The first day of the program, one of the most interesting activities we participated in was the alligator story where we made value based judgements to determine the levels of fault of each of the characters in the story. As I worked on the rankings, after some minutes of thinking and making judgments, decisions came very easily to me. In fact, I expected everyone in my group and in general to have similar if not the same rankings as mine.
Within my group, we had very similar rankings but where we differed was the difference of faults between the character that asked for sex in return for his favor and between the character that beat another up. For me, I chose the latter as the worse behaviour, simply because one character, however immoral his intentions, gave the option of choosing to take his offer or not, whereas the guy who resorted to violence did so, unprovoked and out of his place. None the less, when my group members, all of whom were liberal college going females chose to rank the first character as the worst one, I understood where they were coming from and their reasoning. However overall in the class, I was very surprised to see how the rankings differed. Some ranked the friend who had not helped as the worst while another ranked the man who rejected his lover due to the infidelity as the worse, both instances, I felt that people chose their own emotional reactions rather than objectively analyzing the situation. In my opinion – and I have reflected on this a lot – a bad friend in no way is at more fault than someone who beats up someone else, whatever the reason, or someone who asks for sexual favours. Similarly, rejecting/loving someone is one’s prerogative, and while that might make him a bad human being, it doesn’t make his behavior the worst. People used their values and sentiments to make such distinctions and in this regard, I felt, values were not of much value.
Emotional Baggage Claim Area
Notably, this made me think about how often we use our experiences and past emotions to project blame and judgement on characters and how emotions often cloud our opinions in such cases. I am probably guiltier of this than anyone else, as I am very fast to make judgements about situations without hearing out the whole story. This activity forced me to separate myself from the situation, perhaps because of the absurdity of the story, and try to look at the story with an objective meter. I will definitely try to do the same in more emotionally charged scenarios in the future and perhaps make decisions that are as logical as they are reasonable?
