Orthodox Jewish utilitarianism at first seem to propound act-utilitarianism,

utilitarianism-criticisms-and-responses

One thing bother me about  utilitarianism is the a priori claim  that this can be known without evidence that this is a true good.   Many people in our day, because of lack of proper education, hold this theory to be "modern" and "self evident", which it is not.
The best critique I saw on it was from Michael Huemer but he only mentioned a few of his idea in passing without expanding on them.
I think many Jews and Christians just don't understand how different the morality of the Torah is from  utilitarianism.

I should admit that when I read John Stuart Mill I was impressed. II am really not much of an analytic thinker. Only after a long time of thinking about something do the problems start to become apparent to me. and I alway like to give everyone the the benefit of a doubt.

Nowadays there is also a kind of Orthodox Jewish  utilitarianism. This is that people judge  other people based on whether they are a potential benefit for the super-organism of Orthodox Judaism.

  Orthodox Jewish  utilitarianism at first seem to propound act-utilitarianism (act in a  way that brings the greatest benefit to the super-organism of Orthodox Judaism), but then when it comes to explaining why we should follow the principles of halacha, they resort to the claim that these laws, if adopted as general rules, promote the greatest spiritual good. The problem is simply the argument is self contradictory.
For the thinking person the claims of Orthodox Judaism simply seem incoherent and has little to do with the actual moral principles of the Torah.

Philo Gabriel: The verdict of most philosophers is that utilitarianism is not able to completely overcome all objections, that while the total happiness contained in the consequences of acts surely is of moral importance, it probably fails to contain everything that is of moral importance. Hence most present day moral philosophers argue for a mixed theory that contains both consequentialist and non-consequentialist elements. But the debate continues.[http://www.helium.com/items/1744710-utilitarianism-criticisms-and-responses?page=6]

The Will does not necessarily have human good in mind. And it seems to me that the book of Job supports this conclusion. The friends of Job said G-d is Just. God said to Job that they were wrong.And the whole book supports this. the narrator who has the privileged position says openly that Job was suffering because of a bet that the Satan made with God, not because of sin. and he makes an effort right straight at the beginning to declare that Job was without sin. later his friends said he was suffering because of sin and that God always acts justly. God said at the end of the book that they were wrong.
Now I do this that it is true that God does help people in ways that seems to come from a world that is higher than this world. But this is in the realm that is not possible to understand by human understanding.

I in general do like like the excuses made to turn Torah into a frum document. but i can't resist mentioning this one thing about Ezechiel  (Apologetics Press) .


"Tyre in Prophecy. The city of Tyre had a rather interesting and beneficial geographical arrangement. About half a mile off the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea stood a small rocky island on which the original city of Tyre was most likely founded. Some time after the founding of this island city, the mainland city of Tyre was founded, which was called Old Tyre by the Greeks (Fleming, p. 4)"
  Apologetics Press[http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=13&article=1790]
I mention this here because I know most people do not like my blog because it is neither secular or religious It seems I sometimes argue from a secular standpoint and sometimes I seem deeply religious.. The reason for all this is that my viewpoint is Neoplatonic. and that in a certain respect I think that Neo-Platonism made a few false moves away from Plato,--especially by assigning too much power to Reason. I think that the way synthetic a priori knowledge is acquired is not by reason by by a third type of perception which Plato calls memory of the eternal world before we were born. Now this might not be actual  memory but it is close to the idea of internal perception that Kant developed. This is a move away from the secular world. It is deeply religious. But this religious viewpoint does not make it a mitzvah to deny facts like the  the  Ultra Orthodox world does.
  And this religious point of view believes  that the person that wrote the Torah and all the prophets had a highly developed sense of this non intuitive immediate perception.




Just to mention some examples that show the Torah is not frum: (1) King Shelomo had a woman's choir.
(2) Sukkot was not celebrated during the First Temple period, and people in the Babylonian Exile had not even heard of it.(3) Tamar said to Amnon that with the permission of king David she could be his wife.
(4) The idea of Hillel II making the Jewish calendar is a falsehood. It is no where mentioned in the Talmud. Other decrees of Hillel II were mentioned. You would expect a fundamental decree that the entire future of klal Israel depended upon would merit at least a mention! The Jewish calendar is in fact the ancient Greek calendar of Meton. According to the Torah the day of the Rosh Chodesh is the day of the new moon. Not before or after.


[I should admit by Neo Platonic point of view was developed a long time ago way before i started any Talmudic studies, when other kids were playing basketball or baseball, I was studying Plato and Spinoza]
This was not because I was studious. The thing was my home was very far away from school so I had no place to hand out except at the public library until my Dad picked me up at 6 PM. So I was too far away from other kids homes,es to be able to play sports and by the time I got home I was exhausted.

two types of tyranny

We should distinguish between two types of tyranny: (i) the tyranny of those who abuse authority they legitimately acquired and hold; and (ii) the tyranny of those who obtained and hold power by usurpation.Usurping tyrants  (level two)—as, in effect, parties making war against the political community—may legitimately be resisted and even killed by anyone who has the effective power to do so.  By contrast, where legitimate rule has degenerated into tyranny, the tyrant  is entitled to something like what we might call “due process of law.” It is up to other public officials, operating as such, and not (ordinarily) to private citizens, to overthrow their regimes and, if necessary, bring them personally to trial and punishment.

In the present day this seems to apply to the government of the USA as a whole. You can't really point to any one person who has created the monstrosity the vast government of the USA. But it is clearly against the Constitution which calls for limited government

The conflict is between Divine simplicity and the reality of the ideas.

  I want to make clear the problem that the Pre-Scholastic Christian thinkers struggled with and how this caused a radical shift towards Aristotle in the 1200's. And I want to deal with how the later Jewish thinkers dealt with the same problem.
  The problem is simple. In Plato and Neo-Platonic the ideas are the really real. This world is a reflection of the higher spiritual worlds. So all the multiplicity in this world is really in the Mind [Logos] of God.-- and that creates multiplicity in God.
  Understandably this is not acceptable in any approach based on the Torah. The conflict is between Divine simplicity and the reality of the ideas.
  The general move of Maimonides and later Jewish thinkers was towards Aristotle that universals and the ideas are real, but depend on particulars. In the Christian world this same problem led to the ideas being considered less and less until we get straightforwards Nomalism [that the ideas don't exist].
Shalom Sharabi (הרש'ש) (in his book Nahar Shalom) developed an approach that is dynamic. His claim is that spiritual reality is itself in a process of change from universals being independent to their being dependent. (This is a problem in itself because the ideas were originally conceived as answering the problem of Parmenides "What is must be and was is not can't be;" so the Ari making change in the world of ideas in itself is already a radical departure from the original concept. so you have to posit higher levels of spiritual world in which there is no change --like the Remak הרמ''ק)
  I should probably mention Isaac Luria. It always seemed to me that his major point was simply to put God beyond all processes of creation. In his thought even though Emanation (אצילות) and Adam Kadmon (אדם קדמון א''ק) are Divine, there still come after a long process of contractions and lessening on the Divine light.

 To the Ari and the Zohar all lower worlds after emanation are not Divine. And also the Zimzum  [contraction] is specifically in God himself the Arizal states many times at the beginning of the Eitz Chaim.
The sad thing is that people that supposedly teach Kabalah are never doing that. They are always teaching some corrupted version of pseudo  Kabalah

A Jewish approach to politics

This would not include the Democratic Party in the USA which is positively hostile to America and which has imported  Sharia law to the American  mainland and supported a takeover of the Middle East by Muslim fanatics. Today the Democratic Party is the Muslim party.  Anyone who hates America has a home in the Democratic party.
The problem is that in a democracy, people have realized they can vote for themselves other people's money. This is what Americans are doing when they vote Democrat.. The fact that they are destroying America, one brick at a time, does not bother anyone because there is no longer any national spirit.
It was suggested to me that  America is on its way down because of the Muslim president,




But a Libertarian also would not be an option because of the the conception of natural law of Maimonides and Saadia Geon is not compatible with the thesis of self-ownership -- which is the very heart  libertarian-ism


The Torah is a natural law approach to ethics.

Also self ownership makes no sense.  We cannot plausibly be said to own ourselves in a substantive way. We don't own ourselves in the same way as a piece of property.

This really leaves only the Republican party which is compatible with the world view of the Torah.


An argument against self ownership by [Edward Feser.] : Suppose, for example, that you and I are castaways and wash up on some tiny island upon which no human beings have ever trod. You immediately pass out on the beach, while I get to work constructing a bamboo fence whose perimeter happens entirely to enclose your body. Upon waking, you accuse me of imprisoning you and thereby violating your self-ownership rights, and demand to be released. Suppose I then respond as follows: “I have not imprisoned you at all! I’ve simply homesteaded all the land around you -- which you had no right to, since it was virgin territory -- and I’ve built a fence around it, to make sure you don’t come onto my land and take any of the resources I’ve justly acquired. True, you’ve got nothing in the way of resources in the seven-foot by four-foot plot of sand I’ve left you, but that’s not my fault. That’s just your bad luck, sorry. I suppose it would be nice of me to give you some of mine, but at most I’d be unkind rather than unjust if I decide not to do so. And I was very careful not to touch you as I built my fence. I do respect your right of self-ownership, after all!”