Abstract
Moral criticism, or as the Bible puts it rebuke (tokhehah in Hebrew), is a necessary activity for social learning and improvement.1 Moral criticism is part of a give and take among individuals who must necessarily share, at least, a minimal set of core values, including most importantly respect for one another, a common ethical vocabulary, and a basic moral grammar. For moral criticism to take hold and to have any possibility of truly being effective there must already exist meaningful channels of communication. As the philosopher Michael Walzer has noted, “We do not have to discover the moral world because we have always lived there. We do not have to invent it because it has already been invented” (1987, p. 20).
You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely rebuke your fellow and not bear sin on his account.
Leviticus 19:17
True unity between people can arise only in a form of action and thinking that does not attempt to fragment the whole of reality.
David Bohm
Listen, I’m an f***ing steamroller, and I’ll roll over you and anyone else.
Eliot Spitzer to Jim Tedisco, minority leader of the State Assembly, during Spitzer’s first month as governor
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© 2011 Moses Pava
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Pava, M. (2011). The Art of Moral Criticism. In: Jewish Ethics in a Post-Madoff World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339576_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339576_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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