Beyond Feelings

CHAPTER 18 Forming a Judgment
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Each person would be aware of where everyone else stood in relation to
him or her. And no one would be dependent on others.
c. The institution of marriage has outlived its usefulness. More and more
people today, particularly young people, are realizing that it makes more
sense to have informal relationships. A couple should live together only
as long as both individuals want to. Whenever one wants to end the relationship,
he or she should be able to do so, neatly, without legal complications.
This could be done if marriage were abolished. Everyone would
benefit. People would retain their individual freedom and be able to
fulfill their own need to develop as a person, responding to their own
changing values and interests.
d. College instructors should not be permitted to set restrictive attendance
policies; they should be made to treat students as responsible adults,
leaving each student free to decide his or her attendance behavior.
Students know their own strengths and weaknesses better than anyone
else does and are mature enough to decide which classes they need to
attend. Some courses will be new and challenging to them. Others will
merely duplicate prior learning. Some instructors will add to the students’
store of information and challenge their intellect. Others will
merely read the textbook aloud. Left to exercise their own judgment, students
can use their time wisely, attending the classes of the good, interesting,
dedicated teachers and avoiding those of the dullards and deadbeats.
e. One of the reasons crime is so rampant in our society is that we put too
much emphasis on determining why the criminal committed the crime
and whether the police treated the criminal fairly. Those are important
matters, but other, equally important, ones seem to be neglected lately—
like protecting law-abiding people from dangerous, irresponsible people
and making punishments severe enough to deter crime. We cringe at
primitive societies’ handling of crime—for example, cutting off a thief’s
hands or a perjurer’s tongue. But at least such punishments reflect a
recognition that crime is an outrage against society that should not be tolerated.
I am not suggesting that we return to such a standard of justice,
only that we get tough with criminals. Two steps that would provide
a good start would be setting determinate sentences for crimes instead of
giving judges the wide latitude they now enjoy and refusing to let legal
technicalities set aside a conviction when a person is clearly guilty.
2. Apply what you learned in this chapter to the inquiry you completed for
one of the applications in Chapter 17.