Moral Judgment

 

Yesterday, in traffic, I had a few minutes to listen to Dennis Prager and writer Abigail Shirer on talk radio. They discussed and agreed that to be an adult is to make moral judgments, and that seems right to me.

 

To be a moral person is to make moral judgments about ourselves and others: about our behavior, our character, our actions, our motives and our competing, conflicting moral values.

 

God commands it, and society benefits generally, when good people take a stand in society, calling what is right and good, right and good, and condemning what is wrong and bad, as wrong and bad.

 

Nonetheless, we are also all bound by God to live by the ethical dictum to be moderate in exercising our moral judging, not in all things, but in most things most of the time, and there is usually some wiggle room, interpretation, and gray areas to work through. With that in mind, we do not want to rush to judgment and punishment immediately—unless the case is clear cut, black and white. We are not fit to, nor should we ever seek to judge people’s ultimate destiny, going to heaven or hell. We may have a fair idea, but only God knows.

 

We also want to show empathy, a willingness to understand a “sinner’s problems and how these influence his behavior.”

 

We also do not want to become intolerant and self-righteous, willing to use force and legal sanctions against those we condemn. Intolerance and compelled self-correction demanded by force upon a sinner by repressive, authoritarian society is to offer a cure worse than the disease.

 

Nonetheless, we should all be making moral judgments about ourselves and each other every day. We also want to respect people’s privacy, liberty and free will. Unless the immoral behavior is criminal, the person should not be legally punished, though some social ostracism might be allowable, though that runs uneasily along a slippery slope that readily can degenerates into communal bullying of dissidents that are not immoral, but just behave differently but morally in contrast to regular communal behavior standards.

 

We need to make our moral judgments, announce them openly and forthrightly, but also we should proceed with good will, generosity, humility and self-skepticism, so that an open-mind can prevent us from being about as moral as are the Iranian decency police working the streets of Iranian cities.

 

Abigail Shirer has written eloquently about how young girls have been damaged by parents turning their daughters over to counselors that are relativistic, or even pro-LGBTQ agenda, teaching young patients to adopt gender fluidity as their gender view.

 

Shirer urges that parents select schools and therapists that represent the values of the parents, not the values of relativism and Progressvism, alien to the parental point of view. I agree.