ABSTRACT
Thus public wickedness vanishes into a social problem, as private wickedness does into mental illness. This policy excludes much more than the administration of justice and the writing of history. The knife cuts deeper. It slices off all our power of self-direction. The function of moral judgement in our inner lives is to build up a store of cases approved and disapproved for various reasons – a map by which we can orient ourselves and plot our own course when we have to make decisions. Because we each have to act as individuals, these cases must in the first place be individual ones. Moral judgements on groups and masses have to be secondary, if they can be made at all.2 Nor can we do what the phrase ‘no one has the right to judge someone else’ may suggest, and build up our store entirely from verdicts on our own behaviour. Without an immensely wider range of comparisons, self-judgement could never start. When we wonder whether our own conduct is right, we need to be able to ask ‘What would I think about this if somebody else did it?’ We shall get no answer unless we can call on a range of comparable cases in the past when we actually have judged other people. This does not of
course mean stoning them or sending them to jail, merely forming an opinion on what they have done.3 It is an aspect of treating them with respect as responsible agents.
