Tickets: €10,00 (€7,50 discount rate) for the whole day available online at www.felix.meritis.nl

This debate will be in English.

Very often when one pronounces a judgement today, on most any non trivial subject, more often than not you will be met with the response, ‘and who are you to judge that/me/them’. In fact, simply asking questions about the need for judgement can run up against a culture much influenced by relativism, postmodernism and multiculturalism, or, and it really amounts to the same thing, by an intolerant reaction against those very influences. Inclusively non-judgemental or exclusively judgemental. The battle lines seem entrenched between those who would overturn the hierarchies of judgement and throw normative values out with the bathwater or those who will defend them to the last man.

But the act of judgement is not even or necessarily to express unthinking bigotry and prejudice. When I make a judgement, that is beautiful, that is good, I invite a response from you. We may disagree. In fact there has to be the possibility of disagreement for judgement to be worthwhile. And, in a way, it is the existence of disagreement that makes judgement so necessary. But it is also the potential of agreement that makes judgement so powerful. And we do recognise some judgements, in any sphere of life, as being more powerful than others: more impartial; rooted in deeper experience and knowledge of the human condition.

The more complex society is, the more call for difficult judgements. Why then, do we seek to avoid them? Are we really that sceptical of any that dare lay claim to Truth or Beauty? Is everything provisional and subject to change overnight? Is your opinion or view to be respected because it is your opinion or because it is a good opinion? Are all those who distinguish between good and bad to be dismissed as ‘essentialists’ or ‘fundamentalists’? Does it not matter what I think? What about what we think? Let alone what society may think. Can we afford not to have a battle for judgement today?