Every philosophy student eventually asks: "Why should I be moral?"
It's a reasonable question. If I can get away with something—if no one will know, if I won't get caught, if the benefit outweighs the risk—why shouldn't I?
Western philosophy, built on Greek foundations, has been trying to answer this question for millennia. The responses vary: because reason demands it (Kant), because it maximizes utility (Mill), because it perfects your character (Aristotle), because God commands it (Aquinas), because that's what it means to be human (existentialists).
None of them work. Not really. Not in the moment when you're actually deciding whether to lie, to cheat, to look away from suffering. The answers feel either too abstract (categorical imperatives), too calculated (utility functions), too aspirational (virtue), or too external (divine command).
The problem isn't that these philosophers were stupid. The problem is that they started with the wrong question—which means they started with the wrong unit of reality.
Around 500 BCE, two civilizations were developing radically different approaches to understanding reality, truth, and morality.
In Athens, philosophy began with being. What is real? What is true? What is good? The Greek mind sought to isolate, categorize, and perfect. The fundamental unit of reality was the individual—the substance, the soul, the rational agent standing alone before the cosmos.
In Jerusalem, thought began with relationship. Not "What is?" but "If I am only for myself, who am I?" The fundamental unit wasn't the isolated self but the covenant—the bond between God and humanity, between person and person, between present and future self.
This wasn't a minor difference in emphasis. It was a difference in ontological architecture—in what counts as real.
The Greeks built philosophy like geometry: start with axioms, derive theorems, eliminate contradictions, arrive at perfect forms. Truth was static, eternal, complete.
Jewish thought built like engineering: start with structure under load, test assumptions, expect failure, build in correction. Truth was dynamic, relational, asymptotic—something you approach through integrity but never fully possess. Structure was not to create perfection but to make moral choices more probable.
Western philosophy chose Athens. It's been trying to solve Greek problems ever since problems that don't even arise in the Jewish philosophical mindset.
If you begin with the isolated individual as your fundamental unit, certain problems become unsolvable:
The Free Will Problem: Either your actions are caused by prior states (determinism) or they're random (chaos). There's no logical space for meaningful choice. Philosophers have been trying to thread this needle for centuries. Compatibilism tries to reconcile the two, but it feels like verbal gymnastics—because it is.
The Is/Ought Problem: You can't derive moral obligations from factual descriptions. Hume showed this, and no amount of clever reasoning has bridged the gap. Facts live in one realm, morality in another, and never the twain shall meet.
The Meaning Problem: If you're a collection of atoms following physical laws, why does anything matter? Existentialists told us to create our own meaning, but that just pushes the question back: why should I care about the meaning I create?
The Morality Problem: Why be good if you can get away with being bad? Every Greek answer either appeals to external enforcement (divine punishment, social consequences) or internal perfection (virtue makes you happy)—neither of which actually explains why you should care.
These aren't just abstract puzzles. They're the fractures running through modern civilization:
- We can't agree on what rights are or where they come from
- Our institutions cannot self-correct and are vulnerable to hijack
- We can't make AI systems that remain moral as they scale more towards agency
- We've lost the ability to talk about meaning without sounding either religious or relativist
All of this traces back to starting with the wrong ontological unit.
The Jewish intellectual tradition—formalized in Talmudic reasoning, encoded in halakhic structure, lived through covenant—never made this mistake.
It begins with a different axiom: reality is fundamentally relational. You don't exist in isolation; you exist in a web of obligations, connections, and mutual influence. You have a family, a tribe, a community, a nation. The self isn't an atom; it's a node in a network.
Once you start here, the hardest problems of Western philosophy simply dissolve:
Free will isn't about escaping causation—it's about biasing probabilities within structure. You operate in a field of constraints (biology, history, circumstance), but you have the capacity to reweight outcomes toward good. You're not breaking the laws of reality; you're participating in their unfolding. Freedom becomes meaningful because it's freedom within structure, not freedom from everything.
Values aren't separate from facts—they're properties of relationships. To say "cruelty is wrong" isn't imposing preference on neutral reality; it's recognizing that cruelty fractures the relational fabric that makes reality coherent. "Ought" isn't imported from outside; it's the direction that flows naturally from what "is."
Meaning isn't invented—it's discovered in relationship. You matter because others are affected by your choices. Your actions ripple through a network of obligation and care. Meaning emerges from how your choices affect others, not from internal conviction.
But the most important shift is this: we can now answer "what is morality?" in purely secular terms.
Morality is what increases the universe's creative capacity. Immorality is what diminishes it.
Free will comes from our choices in relationships. That means that our capacity for creativity is in our moral choices. By choosing, we can strengthen our bonds with others. Those bonds are new reality - they are created where they didn't exist before. Creativity is the full spectrum of generative human possibility: the capacity to build, connect, imagine, repair, and transform. It's what allows people to participate in the ongoing creation of meaning, relationship, and value.
Why does this work where Greek answers failed?
It's relational by definition: Creativity isn't solitary. A painting has no value if no one sees it. A song means nothing if no one hears it. Even private creativity—writing in a journal, solving a problem alone—is implicitly addressed to someone, even if that someone is your future self. Creativity is always relational, which means morality (increasing creativity) is always about how we affect others.
It solves the is/ought problem: If reality is fundamentally relational, and creativity is the generative capacity of relationships, then morality isn't imposed on reality—it's built into it. To act morally is to align with the structure that makes reality coherent. To act immorally is to fracture that structure. "Ought" becomes the direction that restores integrity to "is."
It explains why we should care: Because creativity is the only dimension where we have genuine agency. Everything else—our genetics, our history, the laws of physics—is deterministic. But in the moral dimension, we can bias probabilities. We can choose what kind of world we're creating. By consistently choosing good, we change ourselves for the better and can climb to the next level of morality. That's not a burden imposed from outside; that's the only arena where we're genuinely free.
It provides a moral floor without metaphysics: Anything that crushes human creativity—murder, tyranny, cruelty, dehumanization, silencing—is wrong not because it violates a rule, but because it destroys the generative capacity in yourself or in others that makes life worth living. You don't need God to ground this. You just need to recognize that humans are creative beings, and anything that systematically destroys that capacity is evil.
It handles constraint: Creativity doesn't mean chaos. Every creative form has structure—sonnets have 14 lines, jazz has chord progressions, engineering has physical laws. Morality isn't about unlimited freedom; it's about finding the structures that channel freedom into generative possibility. That's why even modesty in clothing or choosing not to use certain offensive words aren't opposed to creativity—they are boundaries that enhance creativity.
It's imitatio Dei—without theology: If there is a Creator, the primary divine act is creation itself. To be moral is to mirror that: to make space for others to create, to protect their capacity for agency, to build structures that enable rather than crush. If there isn't a Creator, the pattern still holds: we are creative beings, and morality is what allows that creativity to flourish across the network of relationships we inhabit.
This is what Jewish ethics always understood: saving a life isn't just preventing death—it's preserving someone's capacity to create meaning. Not standing by while harm occurs (lo ta'amod al dam rei'echa) prevents harm and protects generative possibility. Mutual responsibility (areivut) isn't altruistic sacrifice—it's recognizing that creativity is collective, that we create through and for each other.
Humility is an essential difference between Greek and Jewish philosophy. To the Greeks, human perfection is possible. To Jewish thinkers, the idea of human perfection in a world where there is a supremely perfect God is laughable. The best we can do is to keep improving, forever.
The Jewish intellectual tradition has been continuous for over two millennia. It developed sophisticated methods for handling paradox, testing assumptions, maintaining coherence under uncertainty. Talmudic dialectic is as rigorous as anything Aristotle produced—arguably more so, because it doesn't pretend contradictions are always errors.
So why did Western philosophy ignore it?
Partly language—most of it was in Hebrew and Aramaic. Partly prejudice—it was dismissed as "theology" rather than philosophy. Partly Christianity's complicated relationship with its Jewish roots. Partly the fact that Jewish thought doesn't fit neatly into academic categories; it's simultaneously legal reasoning, ethical reflection, and spiritual practice.
But the cost of this oversight compounds every generation. We've been trying to solve problems that only exist because we chose the wrong foundation.
The stakes have never been higher. We're building artificial intelligence—systems that will make decisions affecting billions of lives. And we can learn from AI.
AI, today, is neither deterministic nor does it have full agency. It is probabilistic. It will almost always come up with a reasonable answer, based on probability. And this is how people are, too: we are shaped by our upbringing, by our environment, by our experiences. We are highly unlikely to kill the next person we see walking down the street. Our free will is manifested in a much narrower range - like should we keep the elevator door open for the person down the hall. When we make moral decisions, we change ourselves - it is the ultimate in creativity.
The alignment problem (how do we ensure AI remains beneficial as it becomes more capable?) is essentially the free will problem in digital form: how do you create agency within structure? Greek philosophy can't solve it because Greek philosophy can't handle probabilistic agency within moral constraint. The Jewish model already understands how to optimize moral outcomes within reality instead of theorizing perfect morality.
We're facing institutional collapse—governments, corporations, universities losing public trust because they can't self-correct without breaking. Greek thinking builds perfect forms that shatter under stress. Jewish thinking builds resilient structures that bend, repair, and learn.
We're in a meaning crisis—secular modernity delivered material abundance but stripped away the relational fabric that makes life feel worth living. You can't solve that by telling people to "create their own meaning." You solve it by rebuilding the networks of obligation and care that make meaning real—that allow people to participate in collective creativity rather than drown in individual isolation.
This isn't about Jewish triumphalism or religious conversion. It's about recognizing that one of humanity's oldest continuous intellectual traditions developed a fundamentally different—and demonstrably better—foundation for moral reasoning, and we've been ignoring it.
Derechology is my attempt to formalize this tradition in language that's legible to secular philosophy, applicable to AI ethics, and useful for institutional design. It takes the core insights of Jewish relational ontology and translates them into systematic principles:
- Reality is relational structure
- Values are part of human reality
- Truth is what survives audit of assumptions
- Freedom is probabilistic agency within moral constraint
- Morality is what increases creative capacity across relationships
- Perfection is the enemy of the good
- Humility is what keeps systems self-correcting
The book (when it's finally finished, but it is shaping up nicely) will lay out the full framework. But the core insight is this:
We've been doing philosophy wrong. Not because the Greeks were foolish, but because they started with the isolated self and built from there. Start with relationship instead, and the hardest problems of Western philosophy dissolve.
The question isn't "Why should I be moral?"
The question is: "Given that I exist in relationship—that my choices affect others' capacity to create, that meaning arises from generative connection, that the only freedom I have is in the moral dimension—how could I be anything else?"
Morality isn't a burden. It's the only space where we're truly alive.
Tuesday, November 04, 2025
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