Patur Aval Assur,
I am reframing it because if it is not personal then there is no reason to do it.
Yes indeed, that is the axis of our disagreement.
Any number of reasons. E.g. you like money so you want to steal. Or you are jealous of someone so you want to kill him. Etc. Etc.
I would argue that the vast majority of people who do stuff like that do not A) Discover what their purpose in life is, and B) Consciously reject it.
Note that my point is not so much that there should be nothing stopping you from killing or stealing inasmuch as it is that you shouldn’t think that you’re a good person for giving up the stealing and killing, since you are only giving it up because you are getting something even better.
That’s balderdash (feel free to quote me on your report cards thread – emoticon).
A person who’s anger flares up, but refrains from killing because he thinks it’s wrong through reciprocal “golden rule” reasoning is better than a person who refrains simply because he’s afraid of getting jailed or executed, even though both are refraining in order to “get something better.” Why? Because once the police are removed from the equation, the former person would kill, while the latter would continue to refrain. We could probably derive some circumstance which would remove the inhibition from the latter guy too. The point that our sages are trying to make is that the ideal for us is to elevate our reasoning to the point where nothing can remove the inhibition to sin. With an animal this is impossible, but Judaism posits that this is possible for human beings.
At the end of the day, you are absolutely right in your reasoning … from the point of view of an animal. Animals are motivated purely by their perception of what is beneficial to them. Most humans are too, but we have the potential to elevate ourselves beyond this reasoning, because we were created b’tzelem Elokim, Who created the universe even though there was no “benefit” to Him. But it’s a waste of breath to try and explain this to an animal, because how could you describe colors to someone who was born completely blind? It would make no sense.