Moral obligations (that is, the facts that we ought to act in certain ways) should be self-evident. But we need the holy Torah because though the principles of Torah should be self evident, most people allow considerations (of what social group they want to fit in with) to cloud their judgment about what is moral.

My basic contention is that the Torah is objective. As I am using the word "objective" to mean "not subjective" -i.e. not dependent on anyone's opinions or viewpoint. Further I want to contend that the Torah consists of principles, not laws.

And that the difference [between principles versus laws] is easily seen in today's society where you have collages giving out rule books about sexual conduct (to protect themselves from lawsuits) and theaters have to tell people not to talk during the show. This is because people have forgotten the basic principle--don't be inconsiderate.


Yosi Faur contends that the Rambam (Maimonides) discovered this objective aspect of Torah, and all his opponents were off the true path.

(My feeling is that the Rambam together with the other "Rishonim" (people from the Middle Ages that wrote either commentary on the Talmud or Halacha books) form a seamless whole.)

At first the Rambam seems to stand on his own, but then little bugs in the system start to creep in. It looks to me that Yosei Faur was trying to make out like that the Rambam/Maimonides found the absolute truth of the universe, and he writes very convincingly in this direction.

At first I was convinced by Yose Faur. But that is me. I find myself always between great charismatic leaders that are very convincing. It takes me a long time to step back and to try to consider things from a rational point of view.

After some time I looked at the original essay of Yosi Faur and I discovered what you can see in a lot of religious writing--they sound very convincing about subjects you know nothing about, but then when it gets to a subject you know something about their supposed genius falls apart. (But I admit this does not happen with the Rambam or Tosphot, or the Torah itself. For me the deeper I go into these things, the better they become.)

  But my claim is that no one person discovered the real Torah. And that true Torah observance is not person based, and not even text based, but rather God based.

  Also my final contention is that one should be like a hound dog with his nose to the ground. That is after one has read and learned Torah and the Talmud, then one should look at the individual questions that come before him. I.e. the big picture is not just too big, but distracting. People that learn Halacha (Law) or Kabalah forget how to be simple decent human beings.

 Moral obligations (that is, the facts that we ought to act in certain ways) should be  self-evident. But we need the holy Torah because though the principles of Torah should be self evident, most people allow considerations (of what social group they want to fit in with) to cloud their judgment about what is moral.

The problem with the American democracy is in its very essence. It is based on the empirical British school of thought begun by John Locke. And empiricism is wrong.

The problem with the American democracy is in its very essence. It is based on the empirical British school of thought begun by John Locke. And empiricism is wrong. Here, I will give a counter-examples to empiricism.

Nothing can be both entirely red and entirely green.

A naive empiricist might appeal to my experiences with colored objects: I have seen many colored objects, and none of them have ever been both red and green. One thing that makes this implausible as an explanation of how I know that nothing can be both red and green is the necessity of the judgment. Contrast the following two statements:

Nothing is both green and red.
Nothing is both green and a million miles long.
These are justified in completely different ways.

And there is a connection between the idea that all knowledge from from the senses and John Locke idea of a democracy. People are not blank slates. Not when they start and at no time. They have genes. And genes are not blank slates. And stuff is written on them. Sometimes really bad stuff.  Sometimes really great stuff. (All men are created equal comes from the idea of the tabula raca, empty slate. But the slate is not empty.)

My learning partner noticed this also. He thinks the direction the USA is going in is is almost the default position.You might say it gives license for people to follow their desires with no restraint. So why not take it all the way? What stopped this for so long was obviously the fact that people were believing in Torah. [Christians and Jews]. But take away that numinous core you have nothing to hold society together.



Charles Darwin and John Locke continue to exercise extraordinary influence from the grave. The former birthed a revolution in biology which has persisted to the present day, the latter fomented a revolution in political philosophy which reasserts itself in every contemporary iteration of “individual rights.” Darwin’s theory is widely taken to be the unifying theory in modern biology; apparently nothing in biology makes sense except in light of his view.

And Locke’s classical liberalism, developed in diverse ways, has had a profound influence on the Founding Fathers of the United States. Collectively, Darwin and Locke tell human beings where they have come from, what they are, and how they ought to live with each other. The combined legacies of these men could hardly be more powerful.

Yet  Darwinism and classical liberalism hold incompatible visions of morality, human nature, and individual autonomy.That means that basic biological science has as view of human nature that is in direct contradiction to the view of human nature as understand by John Locke.

Thus the American democracy can only work together with Torah. It can't hold together without Torah.

Dear Professor Michael Huemer,

Dear Professor Michael Huemer,
I have been reading you writings for a few years and i want to thank you for making public your ideas. I find your writing to be very impressive. My question for you is what do you think about the Kant-Fries school of Professor Kelley Ross. I know you have a some major critique on Kant's "thing in itself," but it seems to me that your thought on this issue runs parallel to the Kant-Fries school.

Your critique of Kant is something that the scholars from that school also deal with.

In fact, the one major difference that you seem to have with that school is that they believe in immediate nonintuitive knowledge, while you don't believe in any such knowledge. It seems to me that you believe that reason itself has the ability to perceive universals--but no universals are inherently known.

I also wonder what he thinks of Princeton school of philosophy. They seem to be doing some good work--but i did not include it in my letter.


The answer: "Thanks for your message. I have not studied the Kant-Fries school and thus have nothing useful to say about it.

I am not sure what you mean by "inherently known". Perhaps you are referring to innate ideas. In that case, I don't know whether there are innate ideas. That seems to be more a matter for cognitive psychologists than for philosophers to investigate.

I am also unsure what you have in mind by "immediate non-intuitive knowledge".

Sorry not to be of more help.

--
Prof. Michael Huemer"



Afterword: The school of thought of Michael Huemer begins with Prichard, and is called the "Intuitionists." 

I want to claim that forming beliefs based on non rational methods is in itself against the Torah.

I want to discuss the thesis that reason can know moral values, and moral values are objective. On the other hand by non rational considerations people can form non moral beliefs and think that their beliefs are moral. (A good example of this is Islam. In Islam people believe that it is a mitzvah to murder Jews or Christians as we see in this news: "Gunmen linked to Al Qaeda shot dead an American teacher in Yemen on Sunday, accusing him of Christian proselytizing." This shows that people can believe in things that are against reason.) This gives a great beginning to understand how God could create a covenant relationship with Israel.
This would not work very well to the Rambam (Maimonides) but I think this fits with Saadia Geon pretty well. And you can actually see this in the Gemara itself where mitzvot are assumed to have rational reasons that support them.

The problem is that the beliefs that people hold are determined by their self-interest, the synagogue they want to fit into, the self-image they want to maintain, and the desire to remain coherent with their past beliefs. People can deploy mechanisms to enable them to adopt and maintain their preferred beliefs, including giving a biased weighting of evidence; focusing their attention and energy on the arguments supporting their favored beliefs; collecting evidence only from sources they already agree with; and relying on subjective, speculative, and anecdotal claims as evidence for religious theories.

I want to claim that forming beliefs based on non rational methods is in itself against the Torah. This is at least implicit in the Rambam and the Сhovot Levavot (Duties of the Heart).
The Rambam considers the halacha process of the Talmud to be using reason to analyze and legal material that was received by tradition. The idea of the Geonim that the Talmud itself is received tradition he said was a very bad view--מְתֹעָב "disgusting" he called it.



Suppose I offer the opinion, "Colors are objective." What then is it that I am saying about colors? What I am saying is that colors are 'in the object.' In what object? In colored objects. What does "in" mean here? It means that a color - redness, say - is a property of the objects that are said to be red. That is, that the nature of those objects themselves and not anything else determines whether they are red or not. Hence, to say that morality is objective is to say that whether an action is right depends on the nature of that action; whether a person is good depends on the nature of that person; etc.

If one knows moral relativism to be true, then one cannot rationally believe any moral judgement. One cannot do so because in order to rationally believe something, the proposition must first be justified, and as a moral relativist you know that no moral proposition is true before you believe it, so you would not have any justification for accepting it.


So if moral values are objective, it is hard for me to imagine that the Torah would say to do otherwise. Rather we say we should keep Torah because it is good--it can't be measured against a standard of objective good. If it would be good by definition then saying "It is good" would be question begging. And this is how it is possible to analyze the Torah by reason as the Talmud does. Torah reveals what is good objectively, and the Talmud analyzes it. This leads to the type of understanding the Rambam had of Torah --a strong correlation between Torah and reason.
The sad thing about the lack of gentile understanding of the Talmud, is that it creates a situation in which they can't understand  the Bible either because they don't know how to learn it with rigorous logic.

 It seems to me that natural law [as some understand it] is not the same thing as the morality that we can perceive by reason. Natural law seems to imply that one who nature is to murder ought to murder since it is part of his nature. But the morality that can be perceived by reason says no.

Now you might complain to me that religious people are often not moral. That is because morality and spirituality are two separate areas of value. Each is perceivable of reason but they are two separate areas. 

Race correlates to a high degree with failure to pay rent.

But as far as I can tell, people think that discrimination is rampant in the housing market. It probably is, but not the way that is usually assumed. Namely, it is likely that race correlates to a high degree with failure to pay rent, among other things. Most landlords that I know of would rent to anyone who would pay the rent on time, and not damage the property. But if they know that there is a correlation between race and lower landlord earnings, they will indeed "discriminate." And THIS kind of discrimination does not get competed away. But is it at all plausible to you that landlords would discriminate in the malicious sense to any important degree if this correlation were illusory? Moreover, do you think it at all plausible that landlords would SYSTEMATICALLY overrate the magnitude of the correlation?

The truths of Being and Value, Bloom's "humanizing questions."

Why learning Torah and Talmud is important? The truths of Being and Value, Bloom's "humanizing questions.

Though I think orthodox Judaism is highly problematic I do agree with a basic premise of the system. That Torah and Talmud are important. Divine Law is important. Torah is important because it is Divinely inspired. Talmud is important because it is a rigorous logical understanding of Torah. Rambam is important because you need a logical basis for faith. Without that basis you end up with hasidut which rejects the philosophy of the Rambam. Systems without a logical and moral basis often end up badly. My impression of Hasidut is that the first mitzvah is fraud. The first thought when a chasid wakes up in the morning is how can he fool some gullible reform Jew into giving him a lot of money.

But a new magnet for intellectuals is emerging: radical Islam. It's not that intellectuals are likely to embrace radical Islam themselves anytime soon - for one thing, the requirement of believing in God would deter many of them. But what they can do is obstruct efforts to combat radical Islam and terrorism, undermine support for Israel, stress the "legitimate grievances" of radical Islamists, and lend moral support to the "legitimacy" of radical Islamic movements.


Most people have a tendency to forgive excesses committed in the name of some cause they support. They either regard them as unfortunate misdeeds by aberrant individuals, or as necessary evils in the name of some higher good. That is, of course, if they admit them at all. Very few things were more bizarre than the spectacle of free-love advocates in the Sixties extolling the virtues of Marxism
Denying the mass murders of Marxist regimes is on exactly the same intellectual level as denying the Holocaust,
To quote Allen bloom, "Positivism and ordinary language analysis have long dominated, although they are on the decline and evidently being replaced by nothing. These are simply methods of a sort, and they repel students who come with the humanizing questions. Professors of these schools simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students. [p.378, boldface added]
Neither a living presence nor the mere inertial continuation of classics speaks well for the state of academic philosophy. What was the worst about all this stuff was the aim of much of it to justify why the philosophers involved were no longer seriously interested in metaphysics or ethics -- the truths of Being and Value, Bloom's "humanizing questions." If metaphysics and ethics are either meaningless or just not matters of knowledge, then philosophy doesn't have to worry about them.

In his late period [I might say, even in his late period, ed.], Wittgenstein, like Carnap, continued to pursue his former positivist aim of showing that metaphysical sentences are nonsense.

I knew the head of the Lev Tahor movement (the Taliban women) in Safed.

I knew the head of the Lev Tahor movement (the Taliban women) in Safed. (His name then was Erez Shelomo Halberns). He is magnetic and charismatic is a very high degree. He was a disciple of Rav Shelmo Shick. Rav Shick stayed in the home of Erez every time he came to Safed and showed him great warmth. Erez at the time was trying to create a synagogue  on the name of  Nachman of Uman in Safed--but this did not succeed. Later Abraham Traceman tried to start a building project, "Breslov City" in Safed and even spent a few thousand dollars to have an architect draw up the building plans.[he also had a phone bill for about a thousand dollars trying to coordinate this project with Rav shick who was in New York at the time.] This also did not succeed. The major problem was the Breslov community did not want competition and did a lot of very dirty tricks to stop the establishing of alternative Breslov community in Safed. One example is that when Erez managed to get permission to start a Breslov synagogue he and put a Breslov sign on it. People from the Breslov community pulled down the sign and beat him up to an inch of his life and he spent a few days in the local hospital (Ziv). There were many more events like this. The major issue here was money. The Breslov in Safed were making millions of dollars in regular trips to the USA by representing themselves as the true Breslov community in Israel. They did not want any competition.
Erez eventually left Rav Shick and that is where the history in the article starts.
But it is important to note that everything that was written in the newspaper Haaretz about the period that I know something about was all wrong. It makes me wonder if this is their standard of accuracy?

Breslov in Safed tended to very non kosher tactics. They wagged a kind of silent war against anyone connected with Rav Shick. This included me. They had clever ways of waging war against me. After all they thought I could not know who was harassing my family and me. And they knew that there was nothing I could do to protect my family from, their types of harassment.

Eventually most of the leading Breslov people in Israel have woken up to the threat of the Breslov in Safed. They have publicly signed a public statement against them.
Though I have certain difference of opinion with Rav Shick I still highly respect him. Learning Torah and keeping the plain Shulchan Aruch is the fundamental aspect of his teaching and at the core of what he actually does.--not just says. And frankly I have a hard time disagreeing with this. My basic complaint against Rav Shick and the general frum [Orthodox] approach is not that this approach is wrong,- but that it could be and should be better and more human and less totalitarian. But it would be better for me to have wings also. That does not mean I should complain about airplanes.



Erez (Halberns), incidentally, tried opening a Breslov Synagogue all over Safed. Every few weeks he would take me along to some person who had offered to him a building to start a synagogue. Once we were at the major of Safed. Other times we were at some home owner [in Canaan, North Safed] that happened to have a synagogue on his property. Somehow Breslov in Safed had spies that were keeping track of Erez. So what would happen would be we would be offered help and the deal be sealed with a handshake [which has the status of a contract in Halacha]. Then the Breslov people would come and tell slander to the person. Then the next time Erez would go there he would be thrown out. (I was usually not present at the occasions on which he was thrown out. I was invited usually just for the initial meetings)
Incidentally, Rav Shick absolutely loved Erez. He definitely was setting him up as his prime disciple in Israel after Nissan David Kivak. I was definitely at the bottom of the barrel. Rav Shick (you could say) did not like me. I could never figure out why. [I think I probably rubbed him the wrong way because of my free thinking. This free thinking has annoyed everyone  in the religious world, and in fact broke my once chance at real shiduch.  The religious like followers, not thinkers.]


At any rate, back to Rav Shick. As a final note I must say that when I was at a speech from Rav Shick and he would talk about Faith--I would feel the whole world light up. He definitely had this power to convey this to people. I assume it was from the Intermediate Zone which is from the Side of Holiness but is still mixed with some Sitra Achra. Hey, but that is just my opinion.

Concerning the Divine Presence. My basic feeling about it is that when one fulfills the basic path of Torah, then  there is some type of aspect of the Divine Presence that seems to descend on people. But the drawbacks to this are first --that it is like I said often mixed with the "Intermediate zone" depending on the spiritual vessels of the person.  Holiness does not in any way imply right opinions or intelligence of even good character. And also even when it is pure Divine spirit, well she is simply hard to take. Most people if they would have a glimpse of the Divine presence for even a second would never ask for it again. It sears and fries the soul.