Maybe right and wrong did not move, but understanding of them did. The wrenching pain of walking the same path, even for a short space, tore away the willingness to judge.
Interpretation
Understanding of right and wrong can change over time, influencing our judgments and perspectives.
This quote suggests that while the concepts of right and wrong may remain constant, our understanding and interpretations of them evolve. The experience of enduring hardship or emotional pain can reshape our willingness to make judgments, urging us to adopt a more empathetic perspective towards others and their choices.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about morality, one could illustrate the complexities of judgment using this quote.
I believe in an individual soul which travels through eternity. This life is far from all there is--in fact, it is a minute part, simply an antechamber, a deciding place where we choose the light from the dark, where we come to know what we truly value.
Where there is no strife there is decay: 'The mixture which is not shaken decomposes.'
You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
Good moral character is not something that we can achieve on our own. We need a culture that supports the conditions under which self-love and friendship flourish.
We have contingency plans for war, but none for peace.
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
The person who does not believe in miracles surely makes it certain that he or she will never take part in one.
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