The Judgment Instinct

Many of us are born with a moral conscience. We do not need religion to experience the sting of guilt or the quiet satisfaction of having done the right thing. Years ago, I had a Hungarian student who described herself as coming from a “very atheist but moral family.” She was one of the most conscientious students I have taught—honest, intellectually rigorous, and incapable of cutting corners. I never doubted her for a moment.

Conscience transcends religious belief. Religion may give conscience a vocabulary, a theology, and a story, but it does not create it. The impulse to judge ourselves seems to arrive long before we learn the language of heaven and hell.

One of my earliest memories comes from when I was three years old. A little girl and I wanted a box of raisins before dinner, but my parents refused. Outraged, I threw a tantrum. In the chaos I lurched forward, accidentally knocking the little girl down a flight of apartment stairs. The image seared itself into my mind. I was horrified—not because an adult scolded me, but because I knew, with the terrible clarity that only children can possess, that I had done something wrong. The guilt lingered into the next day. Unable to bear it, I performed my own act of penance. I deliberately hurled myself down the same staircase, as though suffering could somehow balance the moral ledger.

Around that same time, I became obsessed with the nursery rhyme “This Old Man.” I remember standing in the lunch line at nursery school, trying not to gag at the sulfurous smell of boiled lima beans, singing the song under my breath. When I reached the line, “This old man came rolling home,” an inexplicable vision filled my imagination. I saw an endless procession of people—young and old—watching the old man stand in judgment over the life he had lived. Then, one by one, they understood that they would be judged next. The image carried no explicit heaven or hell, no angels or devils. It was simply an overwhelming certainty that every life would one day be weighed.

I knew nothing of religion.

Yet I seem to have been born with what I call the Judgment Instinct: the inborn intuition that our lives will ultimately be evaluated by a moral standard higher than personal preference, social approval, or self-justification. Religion did not implant that intuition in me. It gave a name to something I already sensed was there.