judgment

We humans have inherited the tendency to judge pretty much everything around us as good or bad. While this faculty certainly helped our ancestors in the savannah judge whether a mushroom would nourish or kill us, or whether a rustle in the bushes was a gazelle or a lion, our overactive judgment is the cause of much psychological and interpersonal misery in the modern world.

I think of judgment as at least one kind of mental module, a kind of accounting program honed over millennia that’s constantly recording our experiences as either positive or negative, and dialing up our anxiety when too many seem to be negative.

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)

Things do not touch the soul, for they are external and remain immovable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within. (Marcus Aurelius)

Emotivism is a branch of moral skepticism which argues that our intuitions about right and wrong are merely emotional reactions to the behavior of others, judgments of the heart and not of the mind. It’s humorously called “boo/yay theory” as it reduces our pretension to moral logic as equivalent to shouting “boo!” or “yay!” at others’ actions.

And Buddhism

I realized that saying that something is good or bad, or better or worse, or best or worst, is not true. It’s not Right Speech. When I say that something is good, I am attributing goodness to the object, but the object is just the object. What is true is that I like it, or more accurately, I like something about it, or them, and I’m neither acknowledging nor owning the feeling. I immediately began an exercise that I still do today. Anytime I catch myself using good or bad, or equivalent words, I stop and rewrite the speech in terms of like and dislike, which has a funny way of rewriting the thought, which has a funny effect of changing my thinking. For example, “That food was good.” becomes “I liked the food.” which can become something like “The tortillas were piping hot, the filling was a little bit bland, but what I liked most was enjoying it with my friends.” “He’s a bad guy.” becomes “I don’t like him.” which becomes “He makes me nervous for some reason.” which can lead all sorts of places. The feeling of like or dislike is a window. When I own and acknowledge my feelings, I can see what’s underneath. When I think that something or someone is good or bad, it’s their fault, and I learn nothing.

From: https://tonywiederhold.com/2021/04/11/the-three-root-guidances-aka-the-three-pure-precepts/