Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Natural Justice
Animals act in their own self-interest. Every tree and bush, every cat and bird and ant works to maximize itself, without any consideration for others. These creatures compete endlessly, sometimes by themselves, and sometimes in cooperation with others of their species or their parasites. The idea of an animal deliberately and consciously favoring a different animal would be nonsensical. Man is not necessarily any better, of course. As Hobbes put it, the natural state of mankind without society is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In a state of nature, man is merely another animal.
Natural justice is thus very easy to define: might makes right. This is hardly new or surprising, but it bears mentioning because a good society requires people to not act that way. And so it is troubling to me when people talk of imitating nature. “Natural” becomes synonymous with “good.” In the ancient world, people were more direct: they worshipped nature outright.
The problem with worshipping nature is that we also come to make what happens in nature into something that people ought to emulate. For example, if one worships nature and seeks to imitate it, then what arguments are there for altruism or kindness? What arguments are there for acting outside of our own natures, to choose, for example, to dampen our anger or encourage our empathy for others? If “natural” is good, then acting against our nature must be bad. More than that: it is against nature not to accept “might makes right.”
A key symbol of nature is the tree. Trees are the largest living things a normal person ever sees, and they reflect (or even lead) the seasons and the natural cycles. Trees are about natural life, from generation and growth to renewal. Trees (and poles made from trees) were also broadly worshipped in their own right in the ancient world, as representative of a deity, Asherah.
All of this is my way of getting to an answer to a question that biblical scholars have long wrestled with. And until yesterday, I did not have an answer that made sense to me. Here is the text that prompts the question:
The Torah gives us the following verses, in this specific order:
In all the communities which the LORD, your God, is giving you, you shall appoint judges and officials throughout your tribes to administer righteous justice for the people. You must not distort justice: you shall not show partiality; you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes even of the wise and twists the words even of the just. Justice, justice alone shall you pursue, so that you may live and possess the land the LORD, your God, is giving you. You shall not plant an asherah or any kind of tree next to the altar of the LORD, your God, which you will build.
The question, of course, is why is a tree or an Asherah antithetical to justice and impartiality? What do these verses have to connect them in any way?
The answer is given above: Justice needs to be impartial and blind. A judge cannot decide the winner of a case by choosing whichever party paid the bigger bribe. Yet a natural way to act would be in naked self-interest. If we worship nature, then we cannot pursue justice. If we put a tree in the place where we worship G-d, then we are accepting that nature is a deity, and acting naturally is emulating the divine.
The Torah is making a very important point, as relevant now as it was then: civilization and a just society must act in contrast against, not in consonance with, nature. If we worship nature, then we will seek to emulate it. And if we do that, then we will seek our natural self-interest, solicit bribes, blinding ourselves to what is good and right. A society that worships trees cannot be just.
Published in General
It seems to me that you have hit on the right understanding of this text.
Torah is hard for me to interpret because
Again, nicely done, iWe.
(Just keep in mind that if a philosopher talks about “natural justice” or “natural law,” he is using a different sense of the word “nature.”)
Good post, iWe.
I have one minor quibble. There are a few animals who sacrifice themselves for the group, but this is rare and is associated with unusual reproduction. The technical term is eusocial, and the common examples are ants, termites, and some bees and wasps. The unusual reproductive feature is sterility of most of the individuals, usually called workers.
There is one very strange mammal following this model, the naked mole-rat of Ethiopia.
On another issue, I never envisioned an Asherah pole as a tree. The word “pole” is used in the translations that I have studied, and I pictured something like a maypole or totem pole. My very brief research, prompted by your post, suggests that the Hebrew term is unclear as to whether it is a living tree or a fashioned wooden pole. Do you have better information on this?
What sense of the word “nature” would that be?
I find the use of “natural” in “natural law” to be quite misleading, as it suggests an objective, non-divine foundation for moral principles. I think that this belief is a grave error, and an important factor in our current moral confusion.
And the poor male praying mantis. I think my ex wife would have liked that from me.
There’s a bit like that at the start of the Babylon 5 pilot, “The Gathering.” Used to be able to find a clip on youtube, but can’t now.
Old answer from 2015:
More here.
And more here.
I don’t know how there can be moral law without a moral lawgiver. That means G-d exists if moral law exists.
But it seems to me that humans can have proper functions without G-d existing. (More precisely, it seems to me that the concept of a proper function does not directly entail the moral authority of G-d. But maybe proper functions involve design, and require a designer.)
That means a “law conception of ethics” (Elizabeth Anscbombe’s phrase) makes no sense without G-d. But a proper functionalist account like you get in Aristotle makes sense.
Or, more briefly: If there is no G-d, Kantian ethics is all wrong, but Aristotle is still a go.
(Intro to this stuff here.)
There cannot. Nothing can exist without it being created.
It means that some creator exists.
For Marx and Lenin, and Saul Alinsky and his acolytes Bill Ayers, Michelle and Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton–and even for the Democrats, were they to stop and examine their beliefs logically–that creator is not God, but man himself. But which particular man, then, since men disagree amongst themselves? For the intellectuals explicitly, and for the Democrats emotionally and unselfconscientiously, it must be the most enlightened of men.
Asherah is an interesting figure in that she pursues both Baal and El sexually in Canaanite tradition. While the Israelites embrace the name El as in Elohim and El-Shaddai as a reference to their monotheistic God, placing the Lord’s altar next to a tree would produce a false, indeed blasphemous, association in those familiar with Canaanite paganism, a reference to a pairing between El and Asherah.
The struggle against pagan worship is so prevalent in the Old Testament that there is the recurring theme of the remnant, the few, numbered at 7000 at one point, who are faithful to the Lord. (Example 1 Kings 19:18, when the Lord assures Elijah that he is not the only faithful one left. “Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”) Paganism idolizes what is found in the Creation (nature) rather than worshipping the Creator. From Psalm 135 (ESV):
And just like the politicians who sell us our sins, addiction, abortion, lust, greed, bigotry, we have always had a knack for making ourselves our favorite idol. As when someone says, “My God doesn’t mind abortion or lust, She loves me for myself!” Usurping the authority of the revealed Lord of scripture to make laws contrary to the one true Lord.
If we were to embrace nature, we would spend our days flinging poo with the apes and eating our children with the fish.
The Torah is not clear. An Asherah is always a worship object and it is made of wood. The following word phrase in this verse means everything between “all tree” and “any wood”.
I can add to this the observation that in the entire tabernacle, not a single thing was visible wood. Everything made of wood was coated with copper or silver or gold or fabric. The Torah takes great pains to make the tabernacle a place made by man, not nature.
No disagreement on the point. And Ancient Israel kept trying to pin the goddess on the deity. The Torah, most emphatically, does not.
When trying to figure the question out, I started by exploring this approach, but it did not help explain the confluence of the verses with “Justice, Justice thou shalt pursue.”
This.
I do understand the idea. It is erroneous, in my view, as demonstrated by your examples of disagreements about the “natural” functions of humans.
I don’t expect to convince you, given your Ricochet handle. I think that it is a major mistake to confuse divine revelation with human reason. Reason is manifestly insufficient.
I’ve discovered something in my Bible studies. When Scripture seems to be at odds with my reasoning, I generally find that the problem is me, and my erroneous reasoning or erroneous premises. I haven’t thought about everything, but I’ve seen this happen often enough that I now have more confidence in Scripture than in myself.
To what disagreements do you refer?
And since when is agreement a prerequisite for either truth or knowledge?
Right on. But why would you expect me to be hard to convince?
Right on, right on!
So if “saving money” is good, spending money must be bad.
False binary here.
It’s more accurate to say that humanity seeks the balance between the natural and the normative.
Deborah, a prophetess who judged Israel, did it from beneath a palm tree. Was this a violation, or is a palm considered something other than a tree? @iwe
We don’t have to act outside our nature to create or maintain civil society we just need to understand that our best interests are served within it. Societies and governments were developed as the best way to preserve our stuff from those who would rather take from others than produce. It requires cooperation to make this scheme work and that means certain rules must be accepted and modeled by nearly everyone; things like, property rights, contract enforcement, personal space including the right to hold and espouse unpopular opinions among others. It’s when some busy-bodies (both Left and Right) begin to succeed in violating these principles that civil society breaks down.
Mankind is elevated above other life forms on this planet in that we have the ability to understand the benefits of cooperative behavior in the long run, therefore we have governments established. The purpose of governments is not to perfect us but to protect us from brigands both foreign and domestic who would like to take our stuff. This purpose is best served when laws are clearly understood and administered without prejudice or favor. Officials both Judicial and Administrative are instituted to see that this system works as designed to the extent possible. When they violate that charge, as for instance taking bribes or giving favors, they undermine the very purpose for their existence as officials. The creation of favored classes, such as ‘race’ gender and so on in America today is the main instrument of deconstructing this system. Whether intentions are good is irrelevant, it’s ends are not to be desired.
Using a tree is not a problem. Putting one in a place of worship is a problem.
We use and elevate and work with nature. But we must not think that G-d is within it. He is not. In this world, according to the Torah, G-d is found in two things: the tabernacle, and in the human soul.
“Nature” in this context means “animating principle or principles”, as in “it is the nature of dogs to hunt” or “it is in the nature of men to be social” or “it is distinctive of the nature of man that he is the only rational animal” or even “it is the nature of God that He is the Most Perfect Being.”
It doesn’t matter whether someone agrees or disagrees with these statements. The point is that this use of “nature” is orthogonal to the more usual contemporary usage of “nature”, which is to distinguish a realm of being distinct from God, as in “the natural vs the supernatural.” The old usage of “nature” in the context of “natural law” cuts across our contemporary nature/supernature distinction.
Since all of Creation is created by God, and God saw that it was good, it would be surprising if we could learn nothing at all about God or what God wants of us from nature – i.e. from the animating principles which He gave to His Creatures. Leftists and secularists in general have opposed the natural law for that reason – to acknowledge that creatures have intelligible natures that can be understood, and that such understanding has moral implications, it to concede that creatures are more than just collections of material particles shaped by a mindless evolution. And that concession may lead some people to reconsider the existence of God.
In the converse case, the denial of natural law implies that creatures have no intelligible natures, or at least any intelligible natures that have moral implications with respect to them. How, then, could they be creations of God? The denial of natural law has atheistic implications.
Your assertion then is that G-d cannot make something that lacks morals? Isn’t He capable of that? What if what we are supposed to learn what not to do from something that G-d made? Is “good” in the Torah the same to you as moral and godly and perfect? Because to me, the “good” in the Torah means a move in the right direction, not a moral judgement. And I have no problem learning from animals how people should not behave. That is a useful lesson to learn from the cruelty of cats.
Only to those who believe in a line of argumentation that leads to that conclusion. I do not believe that nature or the nature of things carries any moral lesson to humanity whatsoever. That is what the Torah is for.
My religion relies on the text. I do not believe that a definitive moral code is an ab initio logical inevitability.
I agree. The reason for the moral code is for mankind to thrive within the context of a natural world. If one does not follow the moral code there are consequences that the natural world deals out. If we abandon the moral code we get a form of social Darwinism. If we hew to the moral code we have a just society. Our institutions — family, church, school, and government — are there to train the young in the moral code that permits individual action with social cohesion. Choice is not removed but operates within an understanding of consequence.
Chesterton wrote about this topic:
All the same, it will be as well if Jones does not worship the sun and moon. If he does, there is a tendency for him to imitate them; to say, that because the sun burns insects alive, he may burn insects alive. He thinks that because the sun gives people sun-stroke, he may give his neighbour measles. He thinks that because the moon is said to drive men mad, he may drive his wife mad. This ugly side of mere external optimism had also shown itself in the ancient world. About the time when the Stoic idealism had begun to show the weaknesses of pessimism, the old nature worship of the ancients had begun to show the enormous weaknesses of optimism. Nature worship is natural enough while the society is young, or, in other words, Pantheism is all right as long as it is the worship of Pan. But Nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan that he soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate. The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped. Stars and mountains must not be taken seriously. If they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended. Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality. Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination. The theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything that was bad.
Quite so!
Some moral realists argue that moral law is conceptually prior to even God.
In other words, this kind of moral realist would place a lot of emphasis on the God’s omniscience and omnibenevolence and less on God’s omnipotence.
Why? Because in the eyes of these kinds of moral realists, God can not, for example, make torturing children “good.” Thus, God is simply an ideal observer of the moral law, omniscient.
Here is an excerpt from “Moral Realism: A Defense,” by Dr. Russ Shafer-Landau (professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin and a non-natural moral realist).
So, God could be an ideal observer, perfectly understanding the moral realm and perfectly adhering to that moral realm. But could not make helping a disabled person cross the street “evil” nor could God make genocide “good.”
Dr. Russ Shafer-Landau has also written an easier to read version of “Moral Realism: A Defense,” titled, “Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?” It’s only 136 pages.
Also, Erik Weilenberg and Peter Railton have written extensively on moral realism. Weilenberg is a non-natural moral realist and Railton is a natural moral realist.
iWe,
This is a discussion, perhaps unconsciously, of the Is/Ought dichotomy. Hume was the first philosopher to formally describe it. Quite simply, the concepts one uses to describe human moral behavior are not the same concepts used to describe the natural world. Put in simpler terms, you can’t turn an Is into an Ought nor turn an Ought into an Is.
As an example, many environmental ideologues talk about Green Energy as if it is morally good. Of course, energy refers to an Is concept and the idea of good & evil refers to an Ought concept and has no relevance to energy. Thus, California mindlessly pursuing Green Energy, as if this alone represents moral goodness, is now failing to produce enough power at peak load and creating blackouts. Even hyper-lefty Gov Gavin Newsome has been forced to admit this.
Meanwhile, purely moral imperatives against robbery and murder are ignored in leftwing cities. Marxist pseudo-Is arguments are used to override these obvious human choice caused disasters.
At Least 60 Shot, 5 Killed, over Weekend in Mayor Lightfoot’s Chicago
Report: 45 Shot, 5 Killed, Since Friday in Mayor de Blasio’s NYC
The left sees morality where there isn’t any and screws up energy production. Then the left sees an inevitable endemic (pseudo-physical) process where human beings are making choices and ignores the most basic moral imperatives thus turning cities into criminal nightmares.
Imagine walking into a hardware store and asking for a chocolate birthday cake. Imagine walking into a bakery and asking for 3/8″ electric drill. Pretty stupid, yes. Yet that is exactly what we are doing when we try to get an Is from an Ought or an Ought from an Is.
Regards,
Jim