Moral Culpability in the Garden

Question

Did Adam and Eve have moral culpability in the Garden before they ate from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil? It would seem that they were like small children in that sense, they were amoral--not because they did not care for morality, but because they had no concept of it.

If Adam and Eve had no concept of morality, of right and wrong, how is it fair to punish them for their behavior? Prior to eating the apple, Adam could not have said: "Eve, do not ask me to do that, it would be wrong." He had no idea it would be wrong to eat the apple.

It seems pretty central to morality that the agent must be aware of what he/she is doing for moral blame to fall upon them. If they were morally blame-less for eating the apple, then why the painful punishments?

Answer 1

This question really touches on what the purpose of the Tree of Knowledge was. Why would G-d not want them to eat from a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Isn't that the most important knowledge to have?

In Moreh Nevuchim 1:1 Rambam develops an approach to understanding this (in which he alludes to your question). As I understand his answer, it is basically the following:

Before eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam understood moral truths as just that - truths. Just like 1 + 1 = 2 is immutable and is not subject to how you feel about it or any weighing of values, so to "do not disobey G-d" was not a question of right and wrong, it was a question of true and false. "Obey G-d" was a truth. It was objectively grasped by his intellect. In the Rambam's example, it would be silly to apply "good" or "bad" to the statement "the Earth is flat." The intellect differentiates between those. When they ate from the Tree, they chose to allow subjective passions to affect their decisions. This lowered them from their lofty intellectual state of being into a state of being which involved moral decisions, as they had to battle their passions. Their framework shifted from אמת ושקר, true and false, to טוב ורע, good and evil.

So to answer your question, they knew much more than good and bad before they ate - they knew moral decisions as truths. When they ate from the tree, their mode of knowledge shifted - now they knew good and bad, as opposed to true and false. Thus, it is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, not simply the Tree of Knowledge - it brought a very specific type of knowledge.

Addendum:

As to why they sinned, the Rambam addresses this between the lines:

וכאשר חטא ונטה אחרי תאוותיו הדמיונות ותענוגות חושיו הגופניים כמו שאמר כי טוב העץ למאכל וכי תאוה הוא לעיניים

The Rambam describes what the sin was - it was going after his תאוות, choosing his desires over his intellect. Thus he brings the following of the sensual draw of the tree as textual support. Adam had such a thing as desire, and his charge was to not be נוטה (to "lean") towards it. Adam was aware of the concept of sensual pleasure, and he had desires. His charge and his challenge was to ignore it, and to choose to remain "שכלי" - an intellect.

Answer 2

Rabbi David Fohrman goes into the concept of what they knew before and what they "knew" after in his series Serpents of Desire: Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden..

Rabbi Fohrman takes the approach of the Rambam as explained in the answer by @Yez and goes into detail about why it is needed, what it means, and what the implications for us would be. He also connects this tree with the Tree of Life and discusses the necessity of both trees and the reason for the expulsion from Eden.

The entire series is too long to go into, but here are a few questions he deals with.

Imagine a world in which people were pretty much the same as they are now -- they were smart, they could walk, they could talk, they could drive cars and become investment bankers. They were missing only one thing. They didn't know right from wrong.

We have a word for people like that. We call them sociopaths.

and

This is a very serious, fundamental problem. Didn't Adam and Eve already have the knowledge the tree was supposed to give them? It's the kind of question that you should lose sleep over. For as long as you are stuck with this question, the story of Adam and Eve simply fails to make any sense at all.

A WORLD BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

Perhaps we've been the victim of faulty premises. We've casually assumed that we knew what kind of knowledge the Tree gave to Adam and Eve: A knowledge of "good and evil," of "right and wrong." But on second thought, just because it's called a "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" doesn't mean that Adam and Eve were ignorant of morality, of right and wrong, beforehand. It just means that they didn't call morality "good and evil." They called it something else.

The approach I am suggesting here is not my own. It in fact is the approach taken by Maimonides, the Rambam. Indeed, in his Guide to the Perplexed, Rambam considers the very same question we have advanced here: Why would God want to withhold a knowledge of good and evil from us? And the answer he gives is this: The tree didn't give us an understanding of right and wrong when we had none before; rather it transformed this understanding from one thing into another. It transformed it into something called a "knowledge of Good and Evil".

Answer 3

I think that the story of Adam and Eve is just a metaphor used to warn the men not to "know."

Think about the apple as the knowledge, the science or the consciousness.

This means that the more you know the more you will suffer, and I think this is just a sad truth. Just think about the terrible things humans have discovered, like atomic bombs or radiation. But God warned them not because knowledge is not useful but because men are not ready for that much, they would use it to harm and not to heal.

The animals have no consciousness and they are not harmful like men....