[journal] You Can Rightly Judge Things You Have Not Tried

This actually isn’t that complicated; stop letting people lie to you.Assumed audience: People familiar with and potentially open to (as I am committed to) a Christian view of ethics, informed heavily by the virtue ethics tradition in particular. Many technology-enthused nerds often offer as a truism the idea that you have to have familiarity with a given technology to be able to judge it rightly. This is nonsense. Do you have to try cocaine to judge whether it is good for you? Do you have to try adultery to judge whether it is good for you? Not only is the answer no: trying these things may in fact ruin your ability to judge them rightly! Becoming a cocaine addict will make it far harder for you to assess whether cocaine is good or bad for you. Committing adultery will deform your character and entangle you in relationships you will not want to give up. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to one’s ability to evaluate the goodness or badness of a given technology. We can and should…