Which school of philosophy provides the best guide for how to think about Gaza?
When it comes to the horrors of the war in the MIddle East, neither Moses nor Immanuel Kant is sufficient
“The Thinker” by French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky August 9, 2025
Two weeks ago, when I was invited to attend a Shabbat service at a local Reform synagogue, I was preoccupied, along with much of the world — or, rather, the part of the world that has the luxury to dwell on the suffering of others — by the hellish situation in Gaza. Though I am agnostic, I thought that the service might cast light on the darkness of current events.
The timing was excellent: the evening’s service, the rabbi observed, marked the start of readings from Deuteronomy. But it also marked the start of a chain of thoughts on the ethical theory I found in the last book of the Torah, and whether it is the ethics our time so urgently needs.
In ancient Greek, Deuteronomy is the mashup of deuteros, or second, and nomos, or law. The same meaning is echoed in the ancient Hebrew title, Devarim, or “words” — specifically, the words announced by God to Moses, which Moses then shares with the Israelites.
The words spoken by Moses narrate both the earthly events the Israelites have experienced and the fiery commands they have heard. “The Lord spoke to you out of the fire,” Moses reminds them, “and you heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a Voice.” The reason Moses repeats these words seems simple: If the Israelites fail to act on the words, they are merely sound.
A few millennia later, the analytic philosopher J.L. Austin had the chutzpah to disagree with Moses. When his book How to Do Things with Words was published in 1955, it became, well, the bible of ordinary language analysis. Austin argued that there are words that are not just statements, but “performative utterances.” When I make a promise, for example, I am not just saying something, but I am also doing something: I am entering an agreement—a covenant, if you wish—with another person. I am vowing to do something, and if I fail in that promise, the words are literally meaningless.
Take, for example, the original bible. Among the most important words in Deuteronomy, the rabbi insisted, was empathy. God commands us to be compassionate towards the suffering of others. Deuteronomy 15:7 makes this pretty clear: “If there is among you a poor man of your brethren, within any of the gates in your land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart nor shut your hand from your poor brother, but you shall open your hand wide to him and willingly lend him sufficient for his need, whatever he needs.”
But this leads to a couple of thorny issues, the first being interpretative. I, for one, understand “brother” to be neither my actual brother nor my fellow Jews sitting in the sanctuary, but is the fraternity of my fellow human beings: God is commanding me to open my heart and hand to those in great need, whether they are family or foreigners. But against this liberal reading, many Jewish commentators tend to be originalist, insisting that “brother” means exclusively the tribe of Israel, whether they are living in Israel and or in the diaspora.
This brings us to the second problem, which is ethical. The rabbi emphasized that the “recent news from Israel, relating to the terrible situation in Gaza” made the divine commandment to be compassionate towards others especially urgent. “We are all created in the image of God,” the rabbi concluded, addingthat “no one deserves to suffer.”
As I nodded my head in agreement, I suddenly wondered why I was doing so. Was it because this impulse reflects the undeniable appeal of the deontological argument, which states that we are obliged—deon is ancient Greek for “duty”—to follow universal rules? The command that we must not make others suffer and we must empathize with those who do suffer is certainly something the world needs more of, right?
For moral philosophers, most importantly Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century, these rules are logically consistent and rooted in reason. In his famous categorical imperative, Kant argues that we must act according to those rules, based on our reason. These are laws which we would want to apply to all people, all the time, and in all places. There is, Kant declared, something truly breathtaking in this claim. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe,” he wrote, “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
But is the claim true? Are these laws truly within us? Religious deontologists think they are not. They instead insist that they are located within divine authority—i.e., the voice from the fire. As Deuteronomy 6:24 makes crystal clear, it is the moral law outside us, inscribed on the tablets handed by God to Moses, that command us “to do all these statutes, to fear Him, for our good always.”
In either case, though, the attraction of deontology remains the same. Not only does it offer consistency—after all, it applies to all people in all situations—but also agency. In other words, while we cannot always determine the consequences of our actions, we can often control the intentions that led to the actions. Let justice be done, as the Latin phrase declares, though the heavens may fall.
But is it that simple? When it comes to Gaza, the rabbi acknowledged that “we search for a perspective that is truly difficult to find.” And yet, the rabbi seemed to find one, nevertheless, because we were then told that our duty is “to stand with Israel and all her inhabitants.”
Yet, this duty to stand with all Israelis seems to include the religious fanatics who have been murdering and terrorizing Palestinians in their effort to colonize the West Bank and are now planning to do the same in Gaza. Moreover, some of these fanatics hold key ministries in a government led by a man whose one guiding principle, regardless of the cost in innocent lives, is self-preservation.
Finally, one does not need a degree in philosophy, moral or analytical, to conclude there is just one perspective on events in Gaza. Namely, that the deliberate starvation of men, women, and children is not just a legal crime, but also a moral horror.
Of course, the settler movement sincerely believes that they are following the command of divine authority in setting Palestinian villages aflame and expelling the men, women, and children who lived there. But there are yet other problems with a deontological ethic.
There is, most famously, the matter of lying. When you turn a general rule into a categorical imperative, perverse consequences can follow. For example, what if I was a Kantian philosopher hiding an undocumented migrant refugee Jew in Houston. One day, masked ICE agents hammer at my door, demanding to know if I was harboring such an individual. Would I need to acknowledge that I was? (And all the more perversely, not out of fear of being arrested, but out of fear of violating the categorical imperative?) It seems so.
But there are alternatives to deontological ethics. Rather than going back to the ancient Israelites, we can instead go back to the ancient Greeks and the writings of Aristotle. In his Ethics and Politics, Aristotle laid the foundations for what we call virtue ethics, which was given a powerful boost in our own age by Alasdair MacIntyre, the recently deceased (and increasingly controversial) thinker and author of the influential book, After Virtue, published in 1981.
In essence, the virtuous person, according to virtue ethicists, has character traits that include compassion, temperance, and courage. When virtuous people respond to a certain situation, they do so not from the call to duty—either from within or without—but because this is, quite simply, what virtuous people do. They already possess these virtues; practicing them makes not only one’s own self happy but also makes others happy.
Put it this way: imagine a passerby in ancient Athens asks Aristotle how he can find happiness. The philosopher adjusts his robe, mimics the playing of a lyre, and cracks, “Practice, practice, practice!”
Happily, there is growing interest among Jewish thinkers about the ways in which virtue ethics can be married to Judaism. One such philosopher, Yonatan Brafman, argues that there is much to be said for “cultivating virtues and pursuing human flourishing within a communally shared practice of commandments, whether they are understood as divinely revealed or socially constructed.”
To be sure, we do not have the luxury of time to argue whether virtues are God-given or man-made. We know virtues like compassion, prudence, and courage when we see them, enact them, and feel them. And what we all should feel right now is the charge of urgency, that we must practice, practice, and practice these virtues to get us at least to a better place for us all.
