DUNCAN GREENBERG
Rabbi Dr Akiva Tatz, who spoke recently at Sinai Indaba 2019, said that the role Torah plays in our ethical lives is more subtle and profound than a simple list of do’s and don’ts.
“Torah is not meant to override your basic humanity,” Tatz told the jam-packed conference hall at the Sandton Convention Centre, “it’s meant to cause it to flourish”.
Tatz told the crowd that humans possess moral intuition, which we are obliged to develop.
Our innate sense of morality is more than an abstract intellectual goal, as Tatz demonstrated with a thought experiment.
Drawing on the well-known “trolley problem”, a thought experiment made famous by Oxford moral philosopher Philippa Foot, Tatz helped the audience to understand the non-rational sources of our moral judgement. Faced with difficult moral dilemmas, we often have strong moral intuitions about the right way to act without necessarily being able to articulate the reasons for preferring one alternative over the other.
The trolley problem poses a hypothetical situation: an out-of-control tram is hurtling towards five people. You can save the five by redirecting the tram, but by intervening, you would kill an innocent person on the alternative track. Is it right to intervene? Such thought experiments may sound like abstractions that have little to do with day-to-day situations, but they can help us to clarify our thinking in real-life cases.
Think of a doctor who might be tempted to let a patient die to harvest life-saving organs to save five other patients. Or the decision to give palliative care that could risk the patient’s life. Many of us would abhor the former decision and accept the latter. But why? Thought experiments such as the trolley problem can help us to clarify and distinguish the moral principles underpinning these intuitions.
Of course, we can’t simply rely on our casual judgements from situation to situation. We need to cultivate our moral sensibilities with the guidance of the Torah. But, ultimately, Tatz said, we should recognise that we bear a deep sense of moral truth. “Children need to know that their sense of fairness is a reliable thing at root,” he said.
