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.