Where does ethics come from?
Should we clone people?
Is there such a thing as a life not worth living?
When is it right to go to war?
Is terrorism always wrong?
Is there something wrong with same-sex marriage?
Could abortion ever be legalized?
The list of ethical dilemmas of the 21st century is endless.
The fundamental question in this regard is: how and with what biases do we respond to these ethical dilemmas?
In fact, this is a question that preoccupied early philosophers.
In Western philosophy, there are generally three views regarding the origin of ethics.
Firstly, there is the “Divine Command Ethics Theory,” which states that ethics originates from God; that God’s commands are arbitrarily good and ethical.
The counter-argument to this maintains that this view leads to the absurdity that God could, in theory, decree that adultery is ethical. If someone argues that God cannot do this, they are admitting that ethical standards are defined by something outside of God.
Continuing the “Divine Command Theory” is the “Form Theory,” proposed by Plato, which maintains that there is an independent “form” outside of God, which is the absolute standard of morality and ethics.
The problem here is that this absolute standard has never been revealed to a space-time world, so one could never be certain that the absolute standard of ethics has been reached. We therefore face the original dilemma: what is ethical?
The third view holds that all knowledge is relative to the individual, in which case there can be no absolute morality: all ethics are relative to circumstances, people, and cultures. This view is also problematic because, taken to its logical conclusion, ethics does not exist.
There is an “enigmatic” verse in the Torah that seems to be directly related to this debate. God says to Moses:
Leviticus 19:2 Speak to the whole congregation of the children of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.
The command “You shall be holy” sparks debate among commentators.
Some maintain that it means one should be particularly careful in matters of sexual morality.
Predicating their view on the Talmud, others maintain that it refers to the need to remain self-disciplined even in matters that do not entail any prohibition in the Torah.
According to this, “you shall be holy” implores us to always be abstemious and self-disciplined when it comes to material pleasures.
Interestingly, this interpretation of the verse is identical to Aristotle’s view on how human ethical conduct should be determined.
“You shall be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy” may seem a rather vague argument for ethical conduct; However, it encapsulates a tremendously profound explanation of the origins of ethics.
God created man “in His image.”
It should be noted, however, that God’s attributes are perfect and infinitely different from those of humans.
So, when the Torah says that God’s ethical (Holy) nature is a reason for humans to be ethical (holy), it means that the origin of morality comes from God Himself.
The perfect form, the standard-bearer of perfect morality, which Plato saw as being outside of God, actually originates from within God Himself.
God is revealing that the ethical laws written in the Torah are not merely relative moral laws or an intellectual analysis of human nature that leads to grounded assumptions about what is and is not ethical.
Instead, the ethical laws found in the Torah are a divine revelation of that perfect divine form that is a paradigm for ethical human conduct.
In truth, there is no surer way to be certain of what is ethical and what is not than to have the standard-bearer of ethical conduct reveal it to us.
Therefore, when confronted with the enormous ethical dilemmas of the 21st century, there is only one place to turn for answers: to the perfect form that is the origin of ethics, as manifested in the Torah, which is the Word, Yeshua himself.
Shalom aleichem