Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Recommended Links of Mine for Purim This Year

Here in one place are links to the pieces I've done related to Purim and our contemporary world that I think are particularly worth a look or listen this year. For reading, listening, or watching.

Introducing Adar Conversations: Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy (read and video)

Getting to Mi Yode'a ("Who Knows") -- Moral Clarity in a Topsy-Turvy World (video and podcast; courtesy of Valley Beit Midrash)

Responding to Antisemitism After October 7, With Esther As a Guide (video) -- with Rabbi Dr. Karen Reiss Medwed

Purim: The Buddy Film! (read and video)

Antisemitism, Our Security and Our Souls: Wisdom From the Book of Esther (read)

Tov! Podcast About Judaism and "The Good Place": Chapter 24 -- Mask, Costume, True Self (video and podcast -- with Rabbi Ilana Schachter and Cantor Daniella Risman

All the videos as one YouTube playlist

A Year of Jewish Ethics #12: Exodus and Freedom

In my overview of ethics and Exodus, you may have noticed I didn’t talk about one central idea: freedom! Well, the Jewish conception of freedom deserves its very own presentation.

In Judaism freedom has many layers. The term for free people is b’nai chorin; a free person might be a bat chorin or a ben chorin. One of the first blessings we say in the morning expresses gratitude to God she-asani bat chorin or she-asani ben chorin, for making me a free person.

Obviously from the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, freedom means not being subject to a tyranny or tyrant, and not being forced to work without earning a fair share of the fruits of one’s labor. Flipping that around, we have a positive obligation to do what’s in our power to increase political freedom and eliminate economic exploitation. Whether that’s in how we vote or how we treat people we pay to work for us, or in more continual or large-scale civic action.

When the rabbis of the early Talmud were discussing how to tell the Exodus story at the Pesach Seder, there was a disagreement about the exact arc -- the beginning and the climax of the story. The sage Shmuel said that the story begins with “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Mitzrayim”, Avadim hayinu l'Phar'oh b'Mitzrayim -- suggesting that the story is fundamentally about political and economic oppression, and the Exodus achievement is crossing the sea into freedom. Rav said that the story begins with our idol-worshipping ancestors long before even Egypt, and that the real transformation in the story is arriving at Mt. Sinai. There, away from Pharaoh, we were given the freedom to accept the Torah and the Divine covenant. Rav’s concept of freedom includes the ability to choose a covenant to be bound by.

The debate between Rav and Shmuel foreshadows a distinction made by the modern Jewish political philosopher Isaiah Berlin between negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from unjust constraints. Positive freedom is freedom for. The choices a free person has the ability to make ought to be good choices, directed at a higher good and guided by Torah. The Exodus story is obviously about both. The demand Moshe brings to Pharaoh from the Divine is not just “Let My people go”, but “Let My people go that they may serve me" Shalach et ami v'ya'avduni.

The freedom at Mt. Sinai involves trading a surface freedom for the ability to choose wise guidelines and commitments to live by. Being able to make a covenant and bind ourselves to it is part of the Jewish concept of freedom.

Sometimes what gets in the way of our positive freedom isn’t force from the outside, but forces on our inside. In fact all the way back at the beginning of the Torah, in the Garden of Eden, the first woman exemplifies for us the nature and operation of freedom as she weights the fruit she has heard she may not eat, but which the snake says will bring her godlike powers. The Torah describes her moment of deliberation, as she sees that the fruit is good to eat, exciting to the eyes, and fascinating to contemplate. In that moment, she is free to assess the outside authority of God and the snake, her relationship to her husband – all of that coming from the outside -- and the superficial and deeper dimensions of the fruit, the present and the possible future that might flow to her if she eats – these are on the inside.

Being free means using our capacity to assess authority when authority gives us both rules and the space to follow or question. It means sorting out our perceptions and judgments, noticing what is on the surface which might appeal to our desires in the moment, and what might be deeper implications or consequences.

Being b’nai chorin, free people, means bringing more decisions into this kind of awareness. It means cultivating that in others whether as educators or parents or friends, and creating spaces for others to act with that kind of freedom. And not ourselves being arbitrary authorities or exerting emotional force or manipulative words to push someone away from their freedom.

That’s why to me there is a connection between the first of the Ten Commandments and the first rule in the law code that immediately follows. The First Commandment doesn’t sound like a commandment – “I am Adonai Your God who brought you out of the land of Mitzrayim, out of the house of slaves.” The first law is about possessing and freeing a household slave after six years. I don’t think it’s really a permission to own slaves. On the contrary, it’s a recognition that each of us at some point finds ourselves exerting coercive power over someone else, in one way or another. We have a responsibility not only to relinquish that, but to bring a person who is not free enough toward their own positive freedom.

Wrapping Up My First Semester

I am probably already getting a late start on my second semester of college review, so here I am bundling all my leftover notes about first term.

I haven't mentioned my Hebrew literature class with Professor Safran. I don't know that I have notes. We read mostly Agnon stories, and talked a lot about his interesting religious concerns and in general his mode of creating characters that were "projections of his own inner life", or I suppose of the dilemmas of modern Jewish intellectuals. Alas, almost everyone else in the course could speak Hebrew; I could understand but hardly say a word at the time. 

I haven't said much about Expos (Expository Writing). I am sure my notebook is somewhere, but all I have found so far are a couple of stories and my final paper. I was delighted to see some great phrases here and there in my stories. As a fiction writer, I was heavy on interiority, not so much on plot, a bit on relationships. At least twice there was a character named Sam or Sammy who was not the narrator, obviously a stand-in for me (middle name Samuel), or a kind of idealized version of me or who I wished people saw me as!

My final paper on Malamud was pretty good! I remember how hard it was to really come up with a thesis that was interesting and actually borne out by my examples. I wrote about main characters who were somewhat conventional but also dreamers inside themselves, who were then challenged by unconventional characters who disrupted their equilibrium or their projects in profound ways. It's interesting to see what I was thinking about "conventional" Jews the year before I became more observant myself. It was a nicely written paper, tight and crisp and confidence.

My final psych paper was a stretch, an attempt to crystallize a cognitive+social psychology perspective on moral development. I am sure we were encouraged to stretch. I didn't find the analysis terribly resonant today, it was rooted again in the limits of my own experience, though I stumbled toward a couple of things. One was a good attempt to clarify what it would mean to synthesize a cognitive and a social perspective on development. The other was a nice typology that sort of anticipated the David Riesman types I'd read about a few years later. I liked that whoever graded the paper -- not sure if it was Scott the TA or Professor Demick -- really went over the language. This one was more unruly than the Expos paper.

I haven't conveyed yet just how excited I was to study psychology for the first time. I always had wanted to, to explore more about why people do and say and relate the way they do. The course did not disappoint, and I just ate it up all the time. Professor Demick, as I think I've commented, was a terrific lecturer, engaging and completely information-packed. Even though it was specifically Intro to Development, it was such a great general intro to the field that my next course, Intro to Psych, seemed a lot like I was reviewing.

When the school year ended, our family picked me up and we went out to Rockport for some days before going home. I bought two books from Justice that had been excerpted in the sourcebook -- Walzer's Spheres of Justice and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In my memory I read them both cover to cover while in Rockport; perhaps I only started there but I did absolutely read each one. I was determined to have a more solid, less debater/argumentative hold on both liberalism and conservatism, to take the critiques super seriously. Though Walzer is and was more fun to read, Nozick had his entertaining parts, and I slogged through the parts that had more symbols in them. 

I guess I'll leave it there, and start to catch up on second semester!

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.

Avraham: Extraordinary Compassion and Justice in the Same Chapter

This is the draft of my D'var Torah for tomorrow, focusing on Genesis 18 within Parashat Vayera.

One afternoon when Avraham did not feel at all great, two things happened. First, he saw three strangers going along their way and he ran out to them to bring them home. Second, and right after, he had a major debate with the God about whether five cities should be destroyed.

I was saying a few weeks ago, when we started from the beginning of the Torah, that we often deal with the Torah one story at a time. So Sodom and Gomorrah is one thing. Welcoming the three travelers is another thing. Each one has a lesson perhaps. But the Torah also has a structure and a flow, and among others the Talmudic rabbis were always wondering about what they called hekesh or juxtaposition – why is this story right next to that one.

So why are these two stories right next to each other?

One is a story of extraordinary chesed, love or lovingkindness, in which Avraham and Sarah go to great lengths in every way to bring people into their home and take care of them. The other is a story about tzedek, about the nature of justice and its application, and it’s also extraordinary because in all other places where God and people debate about tzedek it’s between doing it and not, but here God and Avraham are debating about how it applies.

The people who divided up the Torah into chapters in the Middle Ages, both the Jews and the Christians, made these two stories a single chapter. Which happens to be Genesis chapter 18, and maybe it’s a coincidence but 18 in Hebrew is represented in letters by chai, which means life. Both stories are actually life and death stories, which I’ll talk about. Somehow this chai chapter is about the relationship between chesed and tzedek, compassion and justice, which is both an evergreen topic and also something particularly of the day.

So what’s extraordinary about the first story is hinted at in the second verse. Avraham lifted up his eyes and whoa, three men were standing over him, and he saw and he ran toward them from the opening of his tent and he bowed to the ground (18:2). If they were standing over him, what does it mean that he ran toward them, and that he bowed?

Avraham didn’t just want to do something for them. He felt that he should make the effort to go up to them, even though they were already next to him. He felt that he should not stand over them, as some kind of lord, or as a wealthy shepherd like himself might do over a scraggly wanderer – he wanted to look up to them, even though he was already sitting and they were standing.

The Torah describes what Sarah and Avraham did next in the language of maher, which means hurrying. They didn’t stop to find out anything about these people until they could offer them some refreshment of water and food and restoring their feet. Only when they were sitting would Avraham and Sarah and their people stand.

We find out quickly that these aren’t random travelers, and they have a chai message especially for Sarah and Avraham, a message that they will be welcoming a new life in the next year. But for the first verses Avraham and Sarah have no idea. They don’t have a people where they live, except the camp of followers they have put together. Their land does not lack in enemies. They live on the edge of the desert, which is a dangerous place, and who knows if these are maurauders. As we will soon see, Avraham and Sarah don’t live too far from S’dom and ‘Amorah, where the people are known to be generally vile – maybe these three people come from there.

So I don’t think it’s too much to think that Sarah and Avraham are taking some risk in running toward these travelers and bringing them into their home. At the very least, Sarah and Avraham are do good and ask questions later. As far as they are concerned, it’s the three men who are in danger, from thirst and hunger and bandits. It’s life and death for the three possibly, and at the very least they need something now. That’s the only thing that Avraham and Sarah process.

So there is no hesitation. This is extraordinary chesed.

Avraham escorts them from his home, because it’s dangerous to go out from settlement and there is desert in two directions. They and Avraham stop on the mountain ridge overlooking S’dom and ‘Amorah, and God engages him in conversation. The Torah says that God has an inner monologue: “Should I cover up from Avraham what I am doing? Avraham is surely going to become a large and powerful nation, through whom all the earth’s nations will be blessed” (18:17-18). And God continues to think that all of this is because God wants Avraham to charge and command his descendants in the ways of justice so that they can become great in these ways. So God then speaks to Avraham and says essentially: What is going on down in the valley in S’dom and ‘Amorah is so evil and I’m going to check it out to see if it’s as bad as it sounds. I’m sending my team to investigate. That’s all God says at first, and the messengers leave and now it’s just God and Avraham.

And without hesitation Avraham says: “So you will even sweep away the innocent with the guilty, or the righteous with the evil, tzaddik im rasha?” (18:23) Not, “Tell me more about what you meant by that” – Avraham cuts right to it, and then posits this situation of fifty tzaddikim, and winds it up by saying, “It would be profane for You to put to death tzaddik and rasha, and the tzaddik would be just like the rasha. Profane for you – the Judge of all the world will not do justice.”

And as you know from there, Avraham and God have this negotiation which ends with an agreement to save the cities if there are ten tzaddikim, which again might mean righteous people or just innocent people.

So what’s interesting to me is how this part of the chapter, the tzedek part, has Avraham doing different things than the chesed part. He talks here very differently about people, and his relationship to the people down in the valley is very different, even though what he is trying to do is the same which is to save their lives.

The chesed story is up close human contact. In the tzedek story, Avraham is far away from the people he’s talking about, whom he describes in terms of numbers and concepts, abstractions even.

In the first story Avraham is bowing down to people he doesn’t know and who may be a threat to him. He calls them “my lords.” He makes a presumption of good. In the second, Avraham is on a mountain ridge looking down on them. He calls them tzaddik and rasha, righteous and evil. He has no problem with the language of good and evil, toward people or toward God.

The midrashim say that the people of S’dom believed what’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine to a punctilious extreme, punishing someone who took a short cut across their property just as severely as they would punish a thief.

They had no language for cooperation, only isolation that would surge into small-scale violence and occasionally a mob. Avraham does not volunteer to go up close and get to know them better, and he’s fine looking down on them from the hills.

At our Ritual Committee meeting this week, Larry Rubin brought us an interpretation of Avraham’s pointed words to God. It’s not necessarily an accusation that God isn’t intending to treat the people in the cities justly, but a statement that it’s not enough to apply principles of legal justice. “The Judge of the entire earth wouldn’t only do justice.” Sometimes you have to figure out how to mix the law with mercy, and just calling people guilty even when that’s true is not enough to tell you what to do. Mishpat is the law, but tzedek or mishpat tzedek is the integration of the law and a higher justice.

How could Avraham be such an extraordinary man of chesed and such an extraordinary man of tzedek, not just the same person but the same day? To see all people as potentially good and essential for him, and to see people honestly as good and evil? To be generous up close and to make difficult justice decisions from 10,000 feet?

So I don’t know for sure, or at least I can say I haven’t learned how. There are some extraordinary people like that and they are in our local civic community and our Jewish community.

And I love to contemplate such people, and try to become like them, and I love to contemplate Avraham even when he is so beyond who I am. It is inspiring to be in the light of any real person who is an amazing ba’alat chesed or ba’al chesed, and to be in the presence of someone who is an amazing ba’alat tzedek or ba’al tzedek. There is a reason we were put in this community of Beit Avraham v’Sarah and connected to those two souls.

And I want to leave just three other points, which are not easy but are important.

One is that this analysis of Avraham is to remind us that chesed and tzedek are different and require different actions and words and thoughts. Avraham with the travelers is not the same as Avraham looking at S’dom. A thousand points of light are incredibly important, but they do not necessarily make one big light. Justice does not happen, injustice is not pushed back only by individual and small group acts of generosity and caring, no matter how many.

Nor can the right laws and the right policies by themselves create a compassionate society.

So second, most of us can’t be both Avrahams. But among us we can do both. So if you are more the person of chesed, make sure also to do anything you can for the people of tzedek, whether that means contributing to their causes and organizations, sharing their wisdom, or giving them moral support by taking them out for coffee if it’s a local person, or an encouraging word. And vice versa, if you are focused on tzedek work make sure to give to and support the chesed work even if that’s not what you yourself are mostly doing.

And finally I want to come back to where I started, which is that on the day Avraham did these two extraordinary things, he was not feeling great. It was right after his bris, so he didn’t feel physically like himself, and also I think he was carrying the weightiness of the brit, the covenant that God had just reaffirmed to him. Part of being so committed to a certain world, and knowing you and your descendants would be charged with making big dreams real, is feeling the weight of that responsibility. So whatever pain you are feeling right now, about the country and the world, know that it is covenantal pain. Avraham found extraordinary chesed and tzedek in himself precisely when he was not feeling like himself. So can we. So will you.

Shabbat Shalom.

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.

Back to College: Critiquing Utilitarianism

"Today" in Justice (Moral Reasoning 22), it was both a lecture and the first section! In the big lecture, the focus was on critiquing Bentham's utilitarianism, from the outside and the inside. I remember Professor Sandel's funny thing about how a research attempting to measure comparative utilities by survey found that living in Kansas was less desirable than having a tooth pulled. So obviously, practical issues with applying the principles of Bentham. Even John Stuart Mill, whose father attempted to apply Bentham to his education, ended up claiming that certain pleasures should factor higher in the utilitarian calculations.

JSM's bigger revision was to base individual rights on utility, a bold move that seems to go against the principle of aggregation. In the lecture it was also noted that Bentham was a penal reformer, on the basis (so say my notes) of the excessive pain inflicted on prisoners. My notes say something about liberty being taken into account, but I have no idea what I actually heard. I am surprised that more of a point wasn't made to compare the imputed social "gains" from incarceration to this pain factor. It doesn't seem a slam dunk that Bentham would support penal reform, but that's his major public policy contribution I think.

Professor Sandel chose utilitarianism as the starting point for the dialectic of the class, rather than starting chronologically with Aristotle. No question he wanted to feature the critiques, which go in so many directions (come from so many directions). At the same time, he wanted to give the broad consequentialist intuition its due. Over time, it's been clear to me just how tenacious utilitarianism remains as a metaphor, if not a method. I mean I still think all the time about whether I am doing enough good, in some kind of measurable way. That's the positive part. The negative of course being the treatment everywhere of people as commodities. Which I think I only started to get the language in this class.

The section, with (now Professor) Benor, had such a different feel. He talked about wanting us to learn how to read philosophical texts. It looks like he had two methodological points. One being to track certain concepts and the debates over them through different texts, being careful to identify each thinker's take on a term that might seem common among philosophers. So Bentham did not hold by the concept of "community" as something other than the aggregate of its members. (Benor asked the clarifying question: If there is no community, how is the idea of "general utility" even relevant?) Benor also instructed us to read a philosopher as though their picture of the world is true, rather than critique as we go along. Later on, I learned from my co-teacher Leslie Bazer to call this "the believing game", from Peter Elbow. I forgot that I had heard it long before.

This move is incredibly hard. It's gotten easier for me, I think because I have the time to do it when I am preparing to teach, and because I know there will be a time for the believing game and a time for critical reading. My students, even adults, have much more trouble doing this. It's really hard to hold a picture of someone else's thought when they seem wrong. And even more so when you feel strongly about a problem and the new idea you're being asked to consider seems not helpful or relevant even, and you want to talk to the merits of the issue. Just today in Torah class, we were talking about the idea of malchut, and my whole point was what are various approaches to making anything out of a problematic metaphor for the Divine. But a lot of the conversation was: Here's my solution, or here's why I don't even consider that metaphor worth considering.

Back to substance -- I don't know if I had thought much about what a "community" is before this discussion. I still wrestle with the concept, and even last week and this week have been back and forth with some people about it. Eager to see what I learned and thought later in the course. Bentham's position that you can't say the community is prior to the individual -- I don't like it at all as a normative proposition. I would like to believe it's not even descriptively correct. Do I have a refutation, at this point in my life? Not a universal one. I am working long-term on this idea of a podcast series called "I in We", which is about how the individual emerges as a distinct, sacred (if you will) entity out of prior groups and possibly communities.

Back to College #2: Utilitarianism; Gender and Psychological Theory

Looking at my notes from "Justice" and Psychology today -- it's neat for me to see where the terms consequentialism and utlitarianism first entered my mental landscape. Professor Sandel did a nice job (and I did a good job in my notes) capturing both the simplicity of Bentham's theory and the nuance of Mill's revisions of it, to bring it into conversation with some accepted moral principles ("do unto others"), the emerging liberal framework of rights, and the Aristotelian concept that some goods are more good than others. Interesting that I caught that without knowing much about Aristotle (until later in the course, but probably until much, much later in studies and probably long after my formal studies). In some ways it's a wonder utilitarianism sticks at all, in light of the discussion we had the way my notes reflect it and Professor Sandel's later critique of liberalism generally.

The psych lecture continued the overview of methods and types of theories, and my reading notes were about gender bias in contemporary psychological research. Professor Demick started very early to point out how gender affects conceptions of development, and the particular study we read about to take notes on (Broverman?) was about how when people were asked to rate traits as male or female, and as I guess mature or well-adjusted or not, or something like that, the male-associated traits were more likely to be rated as better-adjusted. This held true largely across ages, or between researchers and students, so it becomes a bias passed down within the field unless pushed back on, as well as a reflection of society generally. I don't remembering this seeming like some kind of radical thing to say back in 1985; Professor Demick presented it critically but rationally as a tool necessary for interpreting observations and studies. I also at some point noticed, maybe when this came up next or maybe right away, that despite my male-ness I myself seemed to track more of the "female" qualities than the average male in the study. I know some friends and I, or maybe just my friend Tova who was also in this class, talked about that in the dorm!