Jewish ethics isn't physics ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Jewish ethics isn't physics

During the Enlightenment, some of the most famous Western philosophers were inspired by physics. The simple beauty of Newtonian equations, like F = ma, caused many to think that if physical laws could be described so elegantly, then human ethics can similarly be reduced to a small set of universal laws.

Immanuel Kant said "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." Jeremy Bentham said that an action is moral if it tends to promote universal happiness or pleasure and immoral if it tends to produce unhappiness or pain, and proposed a "felicific calculus" to calculate the pleasure or pain from an action. Ayn Rand said one's ethical duty is to maximize one's own benefit in any given situation. They and others attempted to shoehorn all humanity, all decisions, all actions into their moral calculators.

There's only one problem. Ethics are not physics. People are not objects.

These philosophers were recognized as the wisest people in the Western world. Their desire to fit the diverse population of humans, each with their own experiences, their own cultures and their own viewpoints, into a rational structure are laughable. Arguing about which philosophy of ethics is superior is a fun intellectual exercise, but it doesn't mean that any of them are right.

Of course it is seductive to try to find a formula to explain how people should act. That desire to make everything simple has no bearing on reality. In fact, it proves that even the people that are supposed to be the most rational creatures themselves - philosophers - fall for wishful thinking rather than see things as they are.

While they try to fit humans into their worldview, Judaism creates a worldview to accommodate humans as they really are. And you cannot make everything fit on a bumper sticker.

It is true that Hillel said "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow," which sounds a lot like what some of these philosophers said. But he added, "That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." The maxim is only the starting point, not the entire philosophy. That "commentary" is a lifetime effort.

Remember that Hillel said this to an arrogant person insisting on a bite-sized Torah. His response showed respect for a disrespectful question and a way to attract him to a lifetime of studying Jewish ethics. His message was not merely his words but also his delivery and the context.

That is real wisdom.

It isn't only human ethics that cannot be boiled down to Newton's equations. Ironically, even physics itself can't be described accurately that way. Quantum mechanics broke that illusion of perfect predictability. The universe is a lot more complex than Newton or the Enlightenment philosophers could ever imagine. If you insist on an analogy between ethics and physics, perhaps you can say that:

The core values of Judaism (life, truth, dignity, responsibility, justice) are like the constants of nature.
The adjudication layer is like the wave function—fluid, contextual, probabilistic, but still governed by laws.
The integrity layer is like the observer effect in quantum mechanics. The outcome depends in part on who’s asking, how, and why. An electron can act like a wave or like a particle, and both of those are correct depending on how it is viewed.

But that is all it is - an analogy. It represents a way of looking at things and it can approximate a view of Jewish ethics but we should not fall for the same fallacy that the philosophers did: wishing that an analogy to physics reflects reality does not make it so.

Physics describes what is. Ethics prescribes what ought to be. Jewish ethics does not treat people like bowling balls dropped from a building or electrons around a nucleus. Equating moral complexity to an equation inevitably produces systems that are brittle, blind to the myriad of circumstances around the issues, and vulnerable to immoral conclusions.

Jewish ethics, by contrast, has always acknowledged that human beings are complex and flawed, that moral decisions are embedded in particular times, places, and relationships, and that principles must be balanced with each other, not arbitrarily prioritized. This flexibility isn’t relativism - it is a principled pluralism with internal consistency. The laws of physics are immutable, while Jewish ethical decisions can and must change to reflect the messy reality that we humans live in.