What is bothersome for me is that I so often hear that we shouldn’t judge others for their actions. But I can’t help but think that life is all about judging. Judging what we do and what others are doing. We judge what’s right or wrong, what’s good or evil and what’s moral and immoral by thinking about everything we see and hear for ourselves.

Judging is perceiving, it’s forming an opinion or not. It is not concrete or absolute but likely to change from one moment to the next. The more we experience and learn, the more our opinions waiver and most likely change.

What seems evil to me today or what I consider immoral or just wrong behavior may in fact change, depending on my future life experience and lessons yet to be learned.

Today, I think that the difficult decisions about our own actions seem to be the ones that rest upon what’s morally right in our hearts and when we choose the easier, more convenient path over the more difficult one, we deny what is in our hearts and moral in our minds.

I think the crux of deciding comes in your more detailed discussion of the nature of compassion. In some ways this echoes one of the key Bible verses Micah 6:6-8 (what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?). Substitute “Gods” or “the universe” for “Lord” and you perhaps have a sentiment that Hindus and Buddhists alike might endorse.

With regards to wisdom, I’m reminded of the medical aphorism that “good clinical judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad clinical judgment.” Other pithy reflections on wisdom come form Kant (“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”), Shaw (“We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.”), and Santayana (“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”).

In our country, debates about good and evil have often taken a political tint. I find the work of psychologist Jon Haidt especially trenchant, with evidence-based observations of how liberals and conservatives have different framing about what are the most important aspects of a moral decision.

http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/mft/index.php

Finally, for a sustained examination of these issues, philosopher Susan Neiman has recently published a wonderful book on “what we can know,” eternal truth and moral relativism, the squabbles between the right and left, insights from modern neuro-science, and acting in the service of “how the world ought to be.” (Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (2008).

Andy: Thanks so much for visiting my blog and as always for your thoughtful insights. As you rightly point out, most discussions on morality seem almost inevitably destined to lead to a “slippery slope” argument somewhere and often strongly contentious viewpoints, but as you also point out and already know, I’m very ambitious.

Alex

Very good post, well argued.

I went over a lot of my views in my comments on Raptitude, so I apologize for being redundant.

I guess the bottom line to my point of view is that moral judgments are a function of rational thought, which means our decision is based on our cultural conditioning and our acute emotional state.

When you look to intuition, and ignore the impulses of the rational mind (the impulse to punish, for example), the answer is always clear, and there is suddenly nothing difficult about these choices.

This kind of wisdom is the “smart” I was referring to in my post. In my experience it always yields the most beneficial response, and there is no need to impose a good/bad dichotomy on top of it, except to make things easy to describe.

David: I got your reference to wisdom in your post and agree with it. Seems to me the difficulty lies in manifesting what I believe to be a universal wisdom which people can use to make moral decisions. Given the complexity of the world and the circumstances that occur in it, even then getting people to agree is difficult…

Alex