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.
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.