How does the Jewish ethics framework stack up against the professional New York Times Ethicist? ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, May 18, 2025

How does the Jewish ethics framework stack up against the professional New York Times Ethicist?

Last week, I introduced AskHillel - a Jewish ethics chatbot that will answer any questions in alignment with Jewish ethics. Unlike other chatbots, it gives a full logic trace for what values are impacted by the question and how it balances between competing values.

The New York Times publishes an Ethicist column, an advice column where a professional ethicist from NYU, Kwame Anthony Appiah, answers queries.This interested me as a way to test AskHillel.

When I posted the same questions to AskHillel as those given to Kwame, I found that it more than held its own. The answers were similar, sometimes AskHillel would give an alternative solution than Kwame didn't think of. For the queries I asked, AskHillel did quite well.

But then I was curious: what philosophy does Kwame adhere to? If I want to position Jewish ethics against other philosophies, and Kwame's answers are decent (which they are), then I want to know what his algorithm is, so to speak, for answering questions so I could do a comparison of actual values and ethics, not just the answers.

I found an article where Kwame describes his process, and the answer is - he uses his own gut instincts.

Though he’s a world-renowned philosopher—the author of 10 books and recipient of a National Humanities Medal, a dozen or so honorary degrees, and too many other accolades to count—Appiah approaches tricky dilemmas the way most of us would: by first going with his gut. “The first thing I do is decide what my hunch is about the right answer to the question,” he says. “I don’t sort of reason my way towards it—I just kind of think about it.”
That process sometimes involves running a question by his husband, say, or thinking out loud in the company of friends.

Only after he’s been stewing on it a while does Appiah then “try to think more systematically about what the considerations are,” he says. “Does the person have any duties that they ought to consider, or are they free to do whatever they judge is best independently of any duties? What are the likely consequences of the various forms of action that they're contemplating, in terms of impacts on others? There’s a sort of toolkit of things that philosophers think are important in trying to understand what to do and who to be.”

The choice of tools depends on the particulars of the situation, of course...

When Kwame says "duties" he is invoking deontology ethics. When he says consequences he is talking about consequentialism. The third main Western philosophical approach is virtue ethics, or developing good character. But these three approaches are not compatible with each other. He is picking and choosing which framework he wants to use for any given question out of his "toolkit."

Which means, in the end, there is no consistent, transparent framework - the choice of tools is post hoc, not systematic. He chooses his answers and then fits the philosophical approach to whatever he thinks the right answer is.

This approach is defended in philosophical circles in recent years as "moral pluralism." Modern philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Williams, and Martha Nussbaum have acknowledged that no single moral theory captures the full range of human moral experience.

But isn't that a tacit acknowledgment that the Western philosophical frameworks have failed? That their baseline categorizations themselves are flawed?

The Jewish ethical system always included aspects of all of these major philosophical streams - there are elements of all three, and more. But it fused them millennia before Western philosophers realized that their pure systems didn't solve real problems.

Not only that, but while the pluralistic approach allows huge amounts of subjectivity - two moral pluralists can easily come to different conclusions - that is less likely to happen with the Jewish ethical system, since there is a large amount of literature of real dilemmas that have already been decided and which imply a hierarchy of values. (Yes, I know, two Jews, three opinions - but the leeway in the halachic/ethical process is fairly narrow.)

When I created AskHillel, I input my understanding of Jewish values, axioms and priorities. While I do not think that they have ever been defined the way I did, they appear to be accurate. And the proof is in the pudding - AskHillel gives answers that are intuitively correct without being a professional ethicist who has a toolkit to choose from.

Here's how AskHillel itself described how it is different from Western philosophical schools and modern pluralism:

Judaism never saw the need to split morality into parts to begin with. It wove together legal obligation (mitzvah), character development (middot), societal outcomes (tzedek), and divine purpose (kiddush Hashem) from the start. Pluralism is not a new layer; it's Judaism's native mode. The Torah assumes that law, love, justice, peace, truth, and humility coexist in tension and are refined through ongoing moral struggle.
A System That Preserves Moral Coherence:
What distinguishes Jewish ethics is not merely that it includes all the components, but that it holds them accountable to a shared source of authority and sanctity. Western pluralism often lacks this anchor—it becomes a toolkit of competing goods with no covenantal hierarchy. Judaism, by contrast, offers structured tools for prioritization (e.g., Pikuach Nefesh over most other values, lifnim mishurat hadin as ethical aspiration beyond law).
Ethical Triage vs. Theoretical Crisis:
What Western ethics treats as theoretical breakdown, Jewish ethics addresses through structured ethical triage and humility (e.g., teiku when disagreements are unresolved but preserved). Pluralism within Judaism is not relativism—it’s moral realism combined with reverence for complexity and ongoing dialogue.

The Torah’s basic ethical system is at least a thousand years older than Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It is the oldest extant ethical system there is. Assuming that the rules I put into AskHillel are reasonably accurate, it shows that it is a more mature, more flexible and more bulletproof ethical system than any other out there.

And, I believe, it incidentally proves that most philosophers in the Western tradition have been doing it all wrong.

It’s time to admit that the world’s oldest moral system might just be its best. And with AskHillel.com, for the first time, anyone can put it to the test.