While I was out at Wyoming Stoic Camp last month, in the course of one of our daily group activities, a younger participant expressed a worry that many of my academic students come in to classes with. “Aren’t we judging?” he asked. Now why is that a problem?
Somewhere this college student had gotten not just introduced, but likely inundated with a counterproductive and oversimplistic moral norm all too common in our society. He had been told that it’s bad or wrong to judge other people.
I tell my students in my classes, particularly ethics classes, that they ought to judge. The issue isn’t whether or not you judge, or whether it is bad to engage in judgements, but the quality and the accuracy of the judgements they make.
Matters get even more complicated when it is Stoicism that we are thinking about and trying to apply to our lives, because don’t the Stoic caution us against making judgements? Well. . . . it’s not quite that simple, and in this episode, I explain why that is the case.
I hope you enjoy listening to this little story and short reflections. Perhaps they might prove useful to you or those you care about!
Share this post