halakha lies on a continuum between language and law.

struggling for freedom from without also struggling for freedom to generates a lot of negative energy.

Our beliefs are, in aggregate, like an operating system: they sit in the background and serve as a framework within which it is possible to organize our lives.

those who don’t identify with a tight-knit community inevitably undervalue the moral foundations, loyalty and restraint, that require a community, an attitude that further alienates them from any such community; these indispensable moral foundations are thus liable to continue to lose appeal.

To assert, as I do, that viable moral systems must be adaptive and must increase certain kinds of collective utility is not to reduce morality to these properties.5

Such codes resemble statutory law in the sense that they are expressed as general principles of law rather than as rulings regarding specific cases. But they differ from typical statutory law in two crucial ways: they are not produced by a legislature but rather by an individual without recognized institutional authority, and, unlike legislation, t

the process of formulating clear principles helps us overcome systemic bias.

abandoning traditions that have proven to be useful for reasons that we don’t understand is likely to lead to consequences that we don’t anticipate.

balancing intuition and reason, as well as egalitarianism and elitism, can be achieved only in the absence of a legislative body with power of enforcement.