Stupid things you hear all the time, #794

"Who's the judge of good or not good?"

A few reasonable responses:
1. You are, regarding anything that affects your life.
2. You are, regarding anything that affects the lives of those you care for, even if you don't have the power or authority to make their decisions for them.
3. Any parent of small children.
4. A judge and/or jury in any court of law.
5. Any individual's personal conscience.
6. The formal bi-laws, policies or traditions of any institution, regarding the behavior of that institutions members.
7. The corporate conscience - acknowledged or implied - of any group of people that gathers together regularly for a common goal.
8. The rules of any game being played.
9. God, if there is one - unless he, she or it has multiple personality disorder.

In my experience, this question is almost always asked when the uncomfortable awareness has arisen that different people would "judge" differently about some matter at hand. The question is usually asked in order to parry away the very idea of making value judgments, but this is a deception, and often a self-deception, since virtually every person alive is regularly making value judgments. It's impossible to function without doing so.

It's a very important issue, one around which there is great foolishness and psychological hurt. We can disagree intelligently and respectfully about what the criteria for what's good or not good might be, but let's not pretend such criteria do not exist, or that we don't want them to.