The presupposition is that passing judgment on somebody’s “lifestyle” (for those who do not speak psychobabble, this means the English word behaviors) is an activity which is forbidden. It follows immediately that when the person says to you “Don’t be all judgmental” they are in fact passing judgment on your behavior. In other words, they are “being all judgmental.” It is, therefore, impossible not to pass judgment. I do not mean “impossible” in the colloquial sense of “unlikely”, but in the logical sense of “certainly cannot be no matter what.”
I am a Norman. It is the immemorial custom of my people to conquer our neighbours, seize their land, suppress their culture, and impose our rule as aristocrats. By the principle of cultural relativity this way of life is no worse than any other.
The best similar cultural-relativity-based deduction I’ve read, as introduced by Wikipedia:
A story for which [Charles James] Napier is often noted involved Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities. This was the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband. As first recounted by his brother William, he replied:
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
It doesn’t follow, from the fact that passing judgment on someone else’s act of passing judgment on people is itself an act of passing judgment on people, that it is impossible not to pass judgment on people.
I’m also not quite clear on whether “passing judgment on” is denotatively the same or different from “judging.” (I understand the connotative differences.)
All that said, for my own part, I want to be judged. I want to be judged in certain ways and not in others, certainly, and the possibility of being judged in ways I reject can cause me unhappiness, and I might even say “don’t judge me!” as shorthand for “don’t apply the particular decision procedure you’re applying to judgments of me!” or as a non-truth-preserving way of expressing “your judgment of me upsets me!”, but if everyone I knew were to give up having judgments of me at all, or to give up expressing them, that would be a net loss for me.
The statement in the quote does not seem to follow, assuming that you have the choice of simply not saying anything. Passing judgement suggests that you actuallly have to let someone else know what you think. On the subject of the value of judgement, it is hard to understand why people are so averse to being judged. Whether someone is being kind or malicious by telling you what they honestly think of your actions it still gives you better information to make future choices.
Is it any harder to understand than why some people experience as a negative stimulus being told they have a fatal illness, or stepping on a scale and discovering they weigh more than they’d like, or being told that there are termites in their walls?
But it’s a phenomenon that we as rationalists should resist. If I am dying, or fat, or living with termites, I want to know—after all, there may be something I can do about it.
No, the only things that follows logically is that not being judgemental is something that you can’t teach someone else directly without judging yourself.
The zen monk that sits in his monastery can be happy and accepting of everyone who visits him.
Explaining what it means to not passing judgment to someone who never experienced it is like telling a blind person about the colors of the rainbow. If you talk about something being blue they don’t mean what you are talking about.
If you ask the zen monk to teach you how to be nonjudgmental he might tell you that he’s got nothing to teach. He tell you that you can sit down when you want. Relax a bit.
After an hour you ask him impatiently: “Why can’t you help me?”
He answers: “I have nothing to teach to you.”
Then you wait another two hours. He asks you: “Have you learnt something?”
You say: “Yes”. You go home a bit less judgmental than when you were at the beginning.
It’s possible that the strategy of only judging those who break the anti-judgment norm is the optimal one. Kind of like how most people only condone violence against those who break the anti-violence norm.
A good example would be using violence to prevent or punish theft.
Some people solve this by stretching the meaning of “violence” to include theft… but if one follows this path, the word becomes increasingly unrelated to its original meaning.
Generally, it seems like a good heuristics to define a set of “forbidden behavior”, with the exception that some kinds of “forbidden behavior” are allowed as a response to someone else’s “forbidden behavior”. This can help reduce the amount of “forbidden behavior” in society.
The only problem is that the definition of the “forbidden behavior” is arbitrary. It reflects the values of some part of the society, but some people will disagree and suggest changes to the definition. The proponents of given definition will then come with rationalizations why their definition is correct and the other one is not.
I guess it’s the same with “judgement”. The proponents of non-judgement usually have a set of exceptions: behaviors so bad that it is allowed to judge them. (Being judgemental, that is judging things not belonging to this set of exceptions, is usually one of them.) They just don’t want to admit that this set is arbitrary, based on their values.
I was with you until you said the choice of forbidden behaviors was arbitrary.
No, it’s not arbitrary; indeed, it’s remarkably consistent across societies. Societies differ on their approaches to law, but in almost every society, randomly assaulting strangers is not allowed. Societies differ on their ideas on sex, but in almost every society, parents are forbidden from having sex with their children. Societies differ on their systems of property, in almost every society, it’s forbidden to grab food out of other people’s hands.
There are obviously a lot of biological and cultural reasons for the rules people choose, and rule systems do differ, so we have to decide which to use (is gay sex allowed? is abortion legal? etc.). But they’re clearly not arbitrary; even the most radically different societies agree on a lot of things.
I don’t have enough data about behaviors in different cultures, but I suspect they are rather different. (I wish I had better data, such as a big table with cultures in columns, behaviors in rows, and specific norms in the cells.)
Of course it depends on how many details do we specify about the behavior. The more generally we speak, the more similar results will we get. For example if I ask “is it OK to have sex with anyone anytime, or is it regulated by some rules?”, then yes, probably everywhere it is regulated. The more specific questions will show more disagreement, such as “is it OK for a woman to marry a man from a lower social class?” or “is it OK if a king marries his own sister?” or “if someone is dissatisfied with their sexual partner, is it OK to find another one?” (this question may have different answers for men and women).
Also it will depend on the behavior; some behaviors would have obvious disadvantages, such as anyone randomly attacking anyone… though it may be considered OK if a person from a higher class randomly attacks a person from a lower class, or if the attacked person is a member of a different tribe.
I guess there is a lot of mindkilling and disinformation involved in this topic, because if someone is a proponent of a given social norm, it benefits them to claim (truly or falsely) that all societies have the same norm; and if someone is an opponent, it benefits them to claim (truly or falsely) that some other societies have it differently. Even this strategy may be different in different cultures: some cultures may prefer to signal that they have universal values, other cultures may prefer to signal that they are different (read: better) than their neighbors.
And my point wasn’t to claim that there is no variation in moral values between societies; that’s obviously untrue.
My main objection was to the word arbitrary; no, they’re not arbitrary, they have causes in our culture and evolutionary history and some of these causes even rise to the level of justifications.
Who says that a society’s moral values don’t have causes? The issue is whether those causes are historically contingent (colloquailly, whether history could have happened in a way that different moral positions were adopted in a particular time and place).
Alternatively, can I suggest you taboo the word justification? The way I understand the term, saying moral positions are justified is contradicted by the proliferation of contradictory moral positions throughout time. (But I’m out of the mainstream in this community because I’m a moral anti-realist)
The way I understand the term, saying moral positions are justified is contradicted by the proliferation of contradictory moral positions throughout time.
Would you apply the same logic to physical propositions? Would you claim that, for example, saying that astronomical positions are justified is contradicted by the proliferation of contradictory astronomical positions throughout time?
-William M. Briggs
Brett Evill
The best similar cultural-relativity-based deduction I’ve read, as introduced by Wikipedia:
Why the national customs of Britain should apply in India? :-)
Because Britain has a national custom saying that they do.
It doesn’t follow, from the fact that passing judgment on someone else’s act of passing judgment on people is itself an act of passing judgment on people, that it is impossible not to pass judgment on people.
I’m also not quite clear on whether “passing judgment on” is denotatively the same or different from “judging.” (I understand the connotative differences.)
All that said, for my own part, I want to be judged. I want to be judged in certain ways and not in others, certainly, and the possibility of being judged in ways I reject can cause me unhappiness, and I might even say “don’t judge me!” as shorthand for “don’t apply the particular decision procedure you’re applying to judgments of me!” or as a non-truth-preserving way of expressing “your judgment of me upsets me!”, but if everyone I knew were to give up having judgments of me at all, or to give up expressing them, that would be a net loss for me.
The statement in the quote does not seem to follow, assuming that you have the choice of simply not saying anything. Passing judgement suggests that you actuallly have to let someone else know what you think. On the subject of the value of judgement, it is hard to understand why people are so averse to being judged. Whether someone is being kind or malicious by telling you what they honestly think of your actions it still gives you better information to make future choices.
Is it any harder to understand than why some people experience as a negative stimulus being told they have a fatal illness, or stepping on a scale and discovering they weigh more than they’d like, or being told that there are termites in their walls?
No harder, because it’s the same phenomenon.
But it’s a phenomenon that we as rationalists should resist. If I am dying, or fat, or living with termites, I want to know—after all, there may be something I can do about it.
Absolutely agreed.
You can refrain from passing judgment yourself, but allow others to pass judgement.
For example, rocks are not judgmental.
The ideal libertarian is a rock.
(This is why I am not a libertarian.)
No, the only things that follows logically is that not being judgemental is something that you can’t teach someone else directly without judging yourself.
The zen monk that sits in his monastery can be happy and accepting of everyone who visits him.
Explaining what it means to not passing judgment to someone who never experienced it is like telling a blind person about the colors of the rainbow. If you talk about something being blue they don’t mean what you are talking about.
If you ask the zen monk to teach you how to be nonjudgmental he might tell you that he’s got nothing to teach. He tell you that you can sit down when you want. Relax a bit.
After an hour you ask him impatiently: “Why can’t you help me?” He answers: “I have nothing to teach to you.”
Then you wait another two hours. He asks you: “Have you learnt something?” You say: “Yes”. You go home a bit less judgmental than when you were at the beginning.
It’s possible that the strategy of only judging those who break the anti-judgment norm is the optimal one. Kind of like how most people only condone violence against those who break the anti-violence norm.
Most people condone violence for a lot more reasons than that.
A good example would be using violence to prevent or punish theft.
Some people solve this by stretching the meaning of “violence” to include theft… but if one follows this path, the word becomes increasingly unrelated to its original meaning.
Generally, it seems like a good heuristics to define a set of “forbidden behavior”, with the exception that some kinds of “forbidden behavior” are allowed as a response to someone else’s “forbidden behavior”. This can help reduce the amount of “forbidden behavior” in society.
The only problem is that the definition of the “forbidden behavior” is arbitrary. It reflects the values of some part of the society, but some people will disagree and suggest changes to the definition. The proponents of given definition will then come with rationalizations why their definition is correct and the other one is not.
I guess it’s the same with “judgement”. The proponents of non-judgement usually have a set of exceptions: behaviors so bad that it is allowed to judge them. (Being judgemental, that is judging things not belonging to this set of exceptions, is usually one of them.) They just don’t want to admit that this set is arbitrary, based on their values.
I was with you until you said the choice of forbidden behaviors was arbitrary.
No, it’s not arbitrary; indeed, it’s remarkably consistent across societies. Societies differ on their approaches to law, but in almost every society, randomly assaulting strangers is not allowed. Societies differ on their ideas on sex, but in almost every society, parents are forbidden from having sex with their children. Societies differ on their systems of property, in almost every society, it’s forbidden to grab food out of other people’s hands.
There are obviously a lot of biological and cultural reasons for the rules people choose, and rule systems do differ, so we have to decide which to use (is gay sex allowed? is abortion legal? etc.). But they’re clearly not arbitrary; even the most radically different societies agree on a lot of things.
I don’t have enough data about behaviors in different cultures, but I suspect they are rather different. (I wish I had better data, such as a big table with cultures in columns, behaviors in rows, and specific norms in the cells.)
Of course it depends on how many details do we specify about the behavior. The more generally we speak, the more similar results will we get. For example if I ask “is it OK to have sex with anyone anytime, or is it regulated by some rules?”, then yes, probably everywhere it is regulated. The more specific questions will show more disagreement, such as “is it OK for a woman to marry a man from a lower social class?” or “is it OK if a king marries his own sister?” or “if someone is dissatisfied with their sexual partner, is it OK to find another one?” (this question may have different answers for men and women).
Also it will depend on the behavior; some behaviors would have obvious disadvantages, such as anyone randomly attacking anyone… though it may be considered OK if a person from a higher class randomly attacks a person from a lower class, or if the attacked person is a member of a different tribe.
I guess there is a lot of mindkilling and disinformation involved in this topic, because if someone is a proponent of a given social norm, it benefits them to claim (truly or falsely) that all societies have the same norm; and if someone is an opponent, it benefits them to claim (truly or falsely) that some other societies have it differently. Even this strategy may be different in different cultures: some cultures may prefer to signal that they have universal values, other cultures may prefer to signal that they are different (read: better) than their neighbors.
I’m sure that’s right.
And my point wasn’t to claim that there is no variation in moral values between societies; that’s obviously untrue.
My main objection was to the word arbitrary; no, they’re not arbitrary, they have causes in our culture and evolutionary history and some of these causes even rise to the level of justifications.
Who says that a society’s moral values don’t have causes? The issue is whether those causes are historically contingent (colloquailly, whether history could have happened in a way that different moral positions were adopted in a particular time and place).
Alternatively, can I suggest you taboo the word justification? The way I understand the term, saying moral positions are justified is contradicted by the proliferation of contradictory moral positions throughout time. (But I’m out of the mainstream in this community because I’m a moral anti-realist)
Would you apply the same logic to physical propositions? Would you claim that, for example, saying that astronomical positions are justified is contradicted by the proliferation of contradictory astronomical positions throughout time?
No