Recently I met a young gentleman who was going through a rough patch in life and thus he wanted to change his career and lifestyle. So, in search of what might be a good profession for him, I asked him some preliminary questions. My second question was ‘What are your best qualities?’ To this he responded that he was non-judgmental.
I have heard this word often. In society it seems to be considered a positive trait, even a virtue. Sometimes it is worded or stated a little differently. For instance, schools will teach children ‘not to judge’, and friends will implore other friends from judging them (usually because they are guilty of something). It seems to be the going orthodoxy that judgment is bad, while non-judgment is good. This belief is wrong and emanates from a massive misconception of the word judgment.
Judgment as a skill
The interesting thing about the word judgment is how you can have good judgment and bad judgment. This is because judgment is a skill, not a virtue or vice. You cannot have good greed or bad selflessness, as those words are already inherently a vice and a virtue. They cannot be altered. But judgment can.
This is a vital distinction, for when you look at judgment as a skill, you begin to see its’ value and the importance of not being afraid of it. We use judgment literally every moment of our lives. People who do not judge at all, are actually gullible. And people who judge without any information are prejudicial. Prejudice and gullibility are undesirable traits in a person. But if we discard judgment altogether (due to it being inherently bad), we fall into the trap of either becoming prejudicial or gullible, as we have never learnt when to carry out judgment and how to do that appropriately.
Judgment and hypocrisy
To take you back to the young gentleman, I told him that I consider judgment to be neutral (it entirely depends on how you use it), but I definitely do not think that a complete absence of judgment is good. He was quite affronted by this, but before he could get anywhere, I told him that whatever he says in the next sentence it cannot contain any judgment. For in my worldview judgment is allowed, but in his it was not. Unsurprisingly he found the conversation very difficult from this point onwards.
That is because even if we try our hardest to avoid judgment, we will always do it. Judgment is a primal survival skill, that no matter the situation, our biology refuses to discard. Once we understand this and take ownership of our inherently judgmental nature, we can use it to make our lives better and safer.
Reservation of judgment
This takes me to a very important skill within the confines of judgment. And that is the ability to reserve judgment. This is a hard one to learn as we do not like uncertainty and would much prefer to judge the person before we have a reasonable amount of facts. This skill requires true virtues, such as self-control and patience. But a reservation of judgment is not the same as not-judging. It still requires judgment of the situation, but perhaps, not yet the person.
Therefore, I implore people to take a serious look at what judgment actually means, and start to view it as a skill, not a vice or a virtue. This could make the difference between making poor decisions or prudent ones.