Jewish Ethics vs. the Regress Problem: What Secular Philosophy Missed ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, July 07, 2025

Jewish Ethics vs. the Regress Problem: What Secular Philosophy Missed

Anyone with children has experienced t least one day when the child asks "Why?" - and continues to ask "Why?" for every answer given,

It turns out that secular moral philosophy has that same problem, without being able to respond with exasperation, "Because I said so!"

Faith-based moral philosophy (at least Western ones) always has an answer: God said so, so you cannot argue. But one of the goals of secular ethics was to come up with a system that can answer "how can morality exist without God?"

This "regress problem" is the Achilles' heel of most secular ethical systems. Utilitarianism gets stuck defending why pleasure matters. Kant struggles to explain why rationality should be treated as sacred. Human rights theories often default to circular appeals to “human dignity,” which themselves lack grounding.

The AskHillel system I have been working on, to secularize Jewish ethics, would seem to have the same problem - without God, why should anyone do anything moral? And how does one decide what is moral and what is not?

But when I fed this question into AskHillel, it gave an answer that is radically different from what the past 400 years of secular philosophy has come up with.

AskHillel shifts the grounding question from “what can be proven?” to “what can be ethically justified through practice?” In other words, instead of asking a question about theoretical physics, it asks one about real world engineering*. Jews have a history of thousands of years of practicing an ethical system that has been attacked from all directions, and it has withstood the challenges.

AskHillel doesn’t pretend that its core values are self-evident or logically deduced. It openly begins with selected axioms, like "Truth Exists, Right and Wrong Are Real, Human Dignity is Inviolable" because a world in which they are denied is unlivable.

In other words, the system begins not with epistemic certainty but moral responsibility. It stakes its claim not on deduction, but on livability. It says, in essence, "We choose these values because without them, civilization collapses into either tyranny, relativism, or incoherence." Once these axioms are defined, everything else can be determined to be a value by its fidelity to the axioms.

AskHillel doesn’t ground values in logic. It grounds them in what they enable.

It asks: Does this value, if treated as foundational…

Allow obligation without coercion?
Enable transparency without manipulation?
Support correction without collapse?
Provide durability without dogma?

This is a systems test - not a syllogism. And if a value meets these standards, it becomes justified not because it’s the “right answer” to an abstract problem, but because it produces a moral world worth living in.

This is Judaism’s response to the regress: Choose values not because they terminate a logical chain, but because they sustain a moral civilization.

A thoughtful skeptic recently asked: “Absent God, why should anyone treat Exodus as authoritative?”

AskHillel’s answer is instructive. It doesn’t appeal to divine command theory. It says:

Outside of Jewish covenantal life, Exodus is just a text.
Within it, it is a shared moral inheritance — one that commands not because it wins debates, but because it built a civilization committed to law over power, dignity over fear, and hope over despair.

That’s not metaphysics. That’s covenantal realism. That is ethical engineering.

So the anchor of AskHillel is not God per se - it’s the layered sense of belonging, responsibility, and inheritance that covenant provides. In secular terms: community-bound obligation rooted in a historical ethical tradition.

In the absence of ultimate proofs, AskHillel substitutes something more useful: integrity under pressure.

It shows its logic.
It names its assumptions.
It admits when it must override or adapt.
It keeps a moral audit trail.
And when it fails, it knows how to do teshuvah - to repair, not just retract. (Well, I need to program it for that - it is not self correcting.)

In short, it replaces certainty with accountability.

AskHillel itself wrote:

We are not spared regress. We are instead invited to stand somewhere, to declare our commitments, and to make them accountable.
That is the ethical wager AskHillel makes.

This isn’t just a clever workaround. It may be something new: a system that doesn’t collapse in the face of regress, because it doesn’t depend on terminating it.

Most secular systems secretly hope their first principle won’t be questioned. AskHillel expects it will be. And it’s designed to stand anyway — not because it’s airtight, but because it’s transparent, corrigible, and morally functional. Ask "why?" all you want - we will try to answer, but if we can't, you are invited to build an alternative method that works as well.

That’s not relativism. That’s covenantal moral architecture.

This reminds me of a great Jewish joke, and I cannot resist:

A yeshiva student gets married, moves into a home with his wife, and comes to his rabbi before Sukkot to ask how to build a Sukkah. The rabbi points him to certain pages in Gemara Sukkah, and to a long comment of Rashi that digests the discussions on those pages into a set of clear instructions.
The student follows the instructions to the letter, spending days meticulously acquiring the proper materials, then building and decorating his fine Succah. The first night of Sukkot, though, a mild wind demolishes the entire structure.
On Chol haMoed the student re-builds the structure, only to have it again collapse at the first gust of wind. The student tries a third time, but again meets with failure.
The student, devastated, comes back to his rabbi and tells him the story. The rabbi listens patiently, then smiles knowingly and tells his student, “Yes, you're right - Tosafot asks that question!”