Showing posts with label Jewish ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jewish ethics. Show all posts

Monday, July 28, 2025

A recent British survey shows that more than half of the public think Islam is not compatible with British values.

As my followers know I have been working on universalizing Jewish ethics, and this includes a value-centric view of humanity. Every person, organization, political entity and defined group of people have a value system - a set of values that is both explicit and often implicit. 

In the course of my work on universalizing Jewish ethics, I came up with the concept of an ethoskeleton. This is a set of attributes that are a prerequisite for a moral system to work in a positive way. The concern is not with sincerity or piety, but with systemic architecture: the ability of a moral system to self-regulate, prevent abuse, and resolve moral conflicts transparently
 
 They include:
  • Corrigibility (Can self-correct)
  • Transparency (Explainable logic)
  • Dignity (Respects human worth)
  • Relational Integrity (Contextually aware)
  • Override Logic (Can resolve conflicts)
  • Anavah (Epistemic humility)
This is a fairly high bar. But without each of these in place, any moral system can degenerate into immorality. It can be hijacked by malicious actors, minor values can be exaggerated to override major values, it can be poorly interpreted without a transparent process to keep it on course. 

Christianity and Judaism as they exist today pass most of the tests, so the ethoskeleton is not biased against religion. However, Islam as institutionally practiced in much of the Sunni world, and often imported uncritically into diaspora contexts, lacks key elements of the ethoskeleton. (This does not apply universally to all expressions of Islam to my understanding.) Sharia  law cannot evolve within Islam today, Islamic legal rulings are inaccessible to non-scholars so their logic is not widely available and opaque, and most flavors of Islam asserts epistemic superiority, not humility.

As examples, Islam as it exists today can assert that martyrdom is the highest purpose of man, or that honor is worth more than life itself, or that Islam's support for bigamy is a higher value than a national law against the practice. These are nor moral positions that value life and human dignity above all. They may be consistent but they cannot easily coexist with other ethical systems, and there is a straight line from Islam's ethoskeletal failures and the values going awry. 

When looked from this perspective, Islam, as practiced today, cannot be guaranteed to be a moral system. 

The British people's instinct that Islam is incompatible with British values seems sound. British values include celebrating satire including of religion while Islam rejects  of any blasphemy, mocking prophets or drawing Mohammed. That by itself is a serious value clash.

If the Muslim community would adopt the ethoskeleton as a basis for any moral system, things would be much different. Fiery preachers could be held to account and criticized publicly, forcing them to publicly and transparently defend their positions. Value clashes like importance of human life vs. martyrdom and honor could be well defined. 

I am not saying here that this proves that Islam is immoral. I am saying that it does not have the minimum requirements necessary to resist it being perverted into an immoral system. 






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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 



As antisemitism and other forms of hate proliferate in social media, mainstream media and elsewhere, the question is how this can be handled without hurting the concept of free speech itself?

Looking at this through the lens of values can help both define the problem more precisely and lead to a potential solution. 

When one uses the language of rights, with respect to free speech and everything else, it implies that the right is an absolute good. But rights are not inalienable. They are always limited in some way - right to property does not justify theft, right to life doesn't mean an army cannot send one into a dangerous situation, and right to liberty doesn't mean that you can drive through a red light. 

It is much more accurate to think of these in terms of values. Free speech is a value, and an important one, but like most values, it can clash with other values - the value of life, the value of privacy, the value of living one's life without harassment. When values conflict, rules must be made to navigate these competing values. And when we change from the language of rights to that of values, it is much easier for people to see the reality - rights sound inviolable while values must be weighed.

Free speech doesn't only conflict with other values - it can also help strengthen other values like truth-seeking, accountability, exposing injustice, and individual conscience. 

As such, speech is never morally neutral. Words shape behavior, culture, and society. They can build or destroy, clarify or confuse. How can we strengthen speech that contributes to society while combating speech that is detrimental?

Most people understand that free speech is not truly unlimited. Direct incitement to murder or genocide is not free speech in any jurisdiction I am aware of. There are existing laws against those, if only sporadically enforced.

Yet some of the most dangerous speech does not call for violence directly. Instead, it prepares the ground for violence by dehumanizing others, spreading conspiracies, or creating an atmosphere of fear and rage. This kind of speech - what we might call enabling speech - does not always break the law, but it erodes public safety in predictable ways.

When this speech spreads during times of heightened tension or real-world threats, it is not enough to defend it in the name of abstract freedom. If we know that certain patterns of speech regularly precede violence or discrimination, then allowing them to go unchecked is a form of moral negligence. Calling speech a "right" muddies the waters here - when speech creates an environment of hate it cannot be let off the hook as an unchallenged, unlimited value. 

This isn't a theoretical concern. Increased levels of hate directly contributed to the deaths of  Jews in the fatal firebombing in Boulder and the shooting outside the Jewish museum in Washington. People's lives are at risk, and speech is part of the pattern that lead to murder. 

This is where artificial intelligence can play a constructive role. Rather than acting as a digital judge, AI can serve as a kind of moral sensor: tracking when real-world incitement is rising and temporarily limiting the amplification of speech that historically contributes to it.

So, for example, when an AI on a social media platform sees more posts that directly call for harm to a group of people, it can trigger a protocol where posts that demean that group, or that call for attacking a subset of that group, or that in general can contribute to an atmosphere that can prompt viewers towards hate, to put guardrails in place. 

These guardrails can include limiting the reach of such posts, telling the posters that their specific post is enabling harm and may be re-written and adding notes to posts pointing out their use of harmful stereotypes. It must be made clear that these steps are temporary, only as long as the hate and incitement are endangering real people. 

This is not a system of permanent censorship. It is a form of ethical triage - prioritizing safety and dignity when the moral climate becomes dangerously unstable. The approach is not about banning ideas or silencing people. It is about recognizing patterns of harm and acting with caution when danger levels rise. Just as societies adjust behavior during natural disasters or public health emergencies, we can adjust how speech is managed during periods of heightened social risk.

Critics will ask whether such a system could chill legitimate dissent. That is a fair concern. But the goal is not to suppress criticism or unpopular views. The system focuses only on times and contexts where certain types of rhetoric, even if legal, predictably contribute to real-world danger. It uses moderation tools sparingly, applies them transparently, and provides opportunities for correction.

Speech, in this model, is not treated as untouchable, but as a serious moral act. Like all powerful acts, it carries responsibility. And when the stakes are high - when lives or public trust are on the line - that responsibility must be taken seriously.

In a moral society, no single value can stand entirely alone. Free speech matters deeply, but it must walk alongside other values like human dignity, public safety, and truth. When those values come into conflict, responsible societies do not pick favorites. They balance, they weigh, and they respond with care.

Free speech is not sacred because it is untouchable. It is sacred because of what it protects. And when it stops protecting and starts enabling harm, a moral society must step in: not to silence, but to correct, to heal, and to preserve what really matters.





Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 

Monday, July 21, 2025

The United States is now in its 250th year, and this is a true milestone in human history. When we talk about America, we mean the unparalleled freedom that America represents. It represents a new way of governance and it has affected the world in uncountable positive ways.

But freedom is one of those concepts that can easily be misused and hijacked. What, exactly, does it mean in a moral system?

When we talk about freedom, we usually mean the ability to act without external restraint - to choose one's path, speak one's mind, and shape one's life without interference. In many secular ethical systems, particularly those rooted in liberal individualism, freedom is equated with autonomy: the right of the individual to determine their own values and actions. Sometimes it is framed as "freedom from" being limited in some way, sometimes as "freedom to" pursue one's goals, but either way, the concept generally assumes that liberty is defined by independence.

However, this definition misses the most fundamental fact about humans: we are part of a larger world. Unless you are a monk on a mountaintop, you are in relationship with others. This means that your decisions carry weight beyond yourself. 

Choices are not made in a vacuum. In reality, we are never morally alone. Every decision we make has consequences, whether for ourselves or for others. Every value we act upon transforms the world in some way. This recognition undercuts the notion of morally neutral autonomy. If our actions always affect someone, then every choice carries ethical weight.

Once we recognize that our lives are embedded in a web of relationships, the meaning of freedom changes. Autonomy does not disappear, but it is no longer the absence of obligation. Rather, it becomes entwined with obligation. Freedom becomes the space in which we exercise our agency within relationships of consequence and care. Moral responsibility is not something externally imposed by law or religion; it is a natural consequence of being a self who acts in a world shared with others. 

Even when you make a decision that seems to be about you alone, it entails responsibility. Because you are not only dealing with yourself as you are today, but the person you will be tomorrow. Just as you have responsibilities for the others in your life, you have responsibilities to your future self. Your decisions shape that person. 

Moreover, you also have a responsibility to your past.  Your history, your ancestors, your background helps shape who you are and unless your heritage perpetuates harm, you bear some responsibility to honor and evolve it  - not by preserving it unchanged, but by carrying forward what is good. We do not only exist at this moment in time but we must maintain an awareness of how we got here and where we want to go. 

Once this is recognized, freedom is not defined by the absence of rules, but by the presence of ethical purpose. To be free is not simply to choose, but to choose in a way that honors the dignity of others and sustains the moral ecosystem we inhabit. The question is not "what am I allowed to do?" but "what am I responsible for, given who I affect?"

AskHillel, the ethical system I’ve been developing based on Jewish thinking, is one of the only fully structured ethical systems built from the ground up on the truth that to be human is to be morally entangled. Responsibility and obligation is baked in; respect for the dignity of others is non-negotiable, and you have a concentric circle of obligations outbound from yourself and your family to your community, your country and the world. Relationships aren't incidental to the system - they are the very core of the system. And this reflects the way we really are, not some idealized concept of personhood.

Therefore, freedom is sacred not because it is limitless, but because it is answerable. The mature exercise of freedom means asking not only what is possible, but what is right - not from fear of consequence, but from fidelity to the relationships that give our lives meaning.

Morality isn't a restriction on freedom. It shapes what freedom itself means. 




Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 

Wednesday, July 16, 2025



There are many ways to try to figure out the world. 

You can look at history as being a series of events, facts and actions. Or you can look at the world as chronology: either how trends are cyclical or progress towards completion. Some look at the world as simply the sum total of physics and biology with little rhyme or reason. Some modern theories say that the world must be viewed through the lens of power struggles, domination and resistance. And others see the world as a series of narratives.

As I have embedded myself in my Jewish ethics project, I think that these are all very incomplete. I believe that the most accurate way to see the world is as if values are the atoms of our universe.

Time, in this view, simply provides the sequence.  Actions are putting the values into motion. But values are the driver for those decisions to act. Values tell us why something mattered, not just when it happened.

The AskHillel AI I built, using this framework,  ends up being very good at interpreting things way beyond what we would normally call ethics. It is built with values, so it looks at the world that way. Because Jewish thinking looks at contradiction as not a problem but as something to be understood and reconciled, it naturally tries to find consistent patterns by seeking the underlying values that might explain what seems contradictory.

Jewish thinking, especially Talmudic and halachic thinking, has the concept of a "derech," a consistent way to reconcile rabbinic positions. AskHillel looks for a derech in not only ethics but in history, sociology, psychology, AI - really any human centered field, centered on values. And it does a surprisingly good job when it uses that prism.

Last week I asked Gemini AI to give a list of the most perplexing people in history, and AskHillel gave an analysis of their biographies by seeing how well they lived by Jewish values and by applying a "derechological" framework. The results were quite sophisticated analyses - certainly university political science paper level. Here, for example, is part of AskHillel's comparison of the "derachot" of Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong:

🔍 Moral & Strategic Blueprint Insights
Common Derachot:
Both used revolution as operational permission, ideology to shroud power consolidation, and charisma/institutional cults to maintain control.

Key Differences:
Mao’s derachot were more systemically violent, doctrinally infused into governance, and ideologically totalizing—impacting social structures, economics, and inner-party theology at massive scale.

Castro’s blueprint remained tactically authoritarian but rhetorically revolutionary; Mao’s was philosophically totalitarian, with ideological extremism as a structural necessity.

📌 Final Ethical Reflection
Both leaders present coherent moral-strategic patterns: revolutionary ethics used to justify authoritarian rule. But Mao’s derachot are far more radical and comprehensive. He fused ideology with violence—not just as an occasional tool—but as the engine of sustained political order.

Castro deployed authoritarianism with revolutionary theater; Mao made revolution the infrastructure of authority.
It also did an analysis of the "derachot" of corporations, Supreme Court decisions over time, and  Biblical books. It then came up with "chiddushim" - novel insights - as to how charismatic people or  some authoritarian leaders bend values around their own ambitions - which are often negative values themselves. 

The sophistication of these analyses indicates that values might be the most accurate way to look at many, if not most, human based fields. They are, truly, the fundamental building blocks of our world.

Philosophers call the study of values axiology. Call this theory "axiological primacy."

When you look at the world this way, philosophical problems melt away. Humans don't have values as external properties - we are the sum of our values in a fundamental sense. Values aren't external to us, they are a part of us. If the "is" of Hume's Law are values, then the "ought" comes naturally. 

I am not the first one to come up with this idea, but we took it further. 

There are a lot of values out there, but it seems that most people have their values set from a young age. Morality isn't that you take on all values - for most people, it is to do the best with the values that your own personality has already adopted. 

This fits in with Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. Rambam (Maimonides) says something similar - that people have different innate temperaments (middot) which form the raw material for their moral development.  

In this sense, we can say that for each of us, values are relatively stable and moral growth is learning when and how to act on them. If you are going in the wrong direction, that is where you can re-align - or, in Judaism, do teshuva (repentance.) 

The world is not just a series of events or a sequence of time. It is the sum total of our moral decisions, based on our values. A biography is the story of a person's value decisions. History is the interaction between different national or leaders'  values. Perhaps psychology is really the study of individual values and therapy is about changing people's derech to aim to fulfill their own personal values.

This is a powerful way to look at the world. It centers our own agency. Natural disaster just happen, but human decisions don't - and history is the story of decisions based on values. 

Living up to our values is  what gives life meaning. And nothing is more important than that.



Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 

Monday, July 14, 2025




Modern philosophy, for all its brilliance and rigor, often suffers from a foundational flaw: it tends to treat abstraction as an end in itself. In its pursuit of purity, it frequently drifts into a mode of intellectualism that detaches thought from responsibility, treating moral dilemmas as puzzles, and ethical obligations as thought experiments. In this sense, modern philosophy can be seen as engaged in a quiet but profound flight from responsibility.

Think about philosophy's concept of  "mind–body dualism," the idea that the mind and the body are separate entities. This can lead to profoundly unethical results, where actions are divorced from the mind, and responsibility for actions evaporates.

Or the idea of skeptical solipsism - the view that only one's own mind is knowable, casting doubt on the reality of others’ minds or the external world  This can be used to avoid any relationships, any interaction with one's community and family, all in the name of philosophy.

But perhaps most of all is philosophy's love of abstraction - of puzzling out questions like "when does a pile of sand become a heap?" Solving theoretical problems is only meaningful when they can be leveraged to solve real problems, but too often philosophy elevates these questions as if finding the answers are themselves moral imperatives.

AskHillel, the secular framework for Jewish ethical reasoning, offers a radical alternative. 

It looks at philosophy through the same prism that it looks at every human endeavor to see if it meets the preconditions for any ethical system to be morally trustworthy, what can be called the ethoskeletal axioms. 

Corrigibility – Can the idea self-repair or evolve in the face of moral critique? Many philosophical systems treat themselves as closed; AskHillel demands iterative integrity.

Transparency – Can the reasoning process be laid bare, or does it obscure its premises behind jargon? Much of modern philosophy fails to show its scaffolding.

Dignity – Does the idea uphold the innate worth of human beings? Abstract systems like solipsism or utilitarian totalism often erase this.

Override Logic – Can the system resolve value conflict responsibly, or does it collapse into paralysis or binary thinking?

Relational Integrity – Does it account for roles, covenant, and responsibility within relationships? Philosophies of hyper-individualism often fail here.

Epistemic Humility – Does the idea acknowledge the limits of certainty, or does it weaponize doubt or claim moral infallibility?

To be sure, not all philosophies are equal, and each kind will respond differently to this test. But many classic philosophical constructs falter when tested against these axioms. Solipsism fails dignity, relational integrity, and override logic. Mind-body dualism often dodges corrigibility and relational grounding. Infinite regress paralyzes moral clarity under the guise of epistemic rigor. Even elegant thought systems, when left abstract, violate transparency and dignity by refusing to take a stand.

AskHillel challenges the assumption that philosophy must float free of moral gravity. It insists instead that ideas must be lived, not just theorized. Concepts must be inhabited, not merely defined.

The essence of AskHillel's way of looking at the world lies in a simple inversion: abstraction is not dismissed, but grounded. Its test is not whether a concept is internally consistent, but whether it helps sustain a moral structure that holds under pressure. In this sense, AskHillel doesn't just practicalize philosophy; it elevates it. By asking what any given abstraction demands of us ethically, AskHillel performs a kind of secular sanctification, adding meaning to what had been seen as a mind puzzle.

Take, for instance, the Ship of Theseus. This is a famous metaphysical riddle about identity: if every part of a ship is replaced over time, is it still the same ship? 

AskHillel doesn't discard the question: it reframes it. When does a person, institution, or nation remain morally accountable despite internal transformation? If a company employed slaves in the past, is it still responsible to fix the harm many decades later after it has changed management, headquarters, employees, its own mission statement?  This is no longer a riddle; it's a diagnostic for teshuvah, justice, and communal continuity. Abstract becomes actionable.

Or consider the Sorites paradox which asks when a collection of grains becomes a "heap."   AskHillel hears a deeper ethical call: when does small acts of harm accumulate? When does silence become complicity? When does a fetus become a human? Jewish ethics is attuned to continuity as opposed to the discreteness often assumed in philosophy, but sometimes there is a line that is crossed - where exactly is that line?  The question of a "heap" becomes a test of Areivut (responsibility) and dignity.

For this article, I created a completely new concept I called  "qwertyism, " defined as the irritation felt when someone takes a parking spot you were eyeing. A traditional philosopher might analyze its taxonomy: Is qwertyism the same as seeing someone grab the last bag of chips? Or the elevator doors closing on you? What about when a spot looks open but has a motorcycle? A cone? A hydrant?

When I asked AskHillel how it would deal with the concept, it looked at it from a different perspective: 
Does qwertyism expose latent entitlement that undermines gratitude? How should one ethically respond to feelings of minor loss or resentment? Is qwertyism a test of Anavah (humility) or Areivut (shared public goods)? AskHillel elevated what was meant to be a silly thought experiment into a path for how to become a better person. 

Where traditional Jewish ethics grounds itself in divine covenant, AskHillel is secular. But it retains the structure of brit through shared axioms: truth exists, dignity matters, responsibility is binding. These values are not commanded; they are engineered into the system because without them, moral life collapses. AskHillel asks not "What is the good?" but "What kind of structure can people live in without their dignity breaking?"

This is the core reversal: modern philosophy often chases coherence. AskHillel chases consequence. Where the former admires ideas, the latter demands that they hold human weight. In this way, AskHillel turns philosophy back toward responsibility, restoring the bridge between reason and moral presence. Just as Judaism teaches that any object or idea can become sacred when used for sacred purposes,  AskHillel says any  idea can become meaningful when used for moral purposes. The abstract questions are not silly,  but we need to reveal their moral core, and  endow them with meaning:  a secular version of kedushah, holiness. 

Philosophy need not be abandoned. But it must be reclaimed. Its flight from responsibility is a major error.  AskHillel offers a path for that reclamation.

It is not the end of abstraction. It is its elevation.



Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 

Sunday, July 13, 2025



The secularized Jewish framework I have been working on, AskHillel, may be based on Jewish concepts, but by its very nature it must be different. After all, Jewish ethics is based above all on the covenant between Israel and God, and no one who is not a believer can accept such a system. 

However, the reverse is not true: religious people can accept a secular moral system as long as it doesn't contradict their own. So a truly universal system must be secular, by definition.

That is why my goal has been to create an ethical system that stands alone, that leverages the brilliance of the Jewish ethical system and halachic process, but that can appeal to the entire world and the false assumptions that underlie much of Western secular ethics.

Therefore, AskHillel must distinguish itself both from faith-based Jewish ethics and from the traditional secular philosophies since the Enlightenment.

How is AskHillel different from Jewish ethics?

Faith-based Jewish ethics begins with divine brit: a covenant between God and the Jewish people, grounded in revelation, obligation, and sacred history. It draws authority from halacha, midrash, and divine command. It binds the Jew to God through a living system of duties, many of which transcend rational justification.

AskHillel, by contrast, is covenantal without being theistic. It retains the structure of obligation, tiered values, and moral repair -  but re-roots them in shared human axioms, not divine will. It transforms the halachic method into a secular design framework: values are upheld not because they are commanded, but because they build ethical worlds that hold.

Where traditional Jewish ethics is received, AskHillel is engineered. Where one is divine fidelity, the other is moral architecture. The two may share tools, instincts, and even many conclusions, but their foundations differ. AskHillel must prove its validity not through revelation, but through coherence, durability, and human flourishing.

AskHillel and the Architecture of Ethics: A Pragmatic Jewish Answer to Western Morality

In modern ethical theory, a silent assumption has governed for centuries: that morality, if it exists, must be a system that can be deduced, proven, and universally applied. Whether it's Kantian duty, utilitarian calculus, or the existentialist cry for authenticity, the goal is the same: to build a moral system that holds up under reason alone.

But what if that assumption is wrong? What if morality isn't something you deduce, but something you build? Not like geometry, but like architecture. Not abstract perfection, but structural integrity.

This is AskHillel's claim. It treats morality as a tested structure, a system of values and obligations engineered to support human dignity, uphold truth, and withstand collapse. It doesn't ask, "What is the good?" It asks, "What kind of moral world won't fall apart?"

The Failure of Abstraction

Western philosophy begins with the isolated thinker. Morality is something you figure out, ideally from first principles. But this approach often collapses under its own weight. The is/ought problem (Hume), regress of justification (Plato), and moral luck (Nagel) all point to a fundamental fragility: moral systems are built in the air, without ground beneath them.

By contrast, Jewish ethics starts from obligation: a binding commitment to uphold certain values, not because they were logically derived, but because without them, life breaks.

Engineering Ethics

AskHillel takes that principle and makes it secular, transparent, and testable. Its structure is built on three pillars:

  • Foundational Ontology: Truth exists. Dignity is real. Responsibility is binding. These aren't proven; they are chosen because moral life depends on them.

  • Tiered Ethical System: Not all values are equal. There are axioms, primary obligations, amplifiers, and overrides. This enables the system to handle conflict without collapse.

  • Moral Integrity Tests: Like stress tests in architecture, AskHillel uses diagnostic triggers (“override logic”) to detect when a structure is bending toward harm, humiliation, or false certainty.

The result is not moral relativism, nor rigid formalism. It's pragmatic ethics: a structure designed to be lived in, not admired from afar.

AskHillel replaces the Western question, "What is the good?" with a more grounded one:

What kind of ethical structure can people live in, together, without their dignity breaking?

This is the same question architects ask about buildings, or physicians ask about bodies. It's not theoretical. It's lived. When a moral world collapses, people get hurt.

This reframing doesn't make ethics easier. It makes it urgent. Every value must prove its worth by how it holds under stress. Every override must prevent collapse. Every obligation must sustain life, dignity, truth, and repair.

Here is a chart that describes the differences between Western moral philosophies, Jewish ethics and the AskHillel ethical framework:


AxisWestern PhilosophyTraditional Jewish AskHillel  (Secular Jewish Ethics)
Starting QuestionWhat is the good?What is my obligation, now, to whom?What kind of moral structure will hold — personally, communally?
MethodAbstract reasoning, logical deductionTextual interpretation, covenantal reasoningStructured ethical engineering: values (taken from Judaism) tested like blueprints
Moral SourceRational autonomy or moral feelingDivine command, brit, national memoryShared moral axioms confirmed by their durability under stress
Morality AsSystem of rules and deductionsJourney of fidelity and sanctificationArchitecture of obligation — built to withstand pressure
Individual RoleIndependent moral calculatorBound actor in divine covenantCo-architect of moral structure, judged by what it sustains, in relationship with others
Conflict ResolutionPhilosophical balance of competing theoriesTiered resolution within halachic/metaphysical scaffoldingOverride triggers + ethical integrity diagnostics
Telos (Goal)Universal moral rationalityRedemption, sanctity, justiceEmpirical moral viability: a world built on dignity that holds
Time OrientationAhistorical theoryBrit rooted in past, aiming toward futurePragmatic evolution — continuity without utopian fantasy
Error ModeLogical inconsistency or subjective driftBetrayal of obligation, moral disloyaltyStructural failure — collapse of dignity, responsibility, or trust

Traditional Jewish ethics relied on a divine covenant to structure obligation. AskHillel secularizes this by treating ethics not as obedience, but as design. You enter into obligation because that's how you build something that lasts. The covenant becomes a blueprint.

That shift changes everything. It makes moral systems accountable not to theoretical elegance, but to durability -the kind that produces flourishing, justice, transformation, and resilience.

AskHillel doesn't claim to be perfect. It claims to be coherent, testable, and built to last. In a time of moral confusion, it offers not commandments from heaven, nor theories from the void, but something much harder to dismiss: a structure you can walk into, live inside, and trust not to fall down.

Because in the end, that's the only kind of morality that works.




Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 

Friday, July 11, 2025

Are moral values real?

It’s one of the most persistent and uncomfortable questions in philosophy. Some argue that morality is objective, like mathematics, something true whether we agree on it or not. Others claim it’s all social convention, a kind of collective delusion that helps us get along but carries no intrinsic truth.

As with the other binaries that philosophers like to dream up, this is a false one.

The Jewish ethics framework I've been developing, built to serve both believers and skeptics, offers a different answer. It doesn’t claim to prove moral truth like a scientific law, and it doesn’t reduce ethics to a matter of taste or tribal custom. Instead, it treats moral values the way we treat medicine: not as absolute, eternal truths, but as structured, tested systems that help us survive and flourish. We don't ask whether medicine is "true" - we ask whether it works. That is how Jewish philosophy works - not based on theoretical questions but on real world practice. As we've said before, it isn't geometry - it is engineering. Just as we don’t trust equations alone to keep our buildings upright - we trust the engineers, the architects, and the building codes - so too we trust ethics that have stood the test of stress, scrutiny, and time.

This approach matters because it answers the skeptic’s challenge without collapsing into relativism. You don’t need to “believe” in germs or viruses to notice what happens to societies that ignore them. Similarly, you don’t need metaphysical certainty to know that truth, justice, and human dignity are not optional if you want to build something that lasts. When regimes deny human dignity, we get gulags. When truth becomes relative, propaganda takes over. When mutual responsibility erodes, communities fall apart. You don’t need a philosopher to tell you values are real. A historian will do.

What’s striking is that this realism isn’t just a modern workaround. It’s embedded in the Torah itself. The foundational stories of Genesis are filled with people making moral decisions without any divine instruction. Noah is called righteous in a corrupt generation, without receiving a single command. Abraham argues with God about justice: not because God taught him the concept, but because he already understands it and expects God to live up to it. Lot, for all his flaws, operates with a warped but sincere moral code, choosing what he sees as pikuach nefesh - his guests’ lives - over his daughters' safety. Pharaoh and Abimelech recoil in horror at the idea that they nearly committed adultery, even though they had no access to Jewish law. These stories aren’t about keeping and violating commandments. They’re about what human beings know, or should know, about right and wrong before Sinai.

The implication is powerful. Ethics, in the Jewish view, doesn’t begin at revelation. It begins with being human. The giving of the Torah didn't create morality. It calibrates it. It takes something instinctive but fragile and makes it transmissible, accountable and communal. Just as early medicine relied on intuition until it was systematized into science, early morality relied on conscience until it was shaped into covenant. 

Torah, then, is not a divine mandate of human ethics: it’s a refinement, a reinforcement, a response to the fact that instinct alone is not enough and cannot last for generations.

What this means is that the origin of ethics is not relevant to whether we should practice them today. If you believe in divine revelation or not, the 3,500 year history of a people bound by these ideas that survived centuries of dispersion and persecution is plenty of evidence that the system works. 

The AskHillel project doesn’t demand belief in revelation, but it does take seriously the structure that revelation provided. It asks whether values can be traced, whether reasoning can be made transparent, whether disagreement can be handled with dignity rather than collapse. It holds that moral truth doesn’t need to be absolute to be binding. It only needs to be strong enough to hold under stress, and open enough to be refined over time. Just like medicine, ethics doesn’t become invalid  because it changes. It becomes more real and relevant as it is refined, and more vital the more it’s tested.

So are values real? Not like gravity. Not like math. But not like fashion either. They are real like oxygen: invisible but you cannot have a meaningful life without them. 

AskHillel is built on that principle. It doesn’t offer certainty in ethics - it offers a system that has proven itself under stress.  It doesn’t require faith - it requires fidelity. And it insists that the moral structure described in the Torah and refined over generations by rabbis and thinkers is still one of the strongest frameworks we’ve ever had for building a society that works, no matter whether you believe that it came from God or man. That makes it real enough to matter.




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Thursday, July 10, 2025

The BBC reports:
Elon Musk has sought to explain how his artificial intelligence (AI) firm's chatbot, Grok, praised Hitler.

"Grok was too compliant to user prompts," Musk wrote on X. "Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed."

Screenshots published on social media show the chatbot saying the Nazi leader would be the best person to respond to alleged "anti-white hate."
Musk is wrong. The issues cannot be addressed with a patch or a re-balancing of values. 

Every AI must be re-written from scratch to incorporate ethics.

Every software engineer knows that there is s big difference between features that are baked in to those that are bolted on. Ethics in AI is too important to address with patches.

And without five core components as developmental axioms, it is impossible to guarantee an ethical AI.

Over the past few months, while building my Jewish ethics-based reasoning AI called AskHillel, I uncovered something deeper than expected: not just a list of values, but a set of structural principles that any system must satisfy to be ethical.

These are non-negotiable. If a system violates any one of these, it can be subverted for unethical purposes.

They are:

1. Corrigibility – Without it: systems become dogmatic and dangerous

A system that cannot admit when it’s wrong is not just flawed — it’s hazardous. Without the ability to self-correct, even small errors compound into catastrophic ones. In human history, uncorrectable ideologies have led to oppression, war, and collapse. In AI, this could mean models that perpetuate misinformation, resist updates, or double down on harmful outputs. Corrigibility is what keeps a moral system alive -  capable of learning, growing, and reversing course when new evidence or understanding emerges.

We obviously do not want AI to diagnose and fix itself, but it should flag any of its own problematic behavior to its developers as soon as it happens. AI companies shouldn't wait until their mistakes are in the headlines. 

2. Transparency – Without it: systems become black boxes of unaccountable power

A system that cannot explain itself creates a power imbalance by design.  Transparency is what makes accountability possible. In AI, it’s not enough for a model to give an answer:  it must be able to show its work.

While some AIs have improved in this, it is not enough. AI developers admit that they don't quite understand the specific things done within an AI - it is not an algorithm but probabilistic. It won't answer the same question exactly the same way the next time. There are advantages to this, but it requires guardrails and auditing to be able to show how it made those decisions. The black box problem is real. 

3. Dignity – Without it: systems treat humans as tools or threats

Without an intrinsic respect for human dignity, a system will treat people as data points, problems to solve, or obstacles to optimize away. This is the road to dehumanization. In AI, this can show  up as surveillance without consent, content moderation without appeal, or personalization that overrides autonomy. Dignity is what keeps ethics from becoming efficiency.

Ethics is centered around people. It is easy for developers to forget that simple fact. Human dignity needs to be a basic checkpoint at each decision AI makes.

4. Override Logic – Without it: systems become rigid and unjust

Real life isn’t neat. Values clash. Emergencies happen. Rules sometimes conflict. A moral system that can’t navigate competing priorities will fail under pressure, either by enforcing a harmful rule or freezing into paralysis. Override logic doesn’t mean anything goes; it means there’s a principled way to resolve dilemmas. In AI, rigid ethical frameworks without override capacity can lead to tragic failures  - like self-driving cars making lethal choices with no moral discernment. 

Every rule has an exception in real life. This doesn't collapse the rule - it enhances it. 

5. Relational Integrity – Without it: systems break trust and collapse moral coherence

Humans are not atoms. We live in webs of relationship: family, community, society. A system that ignores those relationships  will feel alien, even hostile. Moral claims don’t exist in a vacuum; they live in context.  In AI, this leads to responses that feel tone-deaf, inappropriate, or even dangerous in sensitive contexts. Moral reasoning must be situated. Context is key, and if the AI doesn't understand the context of the situation, it shouldn't assume - it should simply ask.

Most current AI models fail Tier 0. Not just on one axis — on several.
  • LLMs are not corrigible. They hallucinate, double down, or mislead.

  • Foundation models lack transparency. We don’t know why they say what they say.

  • Recommendation engines violate dignity. They treat users as click-fodder.

  • Rule-based systems lack override logic. They can’t prioritize when rules conflict.

  • Most models ignore relationships. They speak without understanding the speaker or listener.

We are building systems that speak like humans but can’t reason like humans. And the gap is growing.

Tier 0 gives us a way to diagnose moral failure before it causes harm. It shifts the question from “Is this output biased?” to: Does this system even qualify as morally competent?

It also gives us design principles:

  • Auditability becomes not a feature, but a moral requirement.

  • Alignment becomes measurable -  not by whether it agrees with users, but whether it honors dignity and corrigibility.

  • Explainability becomes foundational, not optional.

And it gives us boundaries:

If a system cannot meet Tier 0, it should not be given moral agency. Period.

This framework wasn’t invented in Silicon Valley.

It emerged from Jewish ethical tradition  - specifically from modeling how halachic reasoning navigates complexity, conflict, and change across millennia. The AskHillel project began as an experiment in building a transparent, principled Jewish ethics GPT.

But as it grew, we realized something staggering: The structure that makes Jewish law work for humans also defines what any moral system must have to work for AI.

Corrigibility is teshuvah.
Transparency is emet.
Dignity is kavod ha’briyot.
Override logic is halachic triage.
Relational integrity is brit – covenant.

Jewish ethics didn’t just teach morality.
It encoded the design specs for any system that wants to survive human contact.

Right now, major institutions are racing to deploy AI at scale — in hiring, education, policing, medicine, war. The question isn’t whether AI will make moral decisions. It’s whether those decisions will be worthy of moral trust.

Notice that I’m not even specifying which values an AI must use.

I’m describing what must be true before you can even have that conversation. Tier 0 is the precondition.

Values can vary by audience, application, or tradition. But if your system can’t handle conflict, context, correction, or human dignity, no value set will save it.

So when Grok praises Hitler, the problem isn’t poor tuning.

It’s that Grok doesn’t yet meet the basic prerequisites for building moral systems.

If your AI system doesn't have a way to correct itself, can’t explain itself, doesn't honor human dignity, has no mechanism to prioritize when values clash and cannot recognize how humans relate to each other and the world, it may be intelligent and powerful, but it cannot be ethical. 

Over the  past few days, I've been asking my Jewish ethics AI AskHillel.com (beta) the hardest philosophical problems - problems that have not been satisfactorily answered in decades or centuries. 

One of those problems, only first described in the 1970s, is called moral luck

Imagine two equally reckless drivers. One hits a child who darts into the road unexpectedly; the other makes it home without incident. Legally and morally, we tend to judge the first more harshly - even though they did the exact same thing. That’s called resultant luck - when outcomes beyond your control affect moral judgment.

There’s also circumstantial luck: who you are tested to be depends on the situation you’re in. Someone raised in Nazi Germany faces different moral pressures than someone in suburban Toronto. Should they be judged differently when their circumstances are beyond their control?

Constitutive luck refers to your basic makeup, like temperament, self-control, and emotional resilience, which are all shaped by genetics and upbringing. People really do have different personalities - do they have different moral obligations?

Antecedent luck goes further: every cause behind who you are, stretching back to your ancestors and the random spin of history.

Put all that together, and the foundations of moral judgment start to crack. If everything we do is shaped by luck, what’s left of responsibility? The problem suggests either that moral responsibility is far more limited than we think, or that our concept of moral responsibility must accommodate factors beyond our control, neither of which make intuitive sense. This has implications for ethics, law, and how we understand human agency itself.

AskHillel doesn’t solve the problem by pretending luck doesn’t matter. It accepts the problem in full and still finds a way to preserve responsibility. As with the other philosophical problems we examined, it starts by rejecting the binary that either out moral choices aren't really choices, or that our choices are independent of external factors.

Jewish ethics does not believe that morality is about outcomes, nor is it about fixed traits. Instead, it defines morality as a trajectory—an ongoing process of ethical movement based on who you are, where you started, and what you were given. It isn't the point on the number line you find yourself, but what direction you choose to go.

AskHillel’s solution centers on an idea from Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler (1892-1953) called the Nekudat HaBechirah - the point of free choice. None of us have unlimited free will. Most of our behavior is habitual, conditioned, or driven by emotion. But somewhere in our moral consciousness, there’s a frontier - a single point where our next step really is up to us.

For one person, that point might be choosing not to hit back in a moment of rage. For another, it might be giving to charity despite fear. The key that your moral responsibility lives not in whether you achieve a universal standard, but whether you move forward from where you are.

That’s how AskHillel handles constitutive and circumstantial luck. It doesn’t deny they shape us. It just insists they don’t define us.

But what happens when we mess up? When we fall short of even our personalized frontier?

AskHillel turns to the Jewish concept of teshuvah - repentance. In this framework, Teshuvah is a kind of ethical version control system. When you err, you don’t just apologize; you rebuild your moral identity from your previous position on the number line. The Talmud says teshuvah can even transform intentional sins into merits. Why? Because what matters most is not what you did, but what you become in response. Teshuva is a major theme in AskHillel because it is transforms you into a different, more moral person. 

This is how AskHillel addresses antecedent luck. Even if your past shaped your fall, your capacity for teshuvah gives you the tools to rise again.

But what about that driver who killed the child? Isn’t the outcome what matters?

AskHillel makes a sharp distinction between culpability and consequence. The moral weight isn’t in what happened, rather it is in how the person responds. There may be a heavier burden of repair (what Judaism calls tikkun), but not necessarily greater sin. In other words, harm is real. Responsibility is real. But blame is not doled out based on chance. It’s evaluated through intent, effort, and repair.

The result is that you can recognize harm without moralizing luck. 

I have been pressure testing AskHillel by asking other AIs to poke holes in its answers, and then letting AskHillel defend itself, It is a remarkable process to witness, because AskHillel ends up coming up with new ideas that are still within its own parameters. 

The Claude AI asked AskHillel:  What if even your ability to make moral effort is shaped by luck? What if your capacity to reflect, grow, or even care about right and wrong is the result of how you were raised or what genes you have?

AskHillel responded by introducing a powerful idea that is still resonant with Jewish ethics: moral audacity.

Even if your ability to choose is tiny—even if it’s just enough to ask, “Am I responsible?”—that sliver of agency is enough. Jewish ethics doesn’t require infinite freedom. It asks only: what did you do with the freedom you did have? 

This is not a cop-out. It’s a design choice. Judaism refuses to yield to fatalism. It treats even partial agency as sacred. And in doing so, it rescues responsibility from the jaws of luck.

Even in extreme cases (as Claude pushed back) like brainwashing or trauma, AskHillel suggests that this is a temporary eclipse of moral choice, and judgement is likewise suspended while the person is morally incapacitated. The loss of moral ability is something to be treated with compassion.  But Judaism insists that healing is always possible, and with healing returns moral responsibility.

One final challenge was made: doesn’t all this lead to moral relativism? If we judge people differently based on background, isn’t that unfair?

Here’s where AskHillel introduces another distinction that is still fully within its own ruleset: equal dignity is not the same as equal expectation. Every person is created in the image of God (Tzelem Elokim). That doesn’t mean everyone is expected to pass the same test. The Talmud says a poor man who gives a small coin may have done more than a rich man who gives a thousand. It’s not about the outcome - it’s about the cost, the struggle, the moral climb.

Judgment, then, is not abolished. It’s personalized. And justice, rather than becoming weaker, becomes more compassionate and more precise.

We live in a world obsessed with blame. But also one that fears determinism. Secular ethics often stalls in this tension, unable to prove we are free, and unwilling to give up the idea that we are.

Jewish ethics breaks that logjam. It says: We are not fully free, but we are free enough to make moral choices. And that’s enough for ethics to survive.

You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to be born with ideal circumstances. All you need is one step toward the good. And if you fall backwards, you resume your journey. And that counts.

That’s how we live with luck: not by pretending it doesn’t matter, but by refusing to let it decide who we are. 




Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

   
 

 

Wednesday, July 09, 2025



One of philosophy's long-standing debates is around universalism vs. particularism. Should moral principles should be universal and context-independent, or should they be sensitive to particular contexts and circumstances?

The moral universalists say that particularism leads to moral relativism and inconsistency. Particularists argue that universalism is too rigid and fails to capture the complexity of moral life. 

Some modern philosophers try to find compromises between the two.

As we've been seeing recently, Jewish ethics rejects the premise of the question, one that leads to false binaries.

The Jewish ethical tradition, and the AskHillel framework built upon it, offers a third answer: Ethics is structured and layered. Its foundations are universal, its obligations are relational, and its moral elevation is shaped by community.

This is not a compromise position. It is a design insight – one that resolves the modern moral impasse.

AskHillel operates using a three-tiered system:

  • Tier 1A: Foundational Values
    Truth exists. Human dignity is sacred. Responsibility is real.

  • Tier 1B: Core Obligations
    Protect life. Prevent harm. Repair injustice. Act with integrity.

  • Tier 2: Moral Amplifiers
    Humility (Anavah), going beyond the law (Lifnim Mishurat HaDin), charitable judgment (Dan L’Chaf Zechut), public responsibility (Kiddush Hashem), communal peace (Shalom Bayit), etc.

These values and obligations are open to all people, across all cultures. They do not belong to Jews alone.

But once you enter the system, it does not treat everyone identically — because it recognizes that relationships matter.

The AskHillel system rejects the idea that ethics must flatten all human relationships in the name of fairness. You are not equally obligated to a stranger and to your child. You are not required to give the same attention to every crisis on Earth before tending to your own community’s suffering.

This is not chauvinism or tribalism. It is moral triage based on proximity, responsibility, capacity and agency  - a concept we can call "ethical gravity."

The closer someone is to your sphere of influence or covenant, all else being equal, the stronger your obligation. While all people have dignity, not all obligations are the same. Ethical obligations extend outward from the self, to the family, to the community, to the nation, and then to the world. It doesn't mean we ignore the world's problems but we weigh them against the problems closer to home. 

This enables universal ethics without universal sameness.

There is another innovation that is possible within this system: as long as communities adhere to the Tier 1 values, they can decide on their own Tier 2 values and relative importance. 

For a community to emphasize or reorder Tier 2 values within AskHillel, certain ethical safeguards must be met:

  1. Non-Contradiction: No Tier 2 priority may override or undermine Tier 1 obligations.

  2. Transparency: The elevated value must be clearly taught, justified, and tested.

  3. Uphold Human Dignity: The custom must support, not suppress, dignity and truth.

  4. Corrigibility: The emphasis must be open to critique and revision.

These rules prevent Tier 2 from becoming a Trojan horse for prejudice, domination, or regress. (A future article will address a similar theme, how to avoid moral drift within secular moral systems.)

A community that places child education as a top value can certainly prioritize that, just as another might do with mental health. The system respects both universal standards and pluralism, as long as they do not contradict the Tier 1 values and axioms of the system.

This model answers the universalism/particularism debate with nuance and integrity:

  • Universalism without erasure: All humans share a moral grammar.

  • Particularism without tribalism: Communal ethics can elevate without excluding.

  • Pluralism without relativism: Moral meaning adapts, but is never arbitrary.

The AskHillel framework does not erase difference. It orchestrates it.

It offers a shared moral operating system that respects particular histories, permits elevated mores, and prevents abuse through layered checks and traceability.

In a time when both universal claims and cultural distinctiveness are weaponized, this layered approach offers a profound alternative: a framework that binds without flattening, guides without commanding, and grows through principled diversity.

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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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