There is some discussion about whether it is right to judge others or to judge anything at all. If we are going to talk about values and virtues, we must recognize that we must judge whether something is good or bad or, at least, whether we or someone else has done good or bad. Virtues are good and vices are bad.
Better yet, we should cultivate our ability to observe, evaluate and discriminate across many layered types of experience in our lives. We need to be able to understand a situation enough to judge why one response might be better than another. We should constantly work to be able to understand make effective judgments about increasingly-complex situations and issues.
The fact is, we cannot live without judging. This is how our minds and our lives work. We judge facts; we judge probabilities; we judge likely outcomes; we judge good and bad; we judge ourselves and we judge others. Let’s examine a hierarchy of judgment from the simplest to the more-complicated.
Automatic responses — When we experience some stimulus, our nervous system may react automatically. Our arm pulls our hand away from heat. Our pupils contract in a bright light. Our knee kicks out when a nerve running past our knee is tapped. Our untrained bodies have judged for us. If we had been a bacterium, we might just as easily have reacted to move away from heat or toward food.
Subconscious responses — Other forms of stimulus reach our brain before we respond. Still, our brain goes to work before presenting the event to our awareness. It compares that experience to previous experience and, perhaps, classifies it as round and moving toward us in the context of a basketball game. Arms come up to catch it even before we can think whether it is a pass or a fumble. Our trained brains have judged for us. Most of us have had the experience of driving for some distance, involved in other thoughts, when something changes enough ahead of us that our brain brings it into our conscious awareness.
Conscious recognition — We make simple conscious comparisons all the time. We observe, take notice, and make comparative judgments of quantitative and qualitative things such as differences in color, size, shape, texture, and velocity. We also make more-complex conscious comparisons all the time. These are based on our experience. We notice that one of our cats is crouching to settle in for a nap. Closer observation allows us to judge that our cat is probably stalking the other and is going to jump any moment now.
We also make values-based judgments, based on our direct experience or, indirectly, the experience of others. You may know someone or have heard of someone who died from liver cirrhosis from alcohol or lung cancer from smoking. You may decide that these are vices and are bad. You may judge that you should avoid these vices or that it would be good to persuade a friend to do so.
We may respond to natural or community laws that have an unacceptable probability of being punished. Gravity may punish us for jumping off a roof. The courts may punish us for disobeying any number of laws. You may judge that obeying laws, or at least not being caught and punished, is good. Juries are asked to judge their peers according to the facts of a case.
All children recognize that others have the ability to enforce compliance to rules. They may judge that they will be punished if they do not obey. They may accept rules as the cost of participating in a game or being a member of a group. Many adults remain at this level. They will run stop signs when they can. They may avoid committing adultery because they don’t want to risk getting caught or go to hell.
As we mature, we may learn how to exercise empathy. There is a well-understood stage of psychosocial development that allows us to imagine how others might feel — to put ourselves in the place of others. We may judge that we should not commit adultery, imagining how our mate might feel if they found out. We are equipped to judge that someone else has done something that could injure another.
Eventually, having a conscience trained by repeated choices, we may even choose to behave virtuously even if there is little or no likelihood of being caught or punished. We can simply understand, and care, that something is intrinsically, or in context, good or bad.
We may easily transfer from one cultural context to another, exchanging one set of values and virtues for another. We know that this group expects you to burp after your meal; another group will think that it is rude.
Of course, it is not only right but necessary to judge ourselves and others. There are those who sincerely maintain that only God can decide what is good or bad. There are others who, just as sincerely, maintain that there is no valid basis for judging good or bad. Nonetheless, both of these groups routinely exercise some basis for making decisive judgments about what has happened or what they should do next as life presents itself to them from moment to moment.
This is an excerpt from “Family and Community Values in American Culture: Forming a More Perfect Union” to be published in 2014 by David Satterlee. Excerpts from other books of essays and short stories by this author are available at http://DavidSatterlee.com