To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
Ed. Note: Methinks if he had added "heart" to "intellect and judgment", he would have been on to something.
In ever more areas of life, algorithms are coming to substitute for judgment exercised by identifiable human beings who can be held to account. The rationale offered is that automated decision-making will be more reliable. But a further attraction is that it serves to insulate various forms of power from popular pressures.
-Matthew B. Crawford, from this essay
I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes.
It sure does beat all how prosperity makes a man critical of all who are less prosperous. Seems like some folks no sooner get two dollars they can rattle together than they start looking down their noses at folks who only have two bits.
-Louis L'Amour, The Courting of Griselda
One thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are evaluative creatures. We can take a critical stance toward our own activities, and aspire to direct ourselves toward objects and projects that we judge to be more worthy than others that may be more immediately gratifying. Animals are guided by appetites that are fixed, and so are we, but we can also form a second-order desire, "a desire for a desire," when we entertain some picture of the sort of person we would like to be—a person who is better not because she has more self-control, but because she is moved by worthier desires.
-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Avoiding regret is a key component to life satisfaction.
Good judgment is expensive, but poor judgement will cost you a fortune.
Most errors in judgment happen when we don't know we're supposed to be exercising judgment.
The key to getting what you want out of life is to identify how the world works and to align yourself with it.
But being wise requires more. It's more than knowing how to get what you want. It's also knowing which things are worth wanting—which things really matter.
The judicious will not fail to extract other lessons from the two conventions. For example, the lesson that politicians, in the main, are poor hands at practical politics—that their professional competence is very slight. Very few of them, indeed, show any sign of ordinary good sense. Their tricks are transparent and deceive no one, not even other politicians. When they accomplish anything, it is usually by accident.
-Henry Louis Mencken, from a 7/14/1924 essay
The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. The seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous "self-esteem" that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.
-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
Those principles have been taken as defining the field of "natural law," for the reason that their validity depends only on the idea of negotiation itself and not on the circumstances of the one who embarks on it.
Something like this was surely at the back of Adam Smith's mind when, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he argued for the "impartial spectator" as the true judge of our moral duties. When asking myself what should I do, I entertain the thought of what another would think of my action when observing it with a disinterested eye. If, as I suggest, morality is rooted in the practice of accountability between self-conscious agents, this is exactly what we should expect. The impartial other sets the standard that we all must meet.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
I now turn to another feature of the human condition that divides us from our simian relatives: the feature of responsibility. We hold each other accountable for what we do, and as a result we understand the world in ways that have not parallel in the lives of other species. Our world, unlike the environment of an animal, contains rights, deserts, and duties; it is a world of self-conscious subjects, in which events are divided into the free and the unfree, those that have reasons and those that are merely caused, those that stem from a rational subject, and those that erupt into the stream of objects with no conscious design. Thinking of the world in this way, we respond to it with emotions that lie beyond the repertoire of other animals: indignation, resentment, and envy; admiration, commitment, and praise—all of which involve the thought of others as accountable subjects with rights and duties and a self-conscious vision of their future and their past. Only responsible beings can feel these emotions, and in feeling them, they situate themselves in some way outside the natural order, standing back from it in judgment.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Attention is not always within our control. The unexpected, the changeable, the novel, even the habitual in life abduct our focus, intrude upon our awareness, and pull us off course for a time. Attention is like a second skin, a meeting ground for our ever-present grappling with external and internal worlds. Yet well used and nurtured carefully, our networks of attention are our foremost means to shaping our lives. These networks give us extraordinary ways to master ourselves and our environment, offering the key to growth, connection, happiness. Accepting a culture of eroding attention relinquishes this potential for sculpting our individual and collective futures. To paraphrase Walter Mischel's caveat on will, we don't always want to exercise our highest powers of attention, yet if we cannot focus, observe, or judge well, the choice is lost. Will we slip into a dark age of distraction? At journey's end, I searched for final clues in contrasting realms of art and science where attention is nonetheless similarly dissected, rekindled, and venerated. To reverse a darkening time, we must understand, strengthen, and lastly value attention.
-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings, however, that they can distinguish an idea from the reality represented in it, can entertain propositions from which they withhold their assent, and can move judge-like in the realm of ideas, calling each before the bar of rational argument, accepting them and rejecting them regardless of the reproductive cost.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Although I am always minded to say good of what is good, and inclined to interpret favorably anything that can be so interpreted, still it is true that the strangeness of our condition makes it happen that we are often driven to good by vice itself—were it not that doing good is judged by intention alone.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 2, Chapter 1
It is a marvelous testimony of the weakness of our judgment that it recommends things for their rarity or novelty, or even for their difficulty, even if they are neither good nor useful.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter54
In the National Assembly, in its two and a half years, Robespierre made some five hundred speeches, usually too long to be convincing, and too argumentative to be eloquent; but the masses of Paris, learning of their tenor, loved him for them. He opposed racial or religious discrimination, proposed emancipation of the blacks, and became, till his final months, the tribune and defender of the people. He accepting the institution of private property, but wished to universalize small-scale ownership as an economic basis for a sturdy democracy. He called inequality of wealth "a necessary and incurable evil," rooted in the natural inequality of human ability. In this period he supported the retention of the monarchy, properly limited; an attempt to overthrow Louis XVI, he thought, would lead to such chaos and bloodshed as would end in a dictatorship more tyrannical than a King.
Not till near his end did he seem to doubt the full identity of his judgment with the popular will. His mind was weaker than his will; most of his ideas were borrowed from his reading, or from the catchwords that filled the revolutionary air; he died too young to have acquired sufficient experience of life, or knowledge of history, to check his abstract or copular conceptions with patient perception or impartial prospective. He suffered severely from our common failing—he could not get his ego out of the way of his eyes. The passion of his utterance convinced himself; he became dangerously certain and ludicrously vain. "That man," said Mirabeau, "will go far, he believes all that he says." He went to the guillotine.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon
But when meaning has been disciplined out of language, and the pride of doing something better than other people banished, and the superficial clarity of being a man or a woman prohibited, and the practical instinct of protection and of self-protection disallowed, and life’s simple practices shamed out of existence—when all these timeless human things, all created out of the senses, melt into air, then nothing in our experience will remind us of anything else in our experience, and we will lose the ability to discriminate, to cherish, to judge. Instead of continually expanding our sympathies by helping us to follow the thread of truth through dissimilarity, the moral imagination will shrink to nothing. And then any comparison, and any equivalence, is possible.
-Lee Siegel, from this post
"What a very attractive woman!" I exclaimed, turning to my companion.
He had lit his pipe again and was leaning back with drooping eyelids. "Is she?" he said languidly; "I did not observe."
"You really are an automaton—a calculating machine," I cried. "There is something positively inhuman in you at times."
He smiled gently. "It is of the first importance," he said, "not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor."
-Arthur Conan Doyle, channeling his inner Holmes in The Sign of Four
I do not share that common error of judging another by myself.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 37
Why has there been so much misunderstanding around that day in the Valley of Elah? On one level, the duel reveals the folly of our assumptions about power. The reason King Saul is skeptical about David's chances is that David is small and Goliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He doesn't appreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength. Saul is not alone in making that mistake. . . .
What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and strong are not always what they seem.
-Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
Powerful and ingenious minds, taking as postulates that the powers expressly granted to the government of the Union are to be contracted by construction into the narrowest possible compass and that the original powers of the States are retained if any possible construction will retain them may, by a course of well digested but refined and metaphysical reasoning founded on these premises, explain away the Constitution of our country and leave it a magnificent structure indeed to look at, but totally unfit for use. They may so entangle and perplex the understanding as to obscure principles which were before thought quite plain, and induce doubts where, if the mind were to pursue its own course, none would be perceived. In such a case, it is peculiarly necessary to recur to safe and fundamental principles to sustain those principles, and when sustained, to make them the tests of the arguments to be examined.
-Chief Justice John Marshall, as he concludes the majority opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)
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