Let's Make a Judgment!
kelly, michael
"LET'S MAKE A JUDGMENT!" A breakthrough in moral thinking by our best and brightest N BY MICHAEL KELLY of to be judgmental about it, but two cheers for Alison Hornstein. Hornstein is a student at...
...Student reactions expressed in the daily newspaper and in class pointed to the differences between our life circumstances and those of the perpetrators, suggesting that these differences had caused the previous day's events...
...Indeed, they are (shut the door for this part, lest the hall monitors catch us) morally wrong...
...17 issue of Nenuweek in which she attempts to come to terms with what for her and her friends atYale is the most troublesome question arising out of Sept...
...In high school, Hornstein and her fellow students agreed that although they personally found the practice of female genital mutilation to be abhorrent, they must accept it as part of the culture of other societies...
...Draw the line, Ms...
...But wait.A lifetime of instruction is not sloughed off quite so easily as all that...
...Oh, dear...
...Hornstein, it is not less important where people choose to draw the line as long as they will draw it somewhere...
...And she adds: "It is less important to me where people choose to draw the line than it is that they are willing to draw it at all...
...Here you have an obviously smart, obviously moral person trying nobly and painfully to think her way out of the intellectual and moral cul-de-sac in which the addled miseducation of her life has placed her-and she cannot, in the end, bear to do it...
...Hornstein is a student at Yale University, and she has written a column for the Dec...
...Others may disagree...
...Why' Because to address it would be to make a moral judgment, and to judge others is, for Hornstein's generation of properly educated young elites, the great taboo...
...Hornstein, murdering thousands of people in fact is bad...
...Manhattan "with students who came from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds" being tutored in an "open-minded curriculum...
...A moral judgment...
...Others may disagree-but they are wrong...
...In third grade, a teacher instructed the class in a parable of violence-one boy kicking another-the moral of which was that the kicker "had feelings that sometimes led him to do mean things...
...In second grade, she writes, she was taught that the Inuit of Alaska were "essentially like us," even though they ate caribou hoofs...
...Hornstein, push on...
...Reprinted with permission...
...11, listening to Yale students and professors offer rationalizations for the mass murders (pover ty in the Middle East, U.S...
...At some point soon after Sept...
...Indeed, she rushes to reassure on this point: "Others may disagree...
...Hornstein's bold moral judgment is not quite so bold as all that...
...Dare to judge...
...11 was one of horror: But by Sept...
...Hornstein had an epiphany...
...To me...
...These reactions and similar ones on other campuses have made it apparent that my generation is uncomfortable assessing, or even asking, whether a moral wrong has taken place...
...Hornstein writes that the initial response at Yale on Sept...
...foreign policy, etc...
...11: Did somebody do something really bad here' This is not a question that most people have a hard time with, and that is Hornstein's point...
...It is astonishing, really...
...Hornstein is clear as to why she and her peers find it so difficult to judge: They were trained all their lives to be this way...
...Go out on the limb of judgment...
...Yes, Ms...
...f,n A m N 98 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002...
...that puts you right back with your silly professors...
...Hornstein spent 14 years in a public school in Michael Kelly edits a magazine whose name rr'e can't remember...
...Some things were just wrong: Just as we should pass absolute moral judgment in the case of rape, we should recognize that some actions are objectively bad, despite differences in cultural standards and values...
...This essay originally appeared in the Washington Post, which in itself is encouraging...
...She cannot judge...
...Mass murder is indeed objectively badand not just in your opinion...
...It is objectively bad only in Hornstein's opinion...
...Hurrah...
...Look at her conclusion again: "To me," it begins...
...She is surprised and bothered to find that, in the wake of the murders, many of her classmates had been unable even to address the question...
...Go the last mile...
...12, as our shock began to fade, so did our sense of being wronged...
...Hijacking planes and killing thousands is not objectively bad after all...
...Draw it where you know it belongs...
...To me, hijacking planes and killing thousands of civilians falls into this category...
...Noticeably absent was a general outcry of indignation at what had been the most successful terrorist attack of our lifetimes...
Vol. 35 • January 2002 • No. 1
