Rabbi Dr. David Gottlieb - Jewish Philosophy: Free Will - Part 4

What’s said in this shiur

The opening of this shiur, in Hidabroot - Torah & Judaism’s own words — taken from the captions, so names and Hebrew terms may be approximate.

so okay i want to start with two footnotes to what we spoke about yesterday expand on both of them and then if you have comments or questions we'll discuss them and then we'll move on to another topic we started talking yesterday about the psychology of free will i mentioned that free will is quantitative in two ways number one how many alternatives do you have and that changes over time you learn more learning more can increase or decrease your alternatives you might learn there's another possibility that you weren't aware of you also might learn that one of your alternatives has disastrous consequences which just makes it out of the question so when you learn one of the things you learned is the differences in the alternatives that are available to you also it's quantitative in the difficulty you have in carrying out the right decision more difficult it is the less responsible you are for failure and as i said yesterday i think disagrees with our normal moral intuition and usually the torah agrees with our normal moral intuition nothing more than usually almost always maybe even always now there's another aspect of the psychology i don't expect you to remember this i said something which you couldn't appreciate when i was saying it but i was careful to qualify what i said how is free will necessary for responsibility i i stayed away from saying you're only responsible for those actions that are produced by free will i stayed away from saying that what i said is any creature that has no free will at all has no responsibility that i said that's a global statement the reason i didn't say it action by action because it's strictly speaking not true

Jump to a moment

1. 0:10so okay i want to start with two footnotes to what we spoke about yesterday expand…
2. 2:45acceptable that jewish guys go out and get drunk maybe i'm just naive in old-fashioned but…
3. 5:17it's just a triggered response i don't think about it i just do it i'm thinking…
4. 7:54do don't be taken in by these appeals to your self-destructive sentiment that you ought to…
5. 10:27here's an example from a paper in the journal philosophy many years ago you're standing next…
6. 13:31he finally succeeded in working on himself not to hurt other people now during that period…
7. 16:02in favor of saving the child he's tracing out the motivations against letting the child die…
8. 18:34right attitude the right attitude is two is not one period i don't care if you…
9. 21:04you can only see to the next opaque surface beyond that who knows maybe it's there…
10. 23:37you're giving me some theory that morality is relative i know that child rape is wrong…

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