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19.4.22

Many Western Values [Principles of morality] are different from principles of morality of Torah. So what is the relationship?  What makes this question difficult is Western Values change constantly. People think their values are those of Reason but if they change every ten years, then they are not.

Now "Torah values"  are manipulated constantly also. So unless you can come to some bedrock layer, of certainty, that also does not provide a solid basis.  


In the two great Litvak yeshivot which I attended, it was thought that the one important principle is to "learn Torah"  [meaning the Old Testament and the Gemara] because Torah itself will correct false opinions. 


However to me Musar [the mediaeval books of Morality] seems to be the best approach--a synthesis of Faith a Reason that was worked out in painstaking detail during the Middle Ages. 

I was at the sea again and it occurred to me to mention that you see this approach of deriving morality by faith and by reason in the Obligations of the Hearts, Saadia Gaon, Rambam. The first to do this was Philo but you can see that his efforts were somewhat naive. The later Mediaeval approach makes a lot more sense. Now I should add that later people like Kant, Hegel, Jacob Fries, Leonard Nelson Michael Huemer    do not look towards faith to discover morality at all but only towards reason.

But I can not see reason as being such a great guide alone. Try that and you can end up with sophisticated systems like Marxism.

[Just one well known example is slavery. But while I tend to see the point of the North to some degree I think the woke movement shows that the South was right.]