Nobody ever experienced “Free Will” but “Choice” – Transcript

Ethics and Human Perfection: An Introduction to Choice and the Human Good

I. Introduction: The Topic of Choice

Instructor: I want to do something like this, which is to have a discussion about choice, which some people call free choice or free will. That is what I want to do. Why do I want to do this? Because we are studying this subject of how to become a better good human being, known as ethics. For some reason—you know the reason, I don’t know either—so the class is not gonna be about that, the etymology of the word ethics, or why becoming a better person is under the same label as ethics. Well, that’s the other way around, right?

Aristotle has a particular [teaching] about the etymology of ethics. I thought you would know it.

Student: Oh no.

Instructor: Okay, okay, so I guess not.

II. Defining Ethics: The Human Good

Instructor: In any case, this is what we’re studying. Now, one of the important points to understand the kind, the style of ethics that we’re trying to do, right, is that there’s a specific focus on this word “human,” right? It’s very important. We could list 13 different ways in which this makes a difference for what ethics is.

But the description of ethics that we’re working from is—and not only, we’re working from the description of ethics that the entire tradition of ethics until last week is working from, including every [scholar] that they’ve ever heard of, even though notwithstanding the great debates between them—has its definition as what is good for, or the good of a human being. Or we could say a human kind of good. Human kind of good.

The General Theory of Good

This works within a very general theory of what good means. Good is the perfection of a thing. For anything, to talk about what is good is to talk about how it is good or what is good for it, although that formulation is a little tricky because it might mean what you think is good, but what is really good for it. That’s why I say the good of it instead of what is good for it, but anyways you understand the difference.

But anyways, if good is always good of something, perfect—which we could call perfection of something—the way in which that thing is most fully that thing, or the best version of that thing, the ideal version of that thing, then it follows obviously that the human good, which let’s say we call this ethics, study of the human good—although that’s not what the word ethics, that’s what it means, but we could get back to that if you want—is the study of the human good. Make sense?

Why This Definition Makes Discussion Clearer

What this does for one is it makes life easier for us. No, it makes life easier. It makes the discussion clearer for us, right? Because number one, many of the discussions of how to live, of how is a good way for human beings to live, especially the ones we’re used to—which is why the way in which this is useful for us—this starts from something beyond or other than the human good, other than what is good for humans.

III. First Problem: Serving God as the Definition of Good

Instructor: Very often people will say things like, “What is good? What is the good life about according to *Yiddishkeit* [Jewish tradition]?” What do people usually say?

Student: To serve God.

Student: To do *mitzvos* [commandments].

Student: To do God’s will.

Instructor: Okay. And what’s that got to do with me?

Usually it often leads people to serve God. So what is good for me is that I should be good for someone else, for something else. I mean, that’s maybe the good of a certain relation that I have, right? Someone could say like the good—a good child is one who serves his parents correctly. A good slave is one who serves his master correctly. But that is not, as long—assuming that the slave as a human being has some existence besides for his slavery—that can’t exhaust everything that it’s good about, can be good about him.

So if a human being is something besides serving God—which maybe people will deny, but assuming that there’s such a thing as a human being—then serving something greater than you might be a good thing because you have a relation to God. You have some kind of relation to things greater than you. And the correct way, the perfection of that relation, is to serve God correctly. Very nice. But that’s not everything that there is to be a good human being, if that makes sense.

Clarifying the Argument

That’s one kind of mistake. There would be answers to this. I’m not here to say that you shouldn’t serve God. I’m just saying that this can’t be like the final definition towards what it offers. If we agree—if we agree to this seemingly very clear and basic understanding of what good is—then you can’t stay there.

Student: You could just disagree with that. You could just not—disagree what a human is, to say that, you know, that even doesn’t exist.

Instructor: Yeah, right. God didn’t create anything when it says in the third [day], “I saw them.” That’s a lie. He just created a relation to himself. People say this. I’m just clarifying what that would entail.

Student: You could say that.

Instructor: You could also say that. But it also leads to a chase after kinds of good which are not human.

IV. Second Problem: The Litvak-Chasid Debate on Perfection

Instructor: So another thing—and this has to do with the previous point—when people say, “Okay, whoever told you that you should, you’re here for your perfection?” Like that’s what a *Litvak* [Lithuanian-style Torah scholar] says, right? *Avodas Hashem* [serving God].

I’ve heard this literal *drusha* [sermon] from Chasidic people: “Litvaks are after their own perfection, like the Rambam [Maimonides]. That’s *gashmius* [materialism/physicality], yeah. That’s selfish. But Chasidim are about serving God. So they’re about someone else’s perfection or something.”

Are they perfecting God? What? The benches?

Student: The bench, yeah. If you want to buy a bench, I’ll say, oh, you need to perfect the bench.

Instructor: Are they a Jewish person?

Student: No, they need a perfect bench?

Instructor: No, they need to perfect the bench. They also perfect benches. There’s the opposite. We’re saying that the Chabad-niks don’t perfect people.

Student: No, they perfect everything else.

Instructor: That’s it. Except themselves.

I’m sorry, I really heard this. You’re selfish. We learn from the bench and then make the bench something new.

Student: I get that, I get that. But I don’t see how that’s—

Instructor: I heard it in this context. I feel like that’s—

Okay, let’s try to—I’m not getting into if you can perfect a bench by sitting and learning. I’m not trying to—I’m trying to say that the idea is to basically do everything—

Student: Non-selfishness.

Instructor: Okay, this is not a class about selfishness.

V. Transition: Why This Matters for Choice

Instructor: But the important thing that I’m saying is—what?

Student: You should have one [another sheet].

Instructor: Now, where is going to be a sheet about—this is going to be a sheet about choice. This whole *shtickl Torah* [piece of Torah learning] is a *hakdama* [introduction] to explain why I care about choice in this context. And if we won’t get to it, I mean, it’s—no, it’s—

Yeah, you can all come in. Hi, hello, hello, welcome. Is Ari coming? We’re gonna get more chairs if he comes. Okay, sit down, don’t worry.

VI. Restating the Core Problem

Instructor: We’re saying that we’re looking for the human kind of perfection, of the human good, which is the [true] perfection. Some other people are looking—just don’t think in those terms—and they think about some beyond-human, higher, greater-than-human perfection, sometimes called serving God, which is, as we said first, really the perfection of a relation you have with what is greater than you, which is something, but not everything.

And then we said that that also sometimes leads to—I wonder why—but it leads to, or it’s connected with, another kind of beyond-human perfection, where, let’s say, let’s try it out by saying it like this: if the entirety of the human good is exhausted by serving God, that seems to mean that most of the kinds of perfections that humans have or care about are not real, right? Because we said perfection is of the thing. Those things are not real. What is real is whatever pertains to this relationship with what is beyond you, with what is greater than you. And that means that the kinds of things that you’re going to be trying to do or the kinds of perfection—

[Chunk ends mid-sentence]

Beyond Human Perfection: Divine Soul, Intellectual Perfection, and the Human Good

Mesirut Nefesh and Chabad Theology

Instructor: So we talk about very heroic perfections, or very, like, *Mesirut nefesh* [self-sacrifice; literally “giving over the soul”] becomes the basic value. *Mesirut nefesh*, and this is a correct description of Chabad theology, for example, *mesirut nefesh* as a term for killing yourself, or not even literally killing yourself, but destroying what you are in service of something greater. *Mesirut nefesh*, literally, becomes a very basic formulation for this kind of work, for this kind of life.

Do these things make sense? It can be argued with, because my connection with these two kinds of ways of going beyond the human good are not entirely accurate. And there’s correct ways of saying all of this.

The Divine Soul Concept in Tanya

Just to be very clear, unlike or somewhat unlike what Chabad would have you think, the reason, for example, the reason people like the *Tanya* [foundational Chabad text by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi] even have the concept of a divine soul as a basic concept in their theory of what it is to be a good human being is only because they’re really working within the framework that says that the good is the good of you, of something. And if their good is something very exalted, very high, they need to make the you something very high, very exalted. Otherwise, you could have just said…

Student: So that it’s relevant?

Instructor: What?

Student: So that it’s relevant?

Instructor: So that it’s a good thing for you. All right, so it’s relevant to you. Yeah, the word relevant is funny, but yeah.

Student: What this word, they’re trying to make the beyond you part of you?

Instructor: Yeah, it entails that really, because there isn’t really a way to… I mean, there is a way, but it’s in some way going to become part of you. Like we say, your relation to something is still you or yours in some sense. You could, we could argue about who the relation belongs to—a relationship that doesn’t belong to anything. It’s like who does the fatherhood of the father or the sonhood of the son belong to? Is it more on the part of the father, more on the part of the son? That depends if you’re a Platonist or an Aristotelian. But in any case, that’s just fancy words for people to think that I’m smart.

But in any case, you need to have something like that being what you are in order for you to be able to even talk about this, be able to do this, for it to be good for you. Otherwise—and I’ve met actually other people who said didn’t understand this—okay, why do we need to talk about someone having a divine soul? Why just tell you I have to do this and this and this? Because there’s nothing as “you have to do.” You have to do what you are. You have to perfect what you are. This is accepted by everyone, including the *Tanya*.

The Incoherence of Pure Bitul

Therefore, when the *Tanya* talks about *bitul* [self-nullification], about giving away what you are, that’s not a really coherent theory. It’s something, it’s more of an aspirational thing. I don’t think it’s a really, I don’t think technically, scientifically, what he thinks, what he’s thinking of is really that.

Student: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think 100%. I don’t think it’s going away from this. I think that we need that. I think everyone is based on this.

Beyond Human Perfection and Aristotle’s Hierarchy

Instructor: Okay, now, but the more important thing is that there’s, this would be a kind of beyond human perfection, kind of beyond human aspiration, and for that reason, in some sense, you could say it entails becoming God, or whatever the source, whatever the higher thing that humans are, becoming an angel or something like that.

And if what you look, what we’re interested in is the human kind of good, then that’s not what we’re interested in. You could of course be interested in that. You could say, and Aristotle even says this when he gets to the next level, Aristotle says this: humans are not the best. Humans are not the best thing. So if you’re looking for the best thing, then the human kind of good is not what you should be after.

Knowledge of the Best Things

And the way he speaks about it is speaking of knowledge. Knowledge is about knowing the best things. Knowing what is good for people is not the best knowledge. Therefore, knowledge of the human good is not the best knowledge. Therefore, everything pertaining to humans is not the best thing. And what a really good person or someone that has really good knowledge wants to know is the fine things.

That is the step towards the, what we call in our language, the intellectual perfection of the human being. Intellectual perfection of the human being is still considered to be… It’s not perfecting what’s human about you. It’s something that touches the space between these two things. It’s perfecting what is, we could sometimes say, this is what’s truly human about you in some weird way, but it’s perfecting, you could say, what is divine in you, or what is potentially divine, or what is truly human, things like that. Not what is human in normal speak, in normal people’s language. There’s a big difference between when we say that and when we say this.

Nature, Intellect, and Human Distinctiveness

Student: Well, we tend to think animals live according to nature, and humans don’t necessarily live according to nature. And how is that possible? Because they have the intellect. So we think the intellect is something separate from nature. We drive cars. That’s because of the intellect.

Instructor: Humans are, in this paradigm, humans are not… Humans have a kind of nature whose perfection works in very much more complex ways than animals, one of them known as intellect. But in a very basic sense, if you, it’s not like, I don’t think this, like the economy of nature versus intellect, where it really works. It’s more that the question is what kind of nature you have.

An animal can be perfect and non-perfect. Human can be perfect and non-perfect. And these are different criteria for what they are, based on what they are. An animal to be a perfect animal doesn’t need to drive a car. A human being might need to drive a car to be a perfect human being. Different discussion, if he does or don’t, but…

Technology as Natural

Student: So is a car a part of nature?

Instructor: Yeah. Because the human had the potential to develop it. We had a class about this. There’s one of the first class in this series was describing how technology is a natural thing, in the very broad sense of nature. Society is natural, according to Aristotle. A city, a city, a human is meant for a city. A human is a city, natural. And different technology is also natural. It’s the human nature to use tools and to build up all these elaborate systems and so on.

Student: Yeah, so, so wait, so this is the important, because…

Instructor: But it’s unnatural in the sense that it derives its purpose from not from itself, right? Taken by itself, a car doesn’t have a, isn’t the natural, is an artificial thing. It’s an artifact, meaning it’s created for someone else. It’s a real slave. It doesn’t have, its good lives in someone else, or it’s for, it’s really serving something else. But a human being or all natural things have some kind of standard of their own good in themselves or somehow.

Deferred Discussion: Is-Ought Distinction

Student: I think I interpret it like it’s a *das Torah* [authoritative teaching], right? I think human creativity is that they have a is and a ought divide, that an animal may suffer, but it doesn’t think of a new possibility. It just goes along with it, or it goes…

Instructor: Okay, wait, wait, we’re going to get to all of this a little bit. I have to try, I have to try to get the move forward according to my plan, so I’m not going to argue with that, but I’ll get to something, something about this in a little bit. I don’t like the is-ought distinction precisely because of this, because that’s also how humans, we’ll try to get to something more useful than that for right now. Yeah.

Returning to the Human Good: Ethics as Character

Instructor: So that’s just one way in which striving for something or looking for something beyond human is a very good thing. And this is a beginning of a solution for a lot of problems that you might have had, including in the Rambam [Maimonides] and including in life and so on.

But we’re primarily interested in human good, which is known as ethics or character. Ethics is just character. And precisely the kind of character which is human, the part of you that is most human about you. Okay, that’s the thing that we’re talking about.

There might be goodness, there’s nothing, it’s important to remember that there is goodness beyond this. And in a certain sense, and I’m going to just make a sentence of this and move on past that, because that would be a whole series of classes. And if you listen to my classes with Antonio Vargas, you’ll learn 500 different *chilukim* [distinctions/arguments] about this.

Religious Perfection vs. Philosophical Ethics

But the main point is, sometimes what we call religious perfection and so on often starts beyond that. Like the Rambam would tell you something like, and Aquinas makes this comment often when he reads the ethics, like yeah, Aristotle says this because he’s thinking of the perfection of human being in this world. Religion starts with perfecting human beings so…

Human Perfection: Distinguishing Human from Non-Human Goods

Non-Human Perfections Within Human Beings

Instructor: And there are also non-human perfections, non-human things in a human being. In the sense of, for example, even below that, you could talk about heaviness, or strength, or strength in the material sense, not in the biological sense, right? Like there are strong things like metal, or bones. And human beings have some of that perfection. We need to have—your bone has to be hard in order to live and things like that.

But all of that—or you could be heavy and heaviness has some use, you know, if you want to block a door or something you need the heaviest guy to be the bouncer—and those are not human perfections. Those are things that you could have used a rock for. It happens to be that humans are somewhat made out of rocks, which is what confuses people sometimes. They see someone that’s just very heavy and very big and very large, or very small, whatever perfection is.

The Doctrine of the Mean Applied to Physical Attributes

This goes back to our discussion of the middle, right? The biggest thing wouldn’t be perfect either. It’s very easy to see why perfection is always—I mean, right? But the perfect size human—well, there’s already something human because it’s going to be relative to what a good human is. But as someone that can, you know, jump the highest or can be the best used as a door post or a door block or something like that, that is not—that is a lower than human perfection, right?

Bodily Perfections: Important but Not Human Virtues

And almost in the same way, most bodily—what we call bodily perfections—are like that, right? Being even being healthy or being strong, like I said, being tall—all of those things are less than human perfection. They’re also not what ethics is about.

That’s not to say that they’re not important, because they’re even in some sense more important because they’re more basic. You can’t start anything if you’re not healthy. You can’t start anything if you’re not the right size and so on. But they’re not the human perfections. Does that make sense?

Student: So you’re saying the material structure of humans is not human?

Instructor: Now, what decided it to be human—that’s not a discussion. But anyways, so this is another thing. And people make this mistake. If the religious people tend to try to be too much over-human, then the materialist secularist people often try to be too much below human, right? And there’s the lowest common denominator and things like that. Like, society should at least have everyone be healthy and happy in a material sense, which is—yeah, it’s necessary for humans, just like necessary to have—or even lower than animal, like I said. You need minerals and stuff. They have to have the correct ratio and things like chemistry. Chemistry is not yet the animals, right? Although humans need chemistry and your chemical balance or whatever—that is, it’s the lower things are a basis. Yeah, they’re basically there. You’re built up of them. But being perfect in those aspects doesn’t really make you a good person.

The Eulogy Criterion: Defining Human Goods

Instructor: Now, just to give a simple definition of what we mean when we say a human good, something humanly good, someone that—I have a simple way that still works, although some people are weirdos even nowadays, especially nowadays. But in general, even nowadays, the kind of things that people say at eulogies [*hesped*: Jewish funeral eulogy]. If you go to a *hesped* and they praise someone or whatever, the kind of things we praise people for—those are the human values, the human virtues, okay? The human goods. Is that a good criteria?

Student: Yeah, well it’s trying to describe a life well-lived.

Instructor: Yeah, for the most part. Nobody says he was so heavy, he was so in shape. Even if they say in shape, they mean to say he had the virtue of self-control—he went to the gym every day. Nobody’s going to say, well, the guy was like—when he got into a fight he always won. Almost nobody, right?

Student: Even if—yes, it’s not—it’s meant in the most human way.

Instructor: Yeah, okay, we could say that, but it sounds—but really they’re saying—yeah, those things are complicated. I’m saying in general, in general people still understand what things people are really praised for, although we sometimes praise people for other things. I could praise you for having a lot of money in life, but when you’re dead usually you don’t get praised for that.

Complications: The “Beyond Human” Category

Student: Despite a lot of times they talk about people’s passion for sports—

Instructor: Well, it must be because they think that that’s part of being a good human being. Now, just like you said—like I said—people who say that ultimately think that that’s what a good human being is, even if they don’t frame it in this way. And therefore they might make mistakes because they don’t understand it that way. I think that ultimately that’s what they must be thinking, and that’s why I’m not so worried about that, really. People might have weird things to say because they have weird ideas of what a good human being is.

Student: I mean, yeah.

Instructor: Yeah, we could say these things, but everyone understands the difference. There are some things that we praise people when they’re alive for, or we don’t know if we really mean to praise them—it’s more like we flatter them.

Canonical Human Virtues

Student: What about *eved Hashem* [servant of God]?

Instructor: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Maybe the parent, a good friend—things like that, those are canonical human virtues. A good son—unless nobody’s a good son. People are more good parents than good sons. But, you know, you can see how that changed, right? Unless you go like *kibbud av* [honoring one’s father/parents]—very few people actually have that.

In any case, so these are what human virtues are—things that people get praised for as people. Of course, I can praise you—I could talk about how great it is to be tall. You could reach the higher shelf. It’s useful, but that’s not a human virtue. It’s something of an animal part of human virtue, or useful part, because I need you to reach the highest shelf. But not a human virtue.

Human Vices and the Nature of Blame

Instructor: And now, if you think about something very—one of the things that are basic to this kind of praise—and here’s where I get to where I wanted to get—if you will get to something that is basic to this kind of praise or judgment, right? Just a clear damnation or the opposite of praise—the criticism or true damnation or something—would be the kind of human evils, right? Things that we criticize people for in the human sense.

I don’t have a good case—when do we do exactly this? On Twitter, I guess, we see who’s bad. And I get—this is when we declare our human virtues. When do we declare our human vices? On Twitter.

Student: Someone else’s, yeah.

Instructor: Blame—when do we blame people? We do it all the time, right?

Student: Yeah, but sometimes—

Instructor: So I’m looking for a situation where it’s obvious that we don’t blame you for being too tall or too thin or something like that. We do blame you for human failings, right? We do that all the time, right?

Student: What, yeah.

Instructor: We don’t have to wait for the guy’s eulogy for this.

Student: Funny.

Distinguishing Human from Below-Human Blame

Instructor: Anyways, yeah. But we understand that very good. But people do that. We say, oh, that’s below—that’s just not being nice. That’s kicking me, right? If you criticize my physical appearance, now I tell you, well, that’s below the belt. That’s—it’s not my fault, right? People do that, but we understand that to not be correct. There’s nothing real in that. You’re just fighting dirty. Just like you push me, okay? You embarrass me by saying I’m small, I’m ugly, things like that.

Student: Yeah.

Instructor: Make sense?

Student: Yeah. I guess there’s two categories. There’s physical appearance that you’re not responsible for, and there’s physical appearance that you are.

Instructor: Yeah, okay, yeah.

Student: And if somebody falls into the physical appearance that you are responsible for, then to the extent that they’re—

Instructor: Right, so then they’re criticizing your lack of discipline.

Student: How you dress is a human thing.

Instructor: How you dress is a human thing, yeah, let’s say. I’m talking about the appearance—you’re overweight or underweight or—I don’t know.

Student: Yeah, so then we’re criticizing your lack of discipline or something like that.

Instructor: But we do understand very clearly the difference. We don’t need to say that people forgot about this. People didn’t actually forget any of the things. We do know the difference between a human kind of blaming and a non-human kind of blaming, a below-human kind of blaming.

By the way, we could also, if we’re using—Aristotle talks about who we blame and who we praise.

Beyond-Human Good and Evil: When Praise and Blame Cease to Function Morally

The Inverse Case: Beyond-Human Evil

When Blame Stops Functioning as Moral Criticism

Those are not the same kind of thing. They’re the same kind of thing, but they’re not the same thing. Something like that. It works for the opposite also, right? This is another interesting point. You could think in certain contexts that I’m not going to get into. But we also blame or criticize people sometimes for things that are so bad that they stop functioning as a moral blame. They start becoming the description of a monster, right? Without giving you an example. There’s a big *makhloket* [מחלוקת: dispute/controversy] about this, and a lot of things. There’s also *makhloket* about the previous thing.

You call certain evil people a monster.

Student: Or if that’s worse, because then you’re exiting the human realm.

Instructor: Yeah, this is not all *makhloket* on the internet. This is all *makhloket*.

Student: Can you give an example?

The Serial Killer Example

Instructor: Yeah, I’ll give you an example. Someone that, someone that’s like a serial killer who hunts people and eats them. We’re against that guy, right? But we’re not really against him even, right? He’s not a good guy. But is he a bad guy? No, and you call somebody like that sick. You could notice that he’s not even a bad guy. We say he’s sick. We have this new word. We call him sick, right? But he’s not really sick. He’s just really evil.

It’s not like maybe you could always find, I read a book, I’ve listened to a podcast about someone that wrote a book to claim that serial killers are just because the air pollution in their city or whatever. But seriously, there were a thousand people in that city, not all of them are serial killers, right? So it has to be something else going on.

You could see that we could, we have this word sick or monster is another word, or you’re referring to the person as an animal.

Student: Well, meaning not human.

Instructor: Yeah, this is lower than human, not even a human evil.

Student: Yeah, exactly. It’s not even human evil, exactly, because it doesn’t seem to be motivated by a normal passion.

Instructor: Exactly. You know, like, I hate this guy, I’m going to kill him.

Student: I think the word Nazi is used that way.

Instructor: Yeah, exactly. That’s the example I didn’t want to talk about because whenever you say that word, whenever you say that word, Gemini refuses to edit my video. Anyways.

Student: Gemini, I’m not Jewish.

Instructor: They’re very from these kind of things.

Student: Which word, Kenji?

Instructor: This box. I don’t know, we could try, but I was like, no, I was criticizing them. No, oh no.

The Problem with Extreme Evil as Mussar

Anyways, well seriously, it’s also used, also destroys the discussion usually when you say that. But what, right, we said they’re animals and things like that, and these are all, sometimes it’s not sure that the guy’s animal is just the evil person, but at least we understand that we have this category of people that we blame, we say that they’re bad, but you can’t imagine yourself doing something like that. So again, when we blame that person, it’s not functioning as don’t be like that. It’s more like, this is a description of some subhuman kind of thing. Of course, don’t be like that. It’s more like be careful of him.

And we could, again, also if we do a Mr. *Haskel* [mussar lesson], it becomes very weird. Don’t be like him. That guy killed 6 million Jews, at least you don’t bother your sister. It doesn’t really connect very well. Basically, it’s not realistic, it’s not *mussar*, it’s not *mussar*. It becomes description of weird things.

Student: So those are very good examples of the inverse still has the same function. You might tell somebody don’t do this because this is the same kind of thing that this person—

Instructor: Yeah, exactly, exactly. It could work in the same structural way.

Student: Yeah, we see how far it is—

Instructor: Yeah, you see how far it is from being a human kind of blame or human kind of praise.

Both Extremes: Outside of Society

Another way, we could say this in another way by saying something like, both of these extremes don’t belong in a city, are not part of society. The great *tzaddik* [צדיק: righteous person] who’s totally flying in the heaven all day, in his mind, is not living with us, not one of us, in the same way as the serial killer is not one of us, he’s not living. So both, that’s why if you go in the desert you meet two kinds of people: bandits and Breslovers.

Okay, now yeah, monastic lives in the same place where the bandits live because they’re both not human, right? Anyways, this is another discussion now.

The Central Question: What Makes Praise and Blame “Human”?

Formulating the Question

But when we talk about blame and praise, you could see very easily that the things, now fast you like what, so what is this thing? What is the criteria for what gets praised in a human way? Specifically in a human way, because that’s why I need this word, in a human way. That’s why I gave this whole introduction. And what is the thing that is not blamed in a human way? How do we define it? What’s one definition that excludes both ends of this spectrum? What is it?

Student: What was fundamentally human?

Instructor: Yeah, what is it that makes the kind of things that we praise as human into human praise? And so on, and vice versa.

Student: Is it the platonic form of human?

Instructor: Well, no, the platonic form, no, part of, an important ingredient at least, I don’t know if that’s the form, at least, I don’t know if it’s enough, it’s not enough, maybe, but at least one of the important ingredients for a good to be a human good, or an evil to be a human evil, is?

Student: Deliberated action, I would say, I don’t know. Pre-meditated action.

Instructor: Right? Or chosen?

Student: Very good.

The Role of Choice

Instructor: Some of these things. Right? Do you agree? If you disagree, you can make your own choice. Something like choice, intention, deliberate action, which is a long word for intention, I think. Pre-meditation.

Student: Pre-meditation, yeah.

Instructor: Right? Whereas these non-human people, if it wasn’t choices…

Yeah, at least we don’t understand that being the Vilna Gaon has a choice. Maybe he was born that way, maybe after doing a thousand choices that possibility opens up. It’s not a normal choice, right? In the same way, I don’t have a choice to be a serial killer. It’s not something that I choose. It’s beyond choice, right?

Application: Physical Appearance and Choice

Or in the same way, that’s not the best example of this. Really, when we say something like, when I say you don’t blame someone for having a deformed nose, it’s why? Because you didn’t choose it.

Student: Well, someone chose it.

Instructor: Wait, wait, this is a *shiur* [שיעור: class/lesson] criticizing of this, isn’t the same thing, explain. But I don’t have patience together that just explain why he was so confused now. But if we’ll get to the end you’ll see why he was so confused.

There’s things, yeah, but forget about for some people, mostly for all people, right? For all people their physical appearance is mostly entirely, we said, but for mostly it’s not a choice. Therefore it’s not human praise to praise someone as beautiful, although there’s a problem, we do praise people as beautiful and we think that that’s somewhat good. But we have to explain that. But at least morally we understand that there’s nothing wrong with being ugly, right? Is it evil to be ugly? Someone that looks ugly is evil?

Student: I mean he’s making everyone uncomfortable by walking into the room.

Instructor: Who?

Student: Yeah but what does he want?

Instructor: But he said—

Student: Not because it was ugly, but that it affected his thought.

Instructor: Oh, okay. Well, that’s why he claims that it was compensating. Which is a different fault.

Okay, so we understand this point.

The Distinction Between Choice and Free Will

Terminological Refinement and the Core Criterion for Ethics

A Brief Tangent: Nietzsche’s Critique of Socrates

Student: Is it evil to be ugly? Someone that looks ugly is evil? I mean, he’s making everyone uncomfortable by walking into the room.

Student: He criticized Socrates for being ugly.

Student: Who?

Student: Nietzsche criticized Socrates.

Student: Yeah, but what was he on?

Student: He criticized Socrates for being ugly.

Instructor: Well, he said that not because he was ugly, but that it affected his thought.

Student: Oh, okay.

Instructor: Well, that’s why he claims that he’s compensating.

Student: Which is a different fault.

Instructor: Fault, okay.

Moving Beyond “Choice” to More Precise Terminology

So we understand this point that things on shows. Now this is something important because I led you through this whole story to get to the point where we discuss choice, right? And I think that probably a better word than choice is something like you said—deliberate action or decided action, something like that. Something that you decided or wanted, maybe could have done—and other, I don’t like that definition so much. You’ll see in a second why.

Student: Planned.

Instructor: Planned, yeah. Thought out, or something like that.

Now, why… Animals maybe have plans, but they’re instinctual plans, no? Like, I’ll collect my acorns and…

Yeah, I’m not so worried about animals at this moment. Like, whenever we talk about what is human, I feel like a very bad way to figure that out is to read animal science books, at least the modern ones. Because it’s not really—but I have to understand why it seems to be wrong.

The Human/Nature Praise Distinction Revisited

But when I talk—give you two examples of human praise and what we don’t praise humans—you understand, like if I praise you for being beautiful, I’m praising nature for making beautiful things. I’m not praising you as a human being. That’s enough for me. And you can ask, forget about peacocks—you know they’re also beautiful, no problem.

So who do you praise when you praise a peacock?

Student: Nature.

Instructor: Whoever it is, God who created beautiful peacocks. Not—he doesn’t get praised as a “you’re a really good peacock,” right?

When we praise a human for doing beautiful deeds and we say “you’re a really good human,” right, you could see the difference without getting into funny complications about do monkeys have laws or things like that.

The Central Criterion: Choice as What Makes Something Human

Now we get to the point that a very important ingredient—if we want to talk about human goods, ethics, virtue—we need one important criteria for this: that it should be something humanly chosen. That’s what makes it human, almost. I don’t know if this is enough, but—so, like I said, this is part of what makes it human, is that it be something we call chosen, or at least willed.

We could think of a different way to get into this. Does this agree? Does this make sense?

Now, I want to make a very important point, and we’ll see if you agree with this, and if not, that’s because you didn’t come to enough classes yet. No, I’m just saying, if not, then we call it as human, it’s ethical, right?

The Free Will Problem—Why the Speaker Never Discusses It

Introduction of the Free Will Concept (Bechirah)

So, now, there’s something very important. You probably remember that we have—you’ve probably in other classes, not in this one, heard about something called, which people nowadays call *bechirah* [free will], or in English, free will. Have you heard of that thing?

Yeah, people have heard of this. I never talk about it, and for a good reason. You’ve never heard me giving a shit about it. And usually people talk about it, and why do I never talk about it?

Student: Because I don’t have *bechirah*, why would I talk about it?

Instructor: No.

Student: You have to choose to talk about it before you talk about it.

Instructor: No.

The Uselessness of the Free Will Discussion

Because people—usually we talk about that in conflict, and the opposite of that would be something like being—what’s the opposite of free will?

Student: Determinants.

Instructor: Determinism, yes. But we have this like noun called determinism, or saying you are forced by your necessity, everything, all your actions are necessitated by your circumstances, by whatever it is, you don’t have free will, right? And people usually say that—well, what do people say? Why do people care about that? I don’t understand why anyone cares about that. Seems to be the most useless loop you can think about in the world. Do you agree with me? If you don’t, then why not?

Free will seems to be the most unnecessary conversation to have about the ones that people have, that teenagers like to have. Like, do I have free will? Kind of. If you do and if you don’t, what was wrong here? Whatever. It doesn’t make—understand something better by thinking about it. Do you understand the truth?

Student: It seems self-refuting.

Instructor: Self—not self-refuting. It doesn’t refute itself whichever side you pick. It seems to self-negate the discussion. Like in any case, this seems to be a very confusing discussion that I don’t know how to have.

Like you said, if I don’t have free will, do I have free will to have this discussion? Free will discussion is impossible to have because once you examine the nature of the mind, you change it. It’s impossible. It shifts while you look at it.

Student: That would be another problem.

Instructor: But it’s part of the loopiness of it. It seems to be very useless.

Common Motivations for the Free Will Discussion

People usually like to have it either for like theological reasons—like if humans have no free will, why could God punish them? Okay, I don’t know. Maybe God doesn’t punish them. Like where did—like it’s all predetermined. I don’t know why—why do people do bad things? For the same reason they get punished. I don’t—I never understand why people—anyone would care about this question. And people seem to care about it. It’s like talking about it and like, “Ah, but does God know what you will do?” So there’s predestination before that. But okay, nice, also like a problem that I don’t understand why I don’t care about.

So there’s something wrong with that. Oh, everyone agrees with me that it’s a weird discussion to have.

A Humorous Demonstration

Now, it’s interesting. There is no free will, because if you would have had free will, some of you would have said, “No, it’s a good discussion.” Now, you could have just chosen to say that, right?

Student: Yeah, free will.

Instructor: That’s another weird thing with the free will discussions, that it conflicts reality.

Rav Dessler’s Observation

This is what Rav Dessler was worried about, and his question is correct. Like he was a good observer of reality. He was never—he had to like 300 years of the destruction of normal philosophy, so he didn’t have any resources to talk about it normally. But like notice that nobody has free will.

The Crucial Distinction: Choice vs. Free Will

This is not the one question I want. I want to distinguish what I care about—choice—and I led you through a half hour of discussion about the human good to see why choice is very important. And now wait, very good. Now what I want to show you is this: how far choice is from free will.

Choice—I’m just going to give these two things, these two names, and try to stick with it, stable at least for tonight, because the words are not the main thing. But let’s call this “choice” and that “free will.”

Choice is very important. If something you don’t have a choice about, we all agree, is either beyond or below human—it’s not interesting to talk about.

But free will is not that.

Why the Free Will Discussion Fails: The Loop Problem

And I want to give some reasons for why the free will discussion is a waste of time. The first one is what I just said: that it seems to be stuck in its own loop forever, and it seems to be like you might have arguments for both of them, but whichever—both of them seem to be self-contradictory, right?

If I do—just to be very clear, both of them, not only the determinism side is in a loop, also the free will side is in a loop, right? By this very simple way that you said: if everything is determined, then it was already determined if I agree. If I believe that I have free will and the problem of punishment are also things like that—like, am I responsible for myself? Do I deserve anything? Any reward or punishment? It also calls the *achnesha* [?]. It’s all part of the same loop. Whoever determines, whatever determines that I sin, determines that the judge gives me a punishment. There’s nothing to discuss.

The Problem on the Free Will Side

There’s the problem the other way around. You’ll notice how weird free will is now. What people think free will is. Because if there’s free will, then I can also just choose to believe the arguments or not. And at every level, like, I don’t know, everyone’s just choosing everything.

Think—everyone is just deciding everything by some magic thing called free will. Then discussions don’t make any sense. People really think this, by the way. People like, “I can’t prove you anything because that would be going against your free will.” That’s why God doesn’t prove that He exists. Anyone could—that would be going—that’s real. Didn’t hear this trickle-toed from anyone ever? Why didn’t God leave any good proof for His existence anywhere? Because that would be going against free will.

As if you would have it. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just showing you something weird right now. Because the—because like argument—there’s—it either arguments prove something to everyone, but you still have to learn them, or they—or you have free will to negate.

The Argument/Free Will Paradox

If the—if free will is the kind of thing that arguments are—know that if it’s *yesh me’ayin* [creation from nothing], then it—this doesn’t—this is still not a problem, right? What you think free will is, there’s not a problem. You could have an argument and not believe it. Let’s just move on.

People seem to think this: you can have an argument and not believe in it. But if it is *yesh ma’ayin*—if it’s not *yesh me’ayin*, then it’s not a problem at all. And there’s still free choice somehow, although I have an argument, right?

So both sides—that that whole—that way of justifying—wait, but so that whole way of describing free will is based on this very weird—so that’s just to finish. I’m—I’m not going to get into that. Maybe I’m wrong about this, the little thing that I got to know. But the important thing is that kind of free will seems to be an inner side you pick, stuck in a very big loop. And therefore it makes no difference. I don’t even have a way to like start, open up the discussion.

The Lack of Philosophical Progress

And it seems to be—we can have like—we can like put down these two statements: “you have free will,” “determinism,” and talk about them endlessly, but no progress seems to be ever made. As, uh, by, um, what’s his name—all right, let’s run by, uh, uh, no, the lead that was *nifter* [passed away]—no, yeah. I said this is one of the frustrating things about philosophy. It’s definitely not a—yes. So as Alistair MacIntyre and other people have noticed, that this is one of the kind of things in which philosophy makes no progress. You don’t even seem to understand each other better. Like there’s free will people, there’s determinist people, and they’re just having endless word games. And it seems to be—there seems to be something weird.

Okay.

Practical Irrelevance and the Rambam’s Concern

Now, um, another thing—another very important thing, and this is the more important thing for me—is that it seems to me that—so we’ll say—so it’s practically relevant, right? For example, that I don’t seem to be very interested in something he calls *bechirah*, which people think means free will. I’m not sure. I think sometimes it does, and if it doesn’t, we’ll have to get into that another time.

But the Rambam seems to be very worried. The Rambam in *Hilchos Teshuvah* [Laws of Repentance] goes on at length about *teshuvah* [repentance], about *bechirah*, and the same thing in *Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah* [Laws of the Foundations of the Torah] and *Perek Ches* [Chapter Eight, referring to *Shemonah Perakim*/Eight Chapters].

The Experiential Critique of Free Will and the Nature of Ethical Action

Challenging the Concept of Free Will

The Ambiguity in Rambam’s Position

Student: So that means what? So that means it’s not free will, it’s a choice.

Instructor: Well, we can see. People read that in both ways. But now, Adam, for example, was interested ethically. He thought that free will is an important thing to believe for ethics to work, for teshuva [repentance] to work, right? I think he’s trying to explain what a human is. I think he has, like, there are some people who seem to have this idea, like, maybe it gets back to what you were saying before, like, there’s this special thing called free will. It’s something, whatever, and it must be true and has different rules. It actually plays with different rules. It’s like a belief. Like, you have a question that you can believe in miracles, but God, Hashem [God], how can you call it a miracle and believe it and all that? He doesn’t do that. Like, why would it be different than anything else in the world? The realm is just, it’s just a description of something that’s important, because maybe there’s, it’s a good way to describe something. But it doesn’t act any differently than anything else that exists.

The Psychology Studies Digression

Instructor: Okay, so let me…

Student: There have been studies that not believing in free will will reduce your discipline. But if free will doesn’t exist, then that’s awful. You just decided for you by something else, right?

Instructor: I get it. I mean, is there… By the way, are there such studies? I don’t believe in any such studies anyway. Don’t worry. It’s like psychology studies means that some guy sent out a questionnaire to 30 bored college students. It doesn’t. Nowadays, you just go on… I don’t know. Does this still exist? Mechanical surveys. Is Mechanical Turk still a thing? You know Mechanical Turk? We used to do service online, pay a dollar. I don’t know if it still works. Many of these services, Google had a service, and Amazon, you could buy a service. But it makes sense in two ways. I’m trying to explain, for instance, do you know this happiness service?

Student: Yeah, I get what you’re saying. I get it.

Instructor: I don’t say it’s not true. Maybe it is true. I’m just saying a study is not helping me much. But I’m trying to understand how is this an important thing?

Why Didn’t Rambam Count Free Will Among the Ikkarim?

Now, I want to define something very simple. The kind of free will that you get told, like some people have even asked on the Rambam [Maimonides], why didn’t he count it as the 14th Ikkar [fundamental principle of faith] to believe in free will? It seems to me very important. It says explicitly in the Hilchos Teshuva [Laws of Repentance], it’s an important principle and it’s the foundation of the Torah. It’s explicitly in the language of the Hilchos Teshuva, but he didn’t count it as one of the things you must believe. And now it’s treated as something you must believe, because obviously…

Now, why is it something I must believe? I have a rule, right? You know me. Anything that someone says you must believe, that means it’s not true. That means he believes that it’s not true, right? Because the truth doesn’t have to be believed in. Remember, truth is the things that stay true even when you stop believing in them. I don’t believe I’m going to get tired. I get tired anyways. So that’s nature. That’s reality. I don’t believe I’ll bump into a wall if I walk straight there. I will anyways. That’s called truth. And when someone says you must believe in something, usually it means to say there’s something I don’t think that’s as true as you think. Okay.

The Experiential Challenge: Has Anyone Ever Experienced Free Will?

Of course life is more complicated than this but that’s my joke. Now therefore whenever people say you must believe in free will like what do you mean you don’t believe in free will I’m like I don’t know, look at yourself, do you have free will? Did you ever experience free will? Did anyone ever experience free will? I have never experienced free will.

Student: Yeah, just because I free will I can do it.

Instructor: Well, even if you do do that, it comes… This is something very weird. Nobody ever except… Where does this belief in free will, like what does it even mean? Okay, free will is like an ex-principle. God is just and therefore he couldn’t have punished you if it were. No problem. You know something? How do I know? I don’t even know how I want to know this. God, do we understand God? Just is like, maybe he doesn’t punish you. Maybe you come to heaven and like, surprise, there was no bechira [free choice]. The Baal Shem Tov was right. Whoever, let’s say, people say that. Like whoever, whoever is the guy that said that. Surprise, straight to Gan Eden [Paradise], then you go, or to Gehennom [Hell], because it’s not free will. Who cares? Whatever. Like you were wasting your time worrying about being good, you know, like maybe, you know, how do we know any of like why do people so sure about things? But that’s not it anyways.

Rav Dessler’s Theory and Its Problems

The important thing is what? So okay, she believe in it, you don’t believe in it, that’s very cute, but like who did anyone ever experience it? Do you, like what would it mean for free will to actually exist? There was a Rebbe [rabbi/teacher] that was worried about this and it was looking and he realized that he has this free will at the 14th cigarette of the day, if he should smoke it or not, something like that. And then came up with this whole theory to base everything we call free will on that kind of choice. But I think that he was mistaken about even that. Because that’s not what free will is.

Defining What Free Will Would Actually Mean

So let’s go back, let’s go back up to where we came from, right? So we established, everyone agrees that free will in the sense, let me just say it, in the sense of some kind of very abstract, very free, free in the sense of free floating, right? Disconnected kind of act of the will, like a magic thing that, not because, right? Not because of anything, and it’s not free. Because and free will are the opposites, right? Causes are chains. Seder [order] is the chaining of the world, right? Seder is literally a chain of being. No, unchained, right? The free, like, just choosing to do this or that.

Now, I don’t know any human being, if someone would have such moments, I would say that he’s not… he’s a sick person, he’s not human. I think I’ve never had such a moment in my life and I wonder if anyone ever did. Seems to be like a very weird thing. Like okay, now I’m just choosing freely. I don’t have any moments of choosing freely and this is what causes all people like do you have bechira?

Testing the Concept with Examples

Okay, so could you be a goy [non-Jew] now? Could you? Obviously not, or maybe theoretically. So we’re back in theory world. Theoretically means I could say things not connected with any experience or any reality. But do you have free will to not come to my shiur [class/lecture] today? You could have been lazy and not came, but that wouldn’t be an act of free will, that would just be laziness. That’s not the same thing, right? That’s already an excuse, some slightly less free will at least, right? You could have decided to come. That also wasn’t free will, it was because of something, right? Because it’s the best shiur in Lakewood, you have to come. You have to, right? Well, it doesn’t force you, that’s another question, but that’s still not free, right?

It seems like nobody ever experiences free will in the way that people believe that it exists. Therefore, unless I’m a tzaddik [righteous person] of this list theory that that’s what happens at one moment of choice… I think that that’s even that is wrong, but I could talk about that separately, but in general it’s not a normal human experience.

Free Will as an Empty Concept

Student: Yeah, because, we’ll get to that. I’ll try to get that in there. And if I don’t, that’s because I don’t have free will.

Instructor: Now, you see how useless this free will is? It’s just a joke that you can put anywhere. It’s not even a good joke. Good jokes are the ones that you can put anywhere.

Student: Yeah, determinism is still a conflict of choice, right?

Instructor: Yeah, but that’s a nice, weird puzzle for weird people to puzzle about. Who cares? I’m interested in things that are real.

Student: I think both of those sides have some degree of relevance.

Instructor: They’re relevant, of course.

What We Actually Experience: Actions That Represent Who We Are

The Real Phenomenon vs. Free Will

Now, let’s go back to where I came from. You remember that we came here, we arrived at this discussion of choice because of something very basic, which we all agree on, which we do experience. Unlike free will, which nobody ever experiences, this is something we do experience. We experience when we blame people, when we judge people, which, okay, you could say maybe we’re just judging them based on our thing. But we also experience them in ourselves. We experience some of the things we do as being more pertaining to us, more coming from me, from what I am.

You’ll notice that that’s already something most people will not call free will. It’s precisely the thing people call just your habit or something. But when you tell me some things you’ve done represent what you are, represent who you are, right? They come from who you are. Representation might not be the correct word, but some things, the things that are mostly me, right?

The Levaya Test: What Represents You

What do you want people to talk about by your levaya [funeral]? The things that represent what you are. You might be a stickler that does those things only once a week. Doesn’t matter, still the things that you think represent what kind of human being you are. You know, be deluding yourself and so on, but that’s what you think at least, right? And not only what’s good, of course. You don’t want to do the bad things, but ideally, none in your levaya or whatever. You still want to have a correct narrative of what you are. And that would not include… it would include a lot of the things that people say are not free will and will not include a lot of things that are free will, right?

The Ethical Inversion: What Actually Counts

So for example, right, when we said that, you’ll notice that this is what’s important for us ethically. I’m making a point based on every human being’s experience in the free world, in the free will world, that’s still which two minutes of light to sleep two minutes a night in the free will world is possible, possibly, possibly possible. But when I’m saying that I praise myself, when I talk about actions that represent myself, that come from me, that are really about me, that I’m trying to become a person like that, right? That’s what ethics is about, aiming to become a good person. Though the actions that we, that include in that, the actions that count for that, are the ones that I have chosen, the ones that have something to do with what I am, based on what I think I should be or based on what I already am. They’re precisely not the ones that I choose freely. They’re almost the opposite. Do you understand what I’m saying? Because I’m drunk around…

Rav Dessler’s Example Reconsidered

Like, things that I just… Just so, like, take even Rav Dessler’s example, okay? Let’s say I’m a guy that eats and drinks and smokes and things like that, and then one time I didn’t drink. Everyone agrees that that’s easy, in the sense of free will. If free will means easy, like Rav Dessler seems to have thought, then I agree with him. I have that experience too. Like, nothing is stopping me from drinking this seltzer or not drinking it. There’s no major, I don’t even have a big fight about it. Like, should I drink it, should I not drink it? That’s already a complicated case. I just put it down to pick it up. No problem. That’s free will. We get called that free will, but that’s really something less than free will, something less than choice, right? It’s not even choice.

If I sat down and I made myself a plan, I want to reduce my intake of seltzer, therefore I’m going to every night drink one…

Choice as Character: Challenging the “Moment of Free Will” Paradigm

The Inversion of Rav Dessler’s Framework

Instructor: That’s something that is about me. About me in the sense of what it talks about represents what I am, who I am. And that’s precisely what Rav Dessler calls, unfortunately, not free will. Because that’s just some habit that you have or some plan that you made or something like that. The act of me taking the cup or not taking the cup that follows from that—what makes that an important thing to me, a human thing to me, is precisely what comes before the moment that he called the moment of free choice. It’s precisely the thing where I thought about it, I deliberated about it, I maybe even created myself a habit to do that way. I made myself into the person that does that, and now I’m doing it because I’m that kind of person, because I chose to be that kind of person. That’s what choice means.

That’s what the kind of things that count for telling you who you are, which is what we’re interested in here now, are those things. Does this make sense? Understand what I’m saying?

What I’m trying to say is that if we forget about free will in the abstract sense—justifying God or anything—and we talk about why is it important to us ethically to talk about something like choice, we understand it very obviously. Because, for example, *ones* [coercion] is the biggest example. If someone just used you as a rack and threw you onto someone else, you didn’t do that at all. You were functioning as a tool of someone else. That’s not me. It doesn’t say anything about me, right? It says something about that guy. It says nothing about me, right?

The Spectrum of Actions and Self-Representation

And then there are more complicated cases where I made an accident, and that represents something about me—more like that I’m not a careful person, if the accident was somewhat my fault. But it still doesn’t represent me in the most important sense, right?

And then I can talk about something that I do just out of unthinking. Something like I just passed by, I just did it. I think that professor’s example is really that. From what I did, in *halacha* [Jewish law] it’s called something like *misasek* [an action performed without intention]—I just did it without thinking. People do things without thinking all day, right? I ate three candies, not two candies, not because I have a diet that says we eat three candies. That’s not saying anything about me. Why is it not saying anything about me? Because I didn’t choose it. It wasn’t premeditated. It’s not something about me.

In some sense you could say, “He every day eats three candies.” Then it becomes something about me, because there’s some habit they have, some character that eats a lot of candies. That’s something about me. But if it’s something done just carelessly, that’s not something about me.

What Primarily Represents the Person

What’s the primary case of something that says something about me, which is what we care about when we say “choice”? We don’t care about some abstractions. We care about what represents what the person is, what is about, what comes from him. It’s precisely those things which we’ve thought about or which we’ve trained ourselves to be.

The Olympics Analogy: Training vs. Momentary Choice

Someone, just in the physical case, someone who trains himself to be a good runner, and now he’s a good runner, we praise him for that. Forget about my previous ethical problems, I’m just using this as an example because it’s easy to see. We praise him for being a good runner, right? He wins the Olympics as our champion. And why does he win the Olympics? Obviously we don’t say, “Well, you don’t deserve it. You just trained well. Now when you’re running, you’re winning the race. That just follows automatically from you training well.”

Well, that’s exactly what we’re looking for—someone that trains well. It’s opposite someone that just takes drugs and doesn’t train well. We say, “Yeah, that doesn’t count. There was not enough human choice in that. You just took a drug. You used the mechanical way to get yourself to win. You cheated,” right?

Why Cheating Disqualifies

Why is that cheating? What’s wrong with cheating? Very nice. If the game would be about—we, everyone agrees for some reason that drugging at the games is bad. Unless someone already invented new Olympics which is just the drugging Olympics, but that would be a different Olympics. But the regular Olympics, the one where we reward a kind of human endurance, human training, right? And nobody says, “Well, he just trained that way.” Yeah, that’s the opposite.

Someone who didn’t train—if someone comes and says, “How did you win?” “I used my free will.” Even if that would be possible, which it’s not, we would still disqualify him. Because we say, “Well, this is not a game of people that use their free will. This is a game of people that actually train and become the kind of person that are an athlete that can win at the Olympic Games.”

The Contradiction with Modern Free Will Theory

So you understand something very simple and very obvious, although it’s not obvious to you before you came to my class, that there’s a case where the Aristotelian or normal people way of thinking is in precise contradiction to what the nowadays free will people say. Because really people say—*Nefesh HaChaim* [a major work of Jewish ethics] says this explicitly, and *Tanya* [foundational text of Chabad Chassidus] says it also actually, and he’s also confused, and this is part of his whole community—what do you get *sechar* [reward] on, right?

What you get *sechar* on is, as we discussed last time we had a class, not at this *shiur* [lesson], about what goes on in heaven—that’s really about human judgments of the good, right? What do you get *sechar* for? So there’s many contemporary books that say you don’t get *sechar* for things you do out of habit, because that’s just a habit doing it. You only get *sechar* for the moment of overcoming. For the one more time that you learned that you were not habituated to, that’s what you get *sechar* for. That is what the conclusion of the free will, the non-existent free will gives you. Or the *mi-pa’am echad* [from one time] theory—we won’t get into that. It’s connected, those two things. We’ll get to chapter 6 and discuss that in that context.

The Aristotelian Response

What Aristotle, what a normal person says is precisely the opposite. What you get the most praise for, the most *kavod* [honor] for, is the thing that you already do, because that’s what you are. You don’t have to choose yourself every day. You don’t have to free will yourself into—if there’s even such a thing as free will, which there isn’t in that sense.

The person we praise as being a great thinker or a great helper is precisely the person who has chosen. Of course, it starts from choice somewhere, and this gets us into the discussion of where we are. This is really why it’s an introduction to where we are, which is how you get into, how you become a good person, how you get a good character. That doesn’t happen by itself either.

But the person that we praise mostly is the person who does have that good character. And of course it’s not just because he started once to have the good character. He gets chosen. The thing that we praise, the thing that gets *kavod*, is precisely to be a good person who is the kind of person that’s chosen. That’s the kind of actions that we ascribe mostly to the human *Shabbat* [unclear term—possibly *shayachut*/belonging], to the person doing that as the kind of human being that either represents who we are. That’s what we give him a *hesped* [eulogy] for.

The Eulogy Argument

We don’t give a *hesped*—you know, by the way, if it would be such a hassle, then most people would be very bad. You know, “Usually he was a good guy, but really we shouldn’t talk about that. That was just his habit. The one time he really bothered someone, and therefore he goes to *Gehinnom* [hell] forever.” That follows also. No, that doesn’t work like that, right? Because that’s a mistake. A mistake is less willing, right? Maybe he should have not made that mistake, so he’ll get some *onesh* [punishment]. But that’s just a mistake. We disqualify mistakes from what represents character, right?

Redefining Choice: A Long-Term Process

So this is the very important conclusion: Choice means this—choice just means what a person, what comes from you as the you, as the person. Choice is not a moment in time. Choice—I mean, the action from choices wasn’t in something for a moment in time, but the choice is something that takes more than a second. Opposite: choice is something that has to—if it takes less than a second, then it’s not choice. Then it’s carelessness.

Of course, many actions take less than a second, and therefore they come automatically from your habit, or just carelessly, or from some *teva* [nature] that you had, and things like that. There’s many reasons why people do actions that take a second. But choice is precisely the thing that it’s a long-term process.

Now, how actually—since we don’t live in long term, we have to get into how it actually works and all the levels, all the stages of that process. But when we praise someone and we say the things we praise are the things that were chosen, we don’t mean the things that he sat now and chose, because that’s not thinking. That something happens.

How Character Formation Actually Works

What does happen is that you decide to do a long-term thing. And you don’t decide—it’s not something, by the way, it’s also not something inside. That’s why the *ba’alei mussar* [practitioners of the Mussar ethical movement] are totally confused, for example, when they talk about *hachlatos* [resolutions] or *kabbalos* [acceptances], right? That’s just not how human beings function. Nobody—I mean, again, this just goes back to my discussion last time about goals. Human beings don’t function like, “I came by and kept around, they decided I’m gonna be good, and I became good.” It’s *lo avad* [it doesn’t work]. You got to do something different than that.

Never works. How do I know it never works? There’s so many books written about how to do it well. And this doesn’t work.

What Actually Works: Creating Habits

What works? Creating habits. Those are things that work. How do you create habits? Yes, from very simple things that are easy. I didn’t say that that’s not how it works, but not from decisions. Decisions are, in the sense of the momentary sense, are totally overrated. They might sometimes happen in emergency cases, but they’re not how things work.

The Primary Example: Choosing a Yeshiva

Choice means I chose to go to this yeshiva, and that’s a primary example of choice. Would be something like, “I chose to go to this yeshiva, and therefore I became a *talmid chacham* [Torah scholar].” What we’re praising is not the moment that he sat—he had maybe a lot of conversations deciding where to go and what to do, but then he did it, and then he did the whole thing out of choice. And that’s why he’s, you know, he’s a student of that yeshiva. That’s the kind of guy he is. That’s a chosen thing.

It’s not like, “Well, you went to yeshiva.” “Yeah, but I chose to go to this yeshiva.” It’s not like someone forced you. It doesn’t make a big difference, by the way. Even if your father forced you to go there, still that’s who formed your character, and that’s what you are. It’s more of a chosen thing than the thing that you’d choose in a moment, and it just moves on.

Does that make sense? More helpful? That’s my main—

Student Questions and Clarifications

Student: I’m just wondering why the word “choice.” I don’t know what’s being added over things that you spoke on previously. That’s the word “choice.” I don’t know what’s adding.

Instructor: That’s the actual—there were choices. There’s more things to add, but this is the one thing. I’m saying—

Student: Yeah, I hear it. Well, we added the negation. I hear the distinction from this on what people consider free will. I hear that. This is just things we’ve discussed before.

Instructor: Okay, so you’re not more convinced. There’s more to talk about what choice is precisely, but I have to finish it within one hour.

Student: [Inaudible question about Rambam and the middle ground through training versus being born with natural dispositions]

The Regression Problem and the Need for Revelation

The Middle Ground and Character Formation

Student: Well, it somewhat is, but that’s the practical way of how to get it. What we call chasing that. It’s more complicated. I have to talk more about this. The inertia is what I don’t understand. The way he says that, it’s the opposite. It’s not the thing that you always do, right? It’s the thing that you do once.

Instructor: All right, I said the opposite. The thing that you always do is the things you choose. Right, so that is… Because you have more *kavana* [intention] on those things. A long-term *kavana*. Right. Not a momentary *kavana*.

Student: This is also inertia there’s some inertia in that but what why is that a problem why can’t it could work with the middle ground maybe says right a person can be born being totally giving person all the time right you could be born like that so he’s always like that right well you people are born in extremes right yeah I don’t know if that’s that’s what he said.

Instructor: No no I know what you mean I’m not sure I don’t I don’t think it’s true that that’s something I don’t I I know you mean I’m not sure why yeah there’s a different problem yeah I know it’s the brown but I don’t know yeah it is true that it’s the middle ground the middle way requires being the kind of the kind of person I agree with that yeah it’s It requires being a kind of person that knows how to act in a certain, relative to a certain area in a certain, the correct way. It’s not something that you can do. I agree with that. Yeah. And what you said about being born, I don’t agree with, but I agree with it. I mean, it’s more complicated. That trajectory, right? Yeah. Which is a… I know what you mean. I know the language. I understand what you’re talking about, but I’m not going to solve it by looking at the language. There’s more problems about this. Yeah. Yeah.

The Beginning of Habit Formation

Student: But to embark on such a habit-forming process or something like that, right? How does that begin?

Instructor: Yeah, it must also begin by the same kind of deliberation. We have to talk more, like Ali says, Lozi is a guy, whatever you want to call him, about precisely what choice is. What I gave you was just why character is what we call choice. More of what we call choice than the momentary kind of choice that people identify with free will. That is very important. I think it’s a clarification that I didn’t know before I made this share, so I don’t know how you would have known it. Maybe you did. Because I was implied in other ones. That’s the whole use of it. That choice, what makes, is more, character is closer to choice than the momentary choice that people identify with free will. And that’s the kind of choice that actually exists.

And if you want to get into a bunch of things like how do we actually gain character, how do we actually get a certain character, we’re exactly the choice in that. That’s something we have to clarify more about the process of it. Also things that we know already, but we can clarify them more. And we’re exactly what we call choice, and Aristotle distinguishes between choice and wish and will and a whole bunch of other things, opinion. All these things are different.

Student: I understand this distinction of choice as being something that represents your humanity but even embarking on that that’s still where I’m stuck and it’s where I’m stuck not even just in thought but even in action there’s all sorts of things I think that we want to do that I’d like to do or that I think I’d like to do I’d pretend I’d like to do you wish to be that way but you don’t do want right right I don’t have those habits it’s habits that I want to have right alright those are wishes right maybe what’s between me and that is knowing but even even to decide to know is not to decide to know even just to begin knowing seems to be its own choice.

Instructor: Yeah.

Student: So has it was the same kind of regression problem.

The Circular Nature of Character Development

Instructor: Yeah there’s a regression problem in the whole theory and he’s very happy with it like it’s a circular and that’s how it’s supposed to be you choose because of what you are and what you are because of the actions that makes you what you are and there’s a whole cycle and therefore like one of the conclusions here is that training that education is what determines what kind of person you’ll be and there’s no way out of that.

Aristotle quotes Plato like Plato and Aristotle both say things like this that the conclusion from this is that there’s no fix for someone who had a bad education, or at least no very good fix, because that’s where things start.

Now, who was the first guy? That’s a good question. How did your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather start his good or bad education?

The Argument for Prophecy and Revelation

Instructor: That’s why we need prophecy. This is for Schneir Berton to explain. Why do we need prophecy? To start the cycle of, like, how did anyone decide to be a good person? This is a true argument for *Torah min HaShamayim* [Torah from Heaven]. I’m not serious. I’m serious about this, by the way.

Rav Saadia Gaon’s Position

Instructor: Rav Saadia kind of says it’s a jump start well no Rav Saadia has no Rav Saadia says I’m making it even worse Rav Saadia says that we could have arrived at the truth because Rav Saadia is unlike the Rambam for example if this Rambam disagrees with him and Rav Saadia believes in some kind of moral intuition which just shows us what the good is.

Rambam’s Disagreement

Instructor: It’s not clear Aristotle or the Rambam believe in that they believe that there might be ways to find out truth but there are probably less ways to find out the good. And therefore, we need prophecy. So, not like prophecy is the use, that’s like, which says this is what prophecy is useful for. What I was saying is that that’s what it’s needed for.

This is still not right. You don’t have to have the word prophecy, some kind of like, jump, like, beginning point of revelation.

Student: Well, if prophecy is part of the nature, then it works. It works better.

Instructor: It doesn’t matter. There still needs to be some beginning point. If we agree that our beginning point is usually our education, and then this has to go back to the first educator and that and this is why just forget about the argument this is why cultures have stories of the first lawgiver every culture has that yeah so long give lost Athens and Moses gave a loss to the Jews and some other guy gave the loss to the I don’t know to the Romans whatever I forgot his name and there and so on right and why do we say this because we believe that it’s at least very hard it stopped record it’s it’s at least very hard for a human being to discover the good. It needs to start somewhere. You need to be good already to get discovered. Yeah, right.

For truth, there might be ways out, but for good, it seems very difficult. Unless you’re a Socratic, that’s at least that, that you could discover the good by inquiry somehow.

The Question of Conscience and Moral Knowledge

Student: That’s back to the question. Is conscience a purely…

Instructor: I just said this.

Student: Or is it somewhat reliable?

Instructor: Yeah, the Rambam is a lot more on the side that it’s conditioned. You need education to go this way, even though you can figure out… But this is not the question problem that you have. This is just random. The question problem, no, but it solves a separate study that we had about the ability to know the good from knowing what something is and the requirements for moral education as a prerequisite for that.

Student: Well, because you don’t know what you are, either.

Instructor: Right, but I’m saying if I would understand the truth of what I am, then I would know the good, right? The problem is for me to know the truth of what I am I need to be I need to start this cycle somewhere which requires education right well maybe no this is that’s a problem what you’re raising is a problem I think.

Student: In other words if this solves the problem if there’s a good argument.

Instructor: No if there’s a really good argument for ethics yeah if teleology whatever it would be a really good argument then you can make bad people good by the argument this is what Socrates believes this is the question if if the good can can be taught but seems to be very it seems like all that talk about the need for education is saying that this is not really correct at least not a practice you might need to be good in order to in order to be taught.

Student: No because the poet everyone could recognize arguments even the slave in the in the in the amino everyone could recognize arguments the statement with all geometry thing.

Instructor: Well that’s not that’s an argument for what your soul already has. So it’s opposite. But I mean, does that mean that *Mitzvot She’asei Chumachayev* [rational commandments] implies that you don’t need it?

Mitzvot Sichliyot: Rav Saadia vs. Rambam

Instructor: That’s what Rav Saadia holds. Rav Saadia holds that. Rambam doesn’t agree. Yeah?

Student: Rambam doesn’t use that language?

Instructor: No. Who else uses this language? Rav Saadia, sorry, Rambam. Very common phrase, no? *Mitzvot She’asei*, it’s Rav Saadia. Rav Saadia came up with it. And Rambam explicitly criticized him for this. And because, yeah.

Student: Who? The mayor? Where is he?

Instructor: Also here. Not in this chapter and later this is only the fourth chapter he explicitly criticizes him for this he said the reason for his where’s the full one the reason for his criticism is because he thinks that the things that the society calls are not they’re something of which there’s no cycle really they’re good they’re about the good and many times works with the assumption.

Student: A political good, meaning?

Instructor: Yeah, a political good is not knowable and not knowable in the same way as, it’s not provable in the same way as like science and philosophy. It’s not a demonstration. Because even not killing and so on, like basic morals, are not really, according to the Rambam, are not strictly demonstrable. There’s no demonstration for that. This is something that Aristotle says sometimes also and it contradicts the point where there are arguments like like the function argument, and things like that. And this is a problem. OK, anyways, I’ve just…