Justice & Law Quote by Maimonides

Austere on the surface, this line is really a manifesto for what Maimonides thinks law is for: not mere social control, and certainly not a checklist for piety, but a technology for remaking the human animal. The “perfect Law” isn’t measured by how efficiently it punishes wrongdoing; it’s judged by whether it can re-train desire itself - thinning out the appetites that make people impulsive, anxious, or cruel, and narrowing the space in which temptation can govern a life.

The key move is his careful triad: abandonment, depreciation, restraint. Not every desire is simply “repressed.” Some are to be abandoned (cut off at the root), others depreciated (demoted in status, stripped of glamour), and others merely restrained (managed because they can’t be eliminated). That nuance signals a thinker steeped in Aristotle’s ethics as much as in rabbinic law: the goal is not ecstatic purity but a workable, disciplined equilibrium.

Context matters. Writing in a medieval world where religious law was the dominant public architecture, Maimonides pushes a rationalist defense of commandments as tools for moral psychology and civic stability. The subtext is polemical: against a spirituality that prizes emotion as authenticity, and against a legalism that treats rules as ends in themselves. His “in so far as possible” is the slyly humane clause - an admission that the law aims at mastery, not mutilation.