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Moral Values, Virtue Ethics, and Jewish Practice: Re-Reading Joseph Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Writings in view of John McDowell’s Neopragmatist Metaethics

Sun, December 16, 4:15 to 5:45pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Beacon Hill 1 Complex

Abstract

This paper examines the resources offered by John McDowell’s neopragmatist metaethics for reconfiguring the relationship among moral values, virtue ethics, and Jewish practice by placing it into dialogue with the thought of Joseph Soloveitchik.

In Soloveitchik’s halakhic writings he presents a virtue ethics that is linked to Jewish practice. On this account, Jewish practice both expresses and instills the proper responses to objective moral values. He argues that values are perceived through emotional responses, which are then expressed as norms. Correspondingly, engaging in the acts commanded by the norms cultivates the emotional responses, which then allows perception of values. Soloveitchik thus grounds Jewish practice in values whose objectivity is secured by reality itself.

J. L. Mackie influentially argued that such moral values would be “objective prescriptions,” features of reality that issue in imperatives for action, which are metaphysically and epistemological implausible. Soloveitchik’s account is vulnerable to Mackie’s arguments, which recall Wilfrid Sellars’s pragmatist assault on the notion of the epistemologically “given.” Soloveitchik envisions values that inhere in reality, evoke particular emotions, and prescribe certain behaviors. He thus succumbs to the myth of the axiological “given” as the source of normativity for Jewish practice.

In a series of articles, McDowell develops a sophisticated view about moral values that avoids Mackie’s criticisms. It neither reifies them as objective features of the world nor reduces them to subjective responses of the individual. Instead, values can be seen as entangled with human nature, culture, and practices. On the basis of human nature, culture and practices encode and cultivate sensibilities, that is, ways of perceiving and responding to the world. Such activity issues in what he calls “second nature,” or what Aristotle called virtues. Among these are attitudes that are endorsed as fitting to occurrences in the world. Values can be explicated on the basis of these fitting attitudes.

McDowell’s metaethics is a generative framework for reinterpreting Soloveitchik’s thought along neopragmatist lines. For then, Soloveitchik’s account can be understood, not as offering dubious metaphysical claims, but as insightfully describing the process by which Jewish practices inculcate ethical ways of seeing and responding to the world.

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