By Selwyn Duke
Do not judge lest you be judged . . . . It's a phrase so frequently misused nowadays.
It's often uttered in an attempt to
immunize oneself against value judgments about one's behavior. After all, few people brook criticism very
well, and many of us fear the re-emergence of a dominant moral code that might
cast a pall over the libertine lifestyle modern man holds so dear. So the aforementioned misused Bible quotation
and other fashionable mantras are trotted out and used as a firewall against
the bearers of bad news. You may hear,
"Don't impose your values on me!" or "Who's to say what right
and wrong are" or "That may be right for you, but that doesn't mean
it's right for others." We've all
heard these refrains in one form or another, and many of us have used them
ourselves. It seems as if civilization's
moral compass is adrift in a Bermuda triangle of moral confusion — there no
longer is a consensus among people about what's right or wrong. So we feel we have the latitude to deflect
inconvenient value judgments with these convenient little clichés; we pay
homage to the notion that what's right is negotiable. But do we really believe this? And what, if anything, is wrong with the
prevailing conception of right and wrong in our society? To answer these questions one has to examine
the nature of right and wrong.
