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Well, Can There Be Jewish Ethics Or Not?

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Well, Can There Be Jewish Ethics Or Not? Thejoumalof jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol. S,pp. 237-241 © 1996 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only Well, Can There Be Jewish Ethics or Not? Menachem Kellner Univeriry oj Haifa I was asked to respond to a group of articles on the subject, "Can There Be a Jewish Ethics?" and gladly undertook to do so. I was sent five won- derful articles, not one of which actually addressed the proposed topic head on. Lenn Goodman rejects the question as "uncivil" and explains elegantly why that is so. Norbert Samuelson dismisses the question as "uninteresting" and goes on to other issues which interest him more. The question is unin- teresting, he maintains, because the answer is "of course, why not." "Of course," because there is obviously a vast amount of Jewish ethical thought and writing. To the "why not?" reply Samuelson proposes two "uninterest- ing" philosophic answers: Jewish ethics is not universal and thus not ethics or Jewish ethics is universal and thus not Jewish. In order to understand Samuelson's point, a number of distinctions must be drawn. Three senses of the term "ethics" must be distinguished: desciptive eth- ics, normative ethics, and meta-ethics. The first describes what has in fact been taught about ethics. It is trivially true that there can be Jewish ethics in the descriptive sense, as pointed out by Kenneth Seeskin, Samuelson, and David Novak in their essays. There is a huge body of literature both ex- pressing and analyzing historically Jewish approaches to ethical questions. Normative ethics, on the other hand, seeks not to describe but to pre- scribe, not to tell us what others have said about moral issues, but to tell us what to do when confronted with these issues. As I will explain below, the question which prompted this symposium was probably meant to be, "Can there be a normativeJewish ethics?" Meta-ethics is an attempt to apply the tools of philosophical analysis to ethical discourse. It seeks to understand the bases of normative ethics, re- lates ethical systems to various theories (such as naturalism, emotivism, rela- tivism, etc.), defmes the terms of ethical discourse, and analyzes the logical structure of ethical arguments. In sum, descriptive ethics describes what people have taught about ethics, normative ethics prescribes ethical behavior, and meta-ethics philosophically analyzes those prescriptions. 238 Menachem Keflner Ever since Kant it has been taken as a given that in order to count as an ethical principle a prescriptive statement must be universalizable: like cases must be treated alike. Where no morally relevant disinctions exist, every case of a certain sort, and every person in a certain situation, must receive the same treatment. It is Kant's demand for universalizability which gives rise the question underlying this symposium. If Jewish ethics is universalizable, in what sense is it Jewish? And if it is not universalizable, then it is not ethics. Samuelson rejects Kant's call for universalizability of ethics. Kenneth Seeskin, on the other hand, skillfully avoids the Enlightenment challenge altogether, phrasing the symposium question as asking whether or not "any theory . can account for the richness and diversity of a culture that has existed for over 3,000 years." Seeskin rightly points out. that this expectation is unrealistic. "On the other hand," he says, "if the question asks whether Jewish thinkers have used the ethical systems of Plato, Aristotle, Al-Farabi, Kant, or Hegel to explain important features of Jewish life, the answer is obviously yes." Dismissing the question as did Samuelson, Seeskin engages in a facinating analysis of "holiness as an ethical ideal." Another point dividing Samuelson and Seeskin ought to be noted here. Samuelson defines "ethics" as dealing with "the reasons for imperatives, and not the imperatives themselves," i.e., what I have called "meta-ethics" and not surprisingly (since Jews reason like other human beings) rejects the pos- sibility of Jewish ethics in those terms. Seeskin, on the other hand, under- stands Judaism in terms of Jewish life, not as a theological system, and thus not suprisingly finds no one system of prescriptive ethics which can prop- erly be called "Jewish" since there are and have been so many competing claimants to that title. Seeskin thus proposes his alternative question, "does the Jewish world view make ethical sense?" and here may be interpreted as proposing a Jewish meta-ethics: "holiness" (as expressed in the imitation of God in the realm of interpersonal relations) is a reason for ethical behavior which is distinctively, if not uniquely, Jewish. Novak, in effect like Seeskin, centers his discussion on the "reasons for the commandments" and may also be interpreted as seeking a Jewish meta-ethics, a project rejected by Samuelson. Kant's position is basically medieval, even though medieval thinkers would not have been happy, I think, with the way in which he framed his ques- tion. Medieval philosophers were not, by and large, particularly interested in ethics per se, but in the search for truth, especially metaphysical truth. In this, Aristotle seems to have triumphed over Plato. They were convinced that there was only one truth. If we rephrased our question in terms con- genial to them, "Can there be a Jewish (metaphysical) truth?" I think that the answer would be quickly forthcoming: No. Truth, like a rose, is truth. The question, "Can there be a Jewish ethics?" would, I think, be answered with another question: "Can there be any other kind?" Agreeing with David Novak that Jewish ethics is called halakhah, Maimonides, for example, would.
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