are part of a larger motif of competition that goes throughout the book of Bereshit (Genesis), from Kayin and Hevel (Cain and Abel) all the way to the end through the twelve sons of Yaakov.

Competition is a fact of life the Torah acknowledges and depicts, from specific incidents between individuals to the destiny of tribes and nations. So what does Judaism generally have to offer us as a perspective on competition?

Obviously these Genesis stories portray the destructive effects of certain kinds of competition. In the Talmudic tradition, competition can be a generative dynamic. Talmudic Judaism itself is created and expressed through a series of discussions where rabbis try to best each other intellectually and spiritually. The generations that created the foundations of Jewish law in the Mishnah and Gemara are anchored by pairs of sages who pushed each other about every kind of topic: Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael, Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehudah, Rav and Shmuel, Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, to name a few. Not to mention Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, two entire schools of thought. In the Talmudic literature, when a pair of sages squares off for the sake of Heaven, Torah is perfected.

In Talmudic thought we also find the notion of harnessing the yetzer hara, which is the selfish or competitive nature within us. Humans are regarded as having two motors, this yetzer hara, the so-called evil nature, and the yetzer hatov, the nature for good. In one view, the yetzer hara is what perfects goodness (Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 9:7), because it’s competition that pushes people to do constructive things like building a house, and more profound things as we've seen with the Talmud. If someone in the economic sphere becomes wealthy through competition, their wealth can become tzedakah that helps someone else on a scale that otherwise wouldn't have been possible. Even if the original motivation is not pure, the outcome can be very good.

In a future video, I’ll talk about competition more particularly in the realm of business. For now, the Jewish view of competition can be summed up with reference to another Talmudic story, where the rabbis capture the yetzer hara and put it in prison (Yoma 69b). Many creative and productive activities come to a screeching halt. So the rabbis come up with the idea of altering the yetzer hara in some way and then release it back into the world, to get the best of competition without its destructive effects. That’s the Jewish perspective. If only the story told how us how to do that specifically, not just metaphorically!

A Year of Jewish Ethics #6: Ownership

In chapter 23 of Bereshit Sarah dies and in order to bury her, Avraham makes his first purchase of land. Burial is such an important mitzvah, and it’s important that a mitzvah becomes the context for the first purchase recorded in the Torah. What does this teach us about a Jewish ethic of ownership?

Avraham wants to buy from the Hittites M’arat Hamachpelah, the cave of Machpelah. Their leader, Ephron, wants to gift it to him, or perhaps only to give him the use of it. But Avraham wants to own it. So they go back and forth about whether it’s a gift or a purchase, until they agree on a price and make the deal.

Many people are critical of Avraham’s focus on this business at a time of mourning. But I think it’s worth considering nonetheless what the story teaches us about the ethical significance of ownership.

In modern America, we say “A man’s home is his castle.” Think about what this conveys about our culture. Ownership in the dominant American view is bound up primarily with individuality and individual control. That’s the typical starting point – owning creates an absolute individual right, and to deviate from that requires a special justification.

For Avraham, the starting point is different. Avraham has been a wanderer, and while he owns herds and has been very prosperous and never in need, only very late in life does he turns to consider ownership of land for the first time.

For Avraham ownership of the cave is grounded first and foremost in a purpose. There is an immediate purpose, which is a mitzvah he needs to do. He needs the cave to bury Sarah. Avraham also intends for this place to endure beyond his own life, as a physical symbol of his family legacy, which is the story of a covenant that is young at the moment but will unfold over generations. God has promised a mission for his descendants that will take place in this land, and Avraham wants to leave his descendants something connected to that which is theirs undisputedly.

Avraham’s purposes for owning the cave define what he can and can’t do there. He can’t use it to build a separate settlement for himself apart from the Hittites, or a fortification.

Second, for Avraham owning the cave is about defining a relationship between him and the people around him. Avraham has been a transient in this city of Chevron, coming and going, and the Hittites and he don’t necessarily know each other that well. So this acquisition is a jump-start toward an enduring relationship. At its best, doing business with someone is the easiest way to begin to develop trust. In the context of a very specific acquisition transaction, it’s easy to define what honesty and integrity are. If done well, exchanging ownership is an easy win, a deposit on a positive relationship. It’s a moment of equality, and then the boundaries around what’s mine and yours give us a way over time to respect each other’s individuality. Definition helps us see each other as who we are, to relate to each other specifically.

So in this story, ownership serves purpose and relationship. Within those come individuality and the prerogatives of ownership.

This is the ideal. Obviously owning is often not done well. Soon in the Torah Yaakov will purchase Esav’s birthright, but he will do it by taking advantage of someone who is weary and hungry. Modern examples of this are everywhere, including in the contemporary city of Chevron in Eretz Yisrael, and these realities lead some to a critique of ownership all together.

Which is why it’s important to define a Jewish ethic of ownership. Ownership is everywhere in our daily life and our social structure. It pervades our consciousness and our metaphors and our language. To push against the modern language of ownership we need an alternative. In the Torah, that alternative begins with Avraham and the Hittites, and the ownership of M’arat Hamachpelah.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #5: The Binding of Yitzchak

 

It’s impossible to talk about Jewish ethics and the book of Bereshit without addressing the story of the binding of Isaac, Akedat Yitzchak or simply the Akedah (found in Genesis 22:1-19). Avraham hears a call from the Divine to take his son to the top of a mountain and offer him as an offering. Avraham packs them up early in the morning and they travel for two days, and on the third day proceeds almost in slow motion toward this terrible act. Ultimately a messenger from the Divine speaks to Avraham and stops him.

There are so many ways to interpret the message of this story, but for Jewish ethics I want to follow a tradition in the midrash where God never wants Avraham to make this sacrifice, and Avraham knows this even though he is not sure how exactly it will play out.

So the ethical principle is that God never wants us to set aside our responsibilities for human life, ever, even when how to live up to that is complicated. No one’s death is good for a cause, no matter how good the cause. No one’s death and no group’s death can be the purpose of a cause, obviously, and just being willing to kill can never be the way you ask someone to show how devoted they are to a good cause. If you think that God’s will or some cause is so high that it overrides the value of a human life without a thought, you are always wrong.

So why doesn’t Avraham just say to God right off – “Good test – I get it, this is a command I should not obey even from you”?

I follow a way of seeing this story taught by a Chasidic rebbe known as the Izhbitzer. He sees the Akedah as a question Avraham asks himself after he has achieved some serenity and prosperity in his life. The Izhbitzer imagines Avraham saying to himself: How do I know what my own motivations are? How do I am not serving God only because things are easy?

So I imagine Avraham saying to himself: I say I have learned the principle of Tzelem Elohim, of the image of God manifest in every person. But am I really committed to it? Do I always stand up for it?

What if the only way to protect someone I care about puts someone else at risk? What if now that I am old, the only way to protect our legacy is for my child to fight for it, to risk his life for my ideals, to kill those who threaten it or threaten us if he has no other choice? What if he doesn’t know yet how to weep at the loss of life that might come from his justifiable acts, the way I hope I do? What if my pursuit of justice has blinded me to someone else’s life?

In this line of thinking, the Akedah isn’t something that happened, a demand from God, but an exploration within Avraham’s own soul. He makes himself live with the hardest dilemmas that test his commitment to Tzelem Elohim and human life. Because he does not delude himself that these dilemmas are easy.

So we have to commit and recommit to the absolute value of human life. Sometimes how to do that is clear. Sometimes it’s not, and in those cases, such as a just war fought justly, we still have to recognize that the deaths are not for God, or for the cause, and make sure at the very least that we don’t turn away.

The big idea is that God despises human sacrifice. We think we know this, and we have to continue to ask what it really means.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #4: Are You Responsible for Your Group?

What responsibility does an individual have for the faults of a whole group? In the first part of Bereshit, the book of Genesis, there are at least two stories that touch on this question directly. One is the story of the Flood, the Mabul in Hebrew, and the other is the situation in Sodom and Gomorrah, S’dom v’Amora. Both of these stories are about a places with a pervasive culture of evil.

The Torah describes and portrays S’dom and Amora in a few places as beautiful, ungenerous, and violent. And also spiritually corrupt, which I take to mean that somehow their ideas and practices justify those other evils and perpetuate them. God presents Avraham with the idea that places like this have no hope and should be destroyed. (I will add here that theologically I don’t believe that this is actually how God operates – I treat this as a metaphor or a thought experiment.)

Avraham argues with God that there might be a group of people within the cities who are tzaddikim, which either means they are innocent of the corruption of their place, or that they are actually people of integrity.

Eventually Avraham and God seem to agree on two possibilities. If there are ten people who are tzaddikim, the cities should not be destroyed at all, and if there are fewer, the cities are doomed but those individuals should be able to leave or extricated.

It turns out that is not a group of ten tzaddikim. There is one family who seem to stand relatively apart, the household of Avraham’s nephew Lot, and maybe it’s only Lot himself. They aren’t admirable, particularly, but they are not the worst of the worst, not what we think of when we think of the pervasive evils of S’dom. They are rescued when the cities are destroyed.

Let me suggest a couple possible lessons from the story of S’dom and Amora, knowing that in later teachings in this series I will have other things to add from the Torah and the Talmudic tradition about this question of individual responsibility within a group guilty of terrible things.

One lesson is that an individual is obligated to leave a group that cannot be swayed away from its vileness, if it’s just one or two against everyone. If you stay past a certain point, then you are responsible even if you’re not one of the ringleaders or you don’t agree. Your presence starts to contribute in all kinds of ways anyway – each time you are silent it strengthens the others, for instance.

It's hard to leave -- Lot and his family hesitate, even when the divine messengers who want to pull them out explain that staying means they will not survive the coming fire and brimstone. But that’s the only way they have a chance to remain innocent and not complicit.

Another lesson comes from the counterfactual that Avraham and God articulate, the idea of ten tzaddikim. Jewish tradition links this with the minyan, a quorum of ten adults for communal prayer. Here in the Torah, it’s a group of ten who stand for the idea of a moral community, not just some individuals who are morally courageous.

Such a group creates an enclave where alternative ideas can be shared openly and fleshed out and lived on a small scale, which can show itself as an alternative to the culture of the larger group. Even a minority can stand up together and try to lead the majority in teshuvah, in reflection and a way back, as long as the small group shares a life together and strengthens each other. A single person or family like Noach or Lot can’t do this, nor can just a few people, and they can’t be expected to take responsibility for that.

Even though there was no such small group in S’dom and Amora, the tradition sees Avraham teaching that there could be and if there are ten people then if they don’t leave, they ought to be a deliberate counterculture. It is at least the first half of the Margaret Mead idea: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

Changing the world, in the context of something as extreme as S’dom, does not mean changing things completely. But when you are part of such a minyan, you now have the possibility of staying productively, and working on one important thing where the larger group has veered off.

S'dom and Amora, and the Flood, represent the extreme versions of a thought experiment about an evil society and the role of one tzaddik. I’ll come back in other installments with more specifics from the Talmud, about for instance how long a group like this ought to keep at it when the possibilities are better than they were for Lot and for Noach.

Back to College: From Aristotle to Rawls

So back to Justice. I’m trying to see if there’s anything from Aristotle that is in the notes but didn’t stick in my mind back then. One thing I see is the distinction between habits and character. Which is really what distinguishes Aristotle from any old consequentialism. One ought to act the way a virtuous person acts, but the added thing is the deeper seeded virtue, which isn’t captured only in this specific act. Kant says a superficially beneficial act isn’t good unless it is done via the rational will. Aristotle says that a beneficial act doesn’t have enduring moral significance unless it derives from a virtuous character and/or helps develop that character.

Although I became more traditional in my Jewish practice starting maybe a year after this course, I held onto a view of ethics rooted in “the right thing” as something outside the inner process, the character process. Maybe. If you’d have asked me, I still would have been thinking in terms of moral dilemmas and better answers to them, separate from the individual actor. At whatever point Aristotle comes more into my picture, and I may write about that later, I think I asked a kind of consequentialist question, which is whether a “virtuous” person is better because the outcomes of their choices are better or last longer or are more sustained. It’s an external view. I think I still grapple with it – in the grand scheme, is virtue somehow icing on the cake or is it essential to the cake in the first place.

The notes say, and Aristotle says, that the best state is one that cultivates virtue in this way and is the arena for it. How? The notes don’t say, and Aristotle to my recollection asserts this in the Ethics but it’s a desideratum, not a detailed plan. I also see in the notes that virtue action is responsive to the individual case and not only to abstract rules, which makes this all the more difficult.

In section, Benor identified honor as the name of the highest virtue in social life, to go with wisdom which is the highest telos for each individual. So for Aristotle a state is based on cultivating honor as well as wisdom, and modeled on/cultivates the relationship between people with those virtues. I have a sense of what wisdom is supposed to be in this account but I don’t remember about honor.

Around this time I wrote paper #1, which was a critique of Ayn Rand’s short paper on libertarianism. My approach was to attack Rand from within. Her conception of a right to life, which to her is the only fundamental right and the grounding of the right to property, is undermined when people do not have the means to guarantee their own life. So a minimal state that took from the excess of the wealthy would be justified in the name of the right to life. I got a B-, largely for two reasons. Benor said the right to life for Rand is not the right to be alive, but the right to try to sustain one’s life, no guarantee. That seems right. The other flaw is that I had a squishy definition of society that did not address Rand’s position that society isn’t a thing of moral significance at all.

I like that I swung for the fences. I didn’t do any better job than what I wrote last time Professor Sandel hadn’t done yet offering a critique of libertarian assumptions. I do see in my paper a tiny seed of a Rawslian idea, which is that the wealthy are entitled to their wealth so long as everyone else has a minimum. I know later Milton Friedman is going to say in our readings that market-based social policies are more Rawslian than liberal government solutions, but I didn’t have that yet! Or maybe Rawls’ positions (have to get there) are really obvious.

[I reread the paper assignment to see whether I got what was being asked, and noticed that word “critique.” It wouldn’t be until a few years later that I came across the term “critical theory”, and I think a long time later, long after college, that I got what I think it means. That some theories specialize in clarifying and critiquing other theories, more than generating substantive world-pictures on their own. I think what I did in this paper was a mix, a bit of this and a bit of that. Obviously it was both a short paper and my first of its kind.]

Professor Sandel – I didn’t remember this quite – now set up a debate between Aristotle and Kant. Aristotle doesn’t really put freedom on any definition at the center, and for Kant it’s the main thing. For Aristotle, the highest purpose defines morality, and it is “natural”, and thus in a sense freedom is counter to nature. For Kant, freedom (autonomy) is the one of the few fundamental natural moral laws.

Professor Sandel used this to introduce the distinction between the framework for political society and the substance of morality. The idea of a social contract is what joins these two together – rational actors with different notions of the moral life/the good create a framework that they are obligated to which enables everyone to pursue their own conception of the good. That gets us to John Rawls, who sought a grounding for individual rights that did not rely on any metaphysics at all, particularly not a teleological one or a utilitarian one, which would make individual rights subordinate to the collective or an outside moral absolute.

Locke’s state of nature account is basically utilitarian when it comes to the transition from the state of the nature to civil government, so that doesn’t work, Rawls does away with any such account and instead has a hypothetical situation, which would yield the two principles of liberty and equality (the “difference principle”). Anyone like us who found ourselves in the original position would agree to those principles, and the contract would bind us.

There was a whole lecture about what makes contracts binding, and a key point is that contracts aren’t justified only by their benefits. It’s only by their being freely agreed to for the purpose of mutual benefit that a contract has force. Real contracts are always flawed. But the social contract posited by Rawls is without those flaws. It didn’t happen at a point in time, but it is the only justification possible for our liberal-egalitarian constitution, because that is the only one we would have contracted with each other if we could have made an ideal contract.

Benor in section helped us see that Rawls, which talking abstractly, really presumed both cultural specificity (us) and moderate scarcity, which makes the second principle relevant. I think he made explicit the genius of Rawls, which is to make freedom and equality the product of self-interest and detach them from a substantive view of the good. Even though we might well hold liberty and equality as goods, some of us, that isn’t their justification across society on Rawls’ account. This is the distinction between “right” (the framework) and “good” (morality.).

We spent a ton of time on Rawls, more than we delved into anything so far. I guess Kant was there as an important piece but not really as political philosophy? This issue of the right and the good as separate things, that’s really important and I sure would never have understood those before. I found this a really helpful way to approach egalitarianism as a political position, at the time, because it did not require persuading anyone out of ideas like the value of hard work and individual effort, or into gooey ideas about common humanity.

I did notice in section this idea of the “well-ordered society”, which strikes me as a bit of Aristotle snuck in at the end? Benor says Rawls imagines a society where it’s more than institutions that embody the two principles of justice. It’s where citizens know the principles and actually imagine themselves having chosen them. I don’t know or remember how much Rawls cares about this or whether it’s as necessary to his picture as such a thing was for the Greeks.

For the couple weeks we were steeped in Rawls I really loved it, and I think it stayed with me for a long time as  beautiful (though not on the page – Rawls’ book is so conceptual and repetitive and full of methodological stuff, which is of course important). I think I struggled with the precise definition of economic equality. Rawls holds that unequal starting conditions for people are relevant, but doesn’t define if there is a degree of wealth inequality that is too much. He gives a standard to judge by, which is in real life impossible to assess. This issue was one of the things Professor Sandel pointed out as a question to Rawls. So how at the time did I see this; as a way for me to excuse existing gaps in wealth with just some tweaks, or as the best a theory could do and a marker for something more progressive? This was peak Reagan times. My first paper didn’t reach for a big redistribution; I didn’t have a theory for that.

I’m also impressed how much time Professor Sandel focused on it, when he was clearly a critic of some of its foundations as we would learn soon.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #3: Is Anger a Moral Emotion?

 

Emotions are a part of ethics. We can’t completely disconnect the principles we want to be guided by from the feelings we experience when someone is living up to those principles or violating them.

But does emotion help us act more ethically? I am recording this not long after the 2024 election, when anger has been a dominant tone both of President-Elect Trump’s campaign and of many people’s reaction to his victory.

Some might say that anger in particular gets in the way of the self-control we need to deliberate on decisions or choose a path of action. Too much anger of course does that.

I am connecting this topic to the parasha called Lech L’cha, the Torah reading which introduces us to Avraham, whose initial name is Avram. I’m struck by two sets of midrashim that suggest a backstory to Avraham, and fill in imaginatively what the Torah doesn’t tell us about the first seventy-five years of his life.

One midrash imagines Avram as a child. In the version in Bereshit Rabbah, his father Terach has a store where people buy figurines of the gods, and one day leaves young Avram in charge. One of the things Avram does when no one is watching to is to smash all the idols but one, and then place a bowl with a dish of flour in front of the largest one and a stick in its hand. When his father return and asks what happened, Avram says that a fight broke out among the idols over who would get the offering, and the big one smashed all of the other ones in order to take the offering. Terach brings Avram before the king, who eventually puts Avram in a fiery furnace from which he miraculously emerges.

Compare that midrash to what Rabbi Moses Maimonides teaches about young Avram. He imagines Avram as a boy who would observe the night sky and wonder about its patterns, who gradually on his own formulates the thought for himself of a single Mover of everything. He comes to believe that everyone around him is in error. But Avram pours his strength into his arguments with them, and smashes idols as a calculated teaching technique and to save people from worshipping them.

These two versions of Avram’s backstory have very different emotional tones. In Bereshit Rabbah, there is at the very least a climate of anger, in the stories told about the many gods and in the approach of the king to a dissenter. Maybe Avram’s smashing reflected that or maybe he absorbed that in his early life and had to leave in order to put it behind him.

In Maimonides’ version, the tone is contemplative. Smashing idols isn’t anger, but a controlled display for a teaching purpose. The people might respond to it viscerally, but Avram himself never loses his self-control.

So can anger be a moral emotion? I think both versions of Avram’s backstory tell us that anger can be part of a moral life. But anger is only morally significant when it is activated by a righteous cause, and even then there is a danger of the anger taking over. In the best case, anger helps us activate our energy for what is right. But the anger itself has to be modulated and converted into something else, particularly to leave room for our own deliberation and for gathering community around what is good. No good ideas and no concerted action for good can be built on anger alone.

Catching Up in College: Justice

I have more than a month of “Justice” to catch up on, after I took what I thought would be a short break for the Jewish holy days during which I’d catch up every few days. I’ll try not to do that again. It's also more than interesting that I have been thinking about this course and reading notes in the period around our recent election.

I noticed in my notes about the draft vs. conscription that there’s a note about Rousseau, who I didn’t think really came up in the course. It cites him for the idea that “in a true free state citizens do and not buy.” I think it’s talking about a radical distinction between public and private goods.

Professor Sandel used the question of military service to iterate the concept of equality. Previously, in utilitarianism, every person weights the same in social calculations. Now he went back and asked: What if equality is not in fact a self-evident given? Which brought us to libertarianism.

I didn’t remember quite how explicitly the link was made between libertarianism and the Reagan administration – the notes mention both Milton Friedman and David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director. But what I do remember is that this was the point in the course where my own understanding of what a contemporary political philosophy is changed in the most important way.

Growing up in the ‘70s and as a teen in the ‘80s, I basically thought that Democrats believed in equality, both economic and racial, and were willing to spend public money for those, and that Republicans believed in free enterprise first and put more of an emphasis on national defense. I thought that Republican-ism was basically cruel.

The turn in the course to libertarianism was the first time I understood that there is a more fundamental disagreement that centers on the nature of freedom. So in Robert Nozick’s version, you posit an equal “initial state” and ask whether people are coerced in any way in their transactions and life choices. If not, you can’t critique the end result, which just emerges from free choices and exchanges. Nozick grounds this is in a kind of equal individual liberty, Locke’s theory of property where anyone can acquire something initially through their own labor, so long as enough is available for everyone to be able to do that.

I didn’t buy that from the beginning, clearly because the first premise doesn’t represent the real world. There was no initial state of equality that our current inequality emerged from. Nozick seems to reject that, at least in his writing (though I have heard very recently somewhere that in real life he thought of course there are reasons for state action). But I certainly did take seriously the argument that an “equality override” over individual liberty could be arbitrary and needs a robust justification. Professor Sandel, who clearly did not support Nozick’s libertarianism, absolutely made us presumably liberal students sit with the premises about liberty and property for a good long time. Taxation was presumptively forced labor or slavery, my notes say about liberatarianism.

In section, Benor gave a deeper dive into Locke, and possibly some interpretation. He leaned into Locke’s reliance on reason over power as a justification for private property in both the state of nature and under civil government. Somehow, in a way I don’t understand, the initial appropriation of property, by mixing land or things with labor, is limited by the need to leave enough for everyone else. A class society is just and it’s good for everyone. But in a state of nature this order is unsafe and tenuous, so people will rationally consent to a government that secures this order. So Locke seems to posit that even poor people are better off in a class society with private property than in a more equal state of nature. Locke’s is an argument, based on reason, or more accurately based on an account that can be couched in terms of reasons. It hardly looks airtight and it’s actually quite a consequentialist argument all the way down.

Professor Sandel pointed out the dialectic so far of the course, and one thing I marvel at is how he did make all of this into a dialectic and not just a survey. Utilitarianism we milked for a lot, but it has a problem with individual rights. Libertarianism corrects for that, but its account of rights is limited to property and economic rights. So what about human rights, and is there a more robust account of equality?

That got him to articulate the concept of a “right”, which is a claim that is fundamental and overrides otherwise sensible claims.

So he brought us to Kant. There is a big conceptual step back, toward a concept of human nature – that we are both sensual and rational beings, who can act out of inclination or choice. Our capacity to choose is what makes us human and gives us dignity, and morality in general is to treat all human beings in light of our dignity. Individual rights flow from and secure dignity, not property. On this account, morality cannot be about material consequences at all, but duty, the moral law itself.

There is a paradox in Kant – the more free we are, the more we are morally bound to a universal law that will be the same for everyone. It seems like the very determinism that a pure materialist might hold to. Kant says that all other ways of acting are however based on the finitude and contradictions of desire and inclinations, so only a moral law chosen purely on rational grounds can be just.

Kant’s critique of Locke and libertarianism is that rights are not in nature at all, not in physical nature or the nature of the land. So rights cannot be derived from land or property and a person’s interaction with them.

At this point, Professor Sandel grouped libertarianism and Kantianism as two forms of “liberalism.” In both, there are rights that cannot be overridden for a utilitarian good, and a presumption that the state should be neutral with respect to the good life. I’m not sure how he got to the second premise as a Kantian one. But it was really important for me to get this definition of “liberalism”, which I think had been in the Milton Friedman reading, as different from the liberalism of being a Democrat. It was also important to see the political debate in the U.S. potentially as a philosophical debate.

Also at this point, and for the next couple of lectures, there was a gap between Kantian equality of dignity, and two other colloquially “liberal” things: economic equality, and a state neutral with regard to the common good. Safeguarding individual autonomy seems as I read like something a Lockean libertarian state could do also, if it is not going to force people into a specific conception of social or economic equality?

I think this might be an imperfection in the dialectic design of the course, in that I’m not sure that Kant himself was ever an egalitarian liberal politically. The course went toward issues of public education, like whether a state could teach creationism and whether school vouchers are better or worse than universal public school. Things got a bit muddled.

Although I have to say that the paper I think I wrote about education launched me on something professional. Educational policy questions were obviously interesting philosophical questions. But all the thinking about education and the different dimensions of content and access planted a thought I hadn't had before, that education might be a super important area for the practice of moral philosophy. And maybe I should think about being an educator, even though I didn't think of myself as much of a classroom teacher. Maybe it would be worth developing that aspect of myself, because of its ethical importance. I know I had that thought at some point in college for the first itme, and I am trying to remember if this is when. I ought to track down my paper in the class and see if there is evidence there.

As I say, the course seemed a bit muddled for a week or two; there were a lot of balls in the air. But then in this muddle Professor Sandel named a problem, though he named it philosophically. Isn’t equality itself a specific good, that a neutral state has no grounds to impose any more than creationism? Isn’t building a neutral state also dependent on a specific conception of society? As he put it, isn’t the categorical imperative of Kant just another teleology, just one with freedom and dignity as its highest good?

That took him to Aristotle (and way faster than I remembered; this is the end of October in the notes, and there are still a couple of months to go!). The idea of teleology is that any moral or political theory, according to the ancients, flows from a conception of the good society and is about how people group together to create such a good society. Rights are not categorical, but exist only to serve that end.

Professor Sandel crystallized this with the negative example of pornography. A “categorical” liberal would say that the state should not be involved in policing what people choose to look at, even though most people would objectively classify pornography as evil. A “teleological” liberal might permit pornography even if it is objectively evil and has a social cost, depending on smaller communities to teach standards and cultivate people who would squelch the demand for or interest in pornography. In both cases there is the same policy but different grounds.

I’m going to take a breather here even though I’m not quite caught up! I will say that at this point in the course, I saw and I still see that the grounds for a libertarian politics and even a conservative teleological politics seem much stronger in the sources. I’ve written before about sitting and reading Kant for the first time, and the thrill of that. Reading Aristotle for the first time was also really interesting. I remembered in the early chapters certain things in Maimonides I had read in English as a teen, in a book I had gotten for my Bar Mitzvah with excerpts from the Mishneh Torah. Both are very propositional texts, and the feel of reading them was the same even separated by a few years. I recognized in Aristotle a lot of Maimonides; obviously Maimonides was the one drawing on Aristotle. I know that the questions I had in Justice about Aristotle – about the connection between different virtues, the connection between individual virtue and politics, and whether individual virtue or the political good is fundamental – these I still have. I have to look at the notes more to see if there are suggested solutions; I don’t recall them.

Catching Up in College: Justice

I have more than a month of “Justice” to catch up on, after I took what I thought would be a short break for the Jewish holy days during which I’d catch up every few days. I’ll try not to do that again. It's also more than interesting that I have been thinking about this course and reading notes in the period around our recent election.

I noticed in my notes about the draft vs. conscription that there’s a note about Rousseau, who I didn’t think really came up in the course. It cites him for the idea that “in a true free state citizens do and not buy.” I think it’s talking about a radical distinction between public and private goods.

Professor Sandel used the question of military service to iterate the concept of equality. Previously, in utilitarianism, every person weights the same in social calculations. Now he went back and asked: What if equality is not in fact a self-evident given? Which brought us to libertarianism.

I didn’t remember quite how explicitly the link was made between libertarianism and the Reagan administration – the notes mention both Milton Friedman and David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director. But what I do remember is that this was the point in the course where my own understanding of what a contemporary political philosophy is changed in the most important way.

Growing up in the ‘70s and as a teen in the ‘80s, I basically thought that Democrats believed in equality, both economic and racial, and were willing to spend public money for those, and that Republicans believed in free enterprise first and put more of an emphasis on national defense. I thought that Republican-ism was basically cruel.

The turn in the course to libertarianism was the first time I understood that there is a more fundamental disagreement that centers on the nature of freedom. So in Robert Nozick’s version, you posit an equal “initial state” and ask whether people are coerced in any way in their transactions and life choices. If not, you can’t critique the end result, which just emerges from free choices and exchanges. Nozick grounds this is in a kind of equal individual liberty, Locke’s theory of property where anyone can acquire something initially through their own labor, so long as enough is available for everyone to be able to do that.

I didn’t buy that from the beginning, clearly because the first premise doesn’t represent the real world. There was no initial state of equality that our current inequality emerged from. Nozick seems to reject that, at least in his writing (though I have heard very recently somewhere that in real life he thought of course there are reasons for state action). But I certainly did take seriously the argument that an “equality override” over individual liberty could be arbitrary and needs a robust justification. Professor Sandel, who clearly did not support Nozick’s libertarianism, absolutely made us presumably liberal students sit with the premises about liberty and property for a good long time. Taxation was presumptively forced labor or slavery, my notes say about liberatarianism.

In section, Benor gave a deeper dive into Locke, and possibly some interpretation. He leaned into Locke’s reliance on reason over power as a justification for private property in both the state of nature and under civil government. Somehow, in a way I don’t understand, the initial appropriation of property, by mixing land or things with labor, is limited by the need to leave enough for everyone else. A class society is just and it’s good for everyone. But in a state of nature this order is unsafe and tenuous, so people will rationally consent to a government that secures this order. So Locke seems to posit that even poor people are better off in a class society with private property than in a more equal state of nature. Locke’s is an argument, based on reason, or more accurately based on an account that can be couched in terms of reasons. It hardly looks airtight and it’s actually quite a consequentialist argument all the way down.

Professor Sandel pointed out the dialectic so far of the course, and one thing I marvel at is how he did make all of this into a dialectic and not just a survey. Utilitarianism we milked for a lot, but it has a problem with individual rights. Libertarianism corrects for that, but its account of rights is limited to property and economic rights. So what about human rights, and is there a more robust account of equality?

That got him to articulate the concept of a “right”, which is a claim that is fundamental and overrides otherwise sensible claims.

So he brought us to Kant. There is a big conceptual step back, toward a concept of human nature – that we are both sensual and rational beings, who can act out of inclination or choice. Our capacity to choose is what makes us human and gives us dignity, and morality in general is to treat all human beings in light of our dignity. Individual rights flow from and secure dignity, not property. On this account, morality cannot be about material consequences at all, but duty, the moral law itself.

There is a paradox in Kant – the more free we are, the more we are morally bound to a universal law that will be the same for everyone. It seems like the very determinism that a pure materialist might hold to. Kant says that all other ways of acting are however based on the finitude and contradictions of desire and inclinations, so only a moral law chosen purely on rational grounds can be just.

Kant’s critique of Locke and libertarianism is that rights are not in nature at all, not in physical nature or the nature of the land. So rights cannot be derived from land or property and a person’s interaction with them.

At this point, Professor Sandel grouped libertarianism and Kantianism as two forms of “liberalism.” In both, there are rights that cannot be overridden for a utilitarian good, and a presumption that the state should be neutral with respect to the good life. I’m not sure how he got to the second premise as a Kantian one. But it was really important for me to get this definition of “liberalism”, which I think had been in the Milton Friedman reading, as different from the liberalism of being a Democrat. It was also important to see the political debate in the U.S. potentially as a philosophical debate.

Also at this point, and for the next couple of lectures, there was a gap between Kantian equality of dignity, and two other colloquially “liberal” things: economic equality, and a state neutral with regard to the common good. Safeguarding individual autonomy seems as I read like something a Lockean libertarian state could do also, if it is not going to force people into a specific conception of social or economic equality?

I think this might be an imperfection in the dialectic design of the course, in that I’m not sure that Kant himself was ever an egalitarian liberal politically. The course went toward issues of public education, like whether a state could teach creationism and whether school vouchers are better or worse than universal public school. Things got a bit muddled.

Although I have to say that the paper I think I wrote about education launched me on something professional. Educational policy questions were obviously interesting philosophical questions. But all the thinking about education and the different dimensions of content and access planted a thought I hadn't had before, that education might be a super important area for the practice of moral philosophy. And maybe I should think about being an educator, even though I didn't think of myself as much of a classroom teacher. Maybe it would be worth developing that aspect of myself, because of its ethical importance. I know I had that thought at some point in college for the first itme, and I am trying to remember if this is when. I ought to track down my paper in the class and see if there is evidence there.

As I say, the course seemed a bit muddled for a week or two; there were a lot of balls in the air. But then in this muddle Professor Sandel named a problem, though he named it philosophically. Isn’t equality itself a specific good, that a neutral state has no grounds to impose any more than creationism? Isn’t building a neutral state also dependent on a specific conception of society? As he put it, isn’t the categorical imperative of Kant just another teleology, just one with freedom and dignity as its highest good?

That took him to Aristotle (and way faster than I remembered; this is the end of October in the notes, and there are still a couple of months to go!). The idea of teleology is that any moral or political theory, according to the ancients, flows from a conception of the good society and is about how people group together to create such a good society. Rights are not categorical, but exist only to serve that end.

Professor Sandel crystallized this with the negative example of pornography. A “categorical” liberal would say that the state should not be involved in policing what people choose to look at, even though most people would objectively classify pornography as evil. A “teleological” liberal might permit pornography even if it is objectively evil and has a social cost, depending on smaller communities to teach standards and cultivate people who would squelch the demand for or interest in pornography. In both cases there is the same policy but different grounds.

I’m going to take a breather here even though I’m not quite caught up! I will say that at this point in the course, I saw and I still see that the grounds for a libertarian politics and even a conservative teleological politics seem much stronger in the sources. I’ve written before about sitting and reading Kant for the first time, and the thrill of that. Reading Aristotle for the first time was also really interesting. I remembered in the early chapters certain things in Maimonides I had read in English as a teen, in a book I had gotten for my Bar Mitzvah with excerpts from the Mishneh Torah. Both are very propositional texts, and the feel of reading them was the same even separated by a few years. I recognized in Aristotle a lot of Maimonides; obviously Maimonides was the one drawing on Aristotle. I know that the questions I had in Justice about Aristotle – about the connection between different virtues, the connection between individual virtue and politics, and whether individual virtue or the political good is fundamental – these I still have. I have to look at the notes more to see if there are suggested solutions; I don’t recall them.