Humility as a foundation for ethical thought ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Humility as a foundation for ethical thought

As I have been working on creating a secularized Jewish ethical system, I've been noticing that some basic facts that apply to the Jewish people, to Judaism or even to religion altogether are difficult to port over or universalize. There are some specific features of Judaism that makes applying the ethical components more challenging- for example, ethical decisions in the secular world do not have the same obligatory nature that commandments from God do.

While I believe, based on my testing with my AskHillel AI chatbot, that the secularized system I created so far already far outperforms any secular system out there, I want to identify the gaps and see how the Jewish particularism can be most effectively universalized. This also helps surface features of both the Jewish and secular systems that are not often discussed.

One example that I've been thinking about is humility. Not humility as a human value, but humility as a building block for ethical philosophy itself.

Humility is more foundational in Judaism than you might think. Moses was the greatest prophet because he was the most humble person. Hebrew scripture is filled with stories of how the greatest Jewish figures like Aaron and King David made mistakes. The Talmud is the antithesis of Plato's Cave - instead of positioning the rabbis as being on a higher intellectual plane than everyone else, the Talmud is filled with stories where rabbis learn wisdom from their wives, children, slaves and non-Jews. This is explicit in Pirkei Avot: "Who is wise, one who learns from all people." Everyone, from great to small, must identify and repent from their sins and mistakes every year.

This is reflected in Jewish law. A basic assumption in Jewish law is that sometimes we cannot know the answer. The legal system builds in structures to handle this uncertainty - for example, safek - things that are indeterminate, like whether twilight is halachically considered day or night.

Many schools of secular philosophy have hubris built in rather than humility. (Not all - in recent decades the idea of uncertainty has become more mainstream.) The simplistic rules behind utilitarianism and duty-based ethics include an assumption of certainty - that they understand how the world works. Some will confidently misapply the rules of logic or mathematics or physics to metaphysics and ethics, as if different domains are all the same. Even today, philosophy forums online are characterized with at least as much of a sneering superiority and smug condescension as any political forum is.

The reason for this, I believe, is the secular nature of modern philosophy itself. Talmudic rabbis were humble because they had a constant awareness of the infinite intelligence of God, and the absolute knowledge that compared to God, the difference between their own intelligence and that of the shoemaker is infinitesimal. Rabbinic humility isn’t about low self-esteem - it’s about accurate self-location in a world filled with mystery and inhabited by God.

Secularists keep thinking that science will answer everything and that they are on the cusp of finally understanding the world fully. They have been on this cusp for centuries, and new riddles keep arising. Yet their misplaced confidence remains. Believers, on the other hand, are keenly and constantly aware that they can never know everything, and they approach everything with the sense that seeking knowledge is a never ending quest and we are barely starting.

Some of history’s worst moral wrongs, like communism, came not from ethical confusion - but from ethical certainty without humility.

Jewish ethics has this humility built in. Don't throw out an answer with confidence - there can always be additional factors we are unaware of that can change the ethical decision. Jewish ethics has baked-in epistemic humility. Humility is not the absence of conviction, rather it it is the refusal to pretend omniscience. It is not just a personal or societal value: humility must be put in the architecture of ethical reasoning itself.

Humility is not incompatible with secularism. But it comes more naturally with faith. If secularists want to be ethical, it means they have to redouble their efforts to understand that they don't know everything - and use that as an impetus to always learn more.

Maybe if science classes emphasized more of what we don't know than what we know, it will result not only in increased secular humility but also in more incentive to learn more about the mysteries of the universe.