 The Philosopher first argues with the Jew, who espouses a ‘strict observance’ moral theory, namely obedience to the Mosaic Law. One of the arguments the Jew offers is the Slave’s Wager (apparently the earliest-known version of Pascal’s Wager). Imagine that a Slave is told one morning by someone he doesn’t know whether to trust that his powerful and irritable Master, who is away for the day, has left instructions about what to do in his absence. The Slave can follow the instructions or not. He reasons that if the Master indeed left the instructions, then by following them he will be rewarded and by not following them he will be severely punished, whereas if the Master did not leave the instructions he would not be punished for following them, though he might be lightly punished for not following them. (This conforms to the standard payoff matrix for Pascal’s Wager.) That is the position the Jew finds himself in: God has apparently demanded unconditional obedience to the Mosaic Law, the instructions left behind. The Philosopher argues that the Jew may have other choices of action and, in any event, that there are rational grounds for thinking that ethics is not a matter of action in conformity to law but a matter of the agent’s intentions, as we have seen above.