Judge Not

This is something I have been thinking about for a while now. I have written down thoughts and ideas about this for weeks and have often found myself thinking about some of the elements of this when I didn't have anything else to think about. It started as I was pondering the idea of worth. How we measure worth, and where our worth as humans is derived from. As I began to think through different concepts I realized that before you can get close to that topic it is necessary to understand the process of judgment in a general way.

Now I wrote the following to satisfy a requirement for my english class, but it is not comprehensive or complete. Since I was trying to cover all of it in one paper I didn't go in to detail and was unable to use some of the examples I really wanted to. This, however, would give someone an overall idea of my train of thought. I thought I would just post it and then as I deal with each section in greater depth later on I can post those one at a time. Enjoy.

We tend to think we are very good at judging other people. Maybe we think we’re good at it because we do it so much – practice does make perfect. But how good are we really at judging a given situation, and even more importantly the people involved? Again we may believe that while others are pretty bad at it, and shouldn’t do it, we know what’s going on and it’s not a problem for us.

Big mistake.

What is involved with judging another person, and why is it so often problematic for us? There are several stages of judgment that we go through sub consciously, and as we look at each stage it will become more and more apparent why we should think twice about judging those around us.

The Standard (Theirs and Yours)

Judging always involve a standard. Depending on what is being judged the standard is different. There are objective standards and there are subjective standards. An example of an objective standard would be a multiple-choice test. For every question there is a right answer, and if we all take the same test we will all be graded by the same standard. Standards for behavior are a little different because there are only a few universal rules we all agree on, but the rest is different.

For example, you may have been taught that eating meat is good and wonderful. I may have been taught that eating meat is immoral. If we were hanging out and you were enjoying a delicious cheeseburger, I might make a judgment of you based on the standard I have. Is that fair? Whether eating meat is immoral isn’t really the issue. We usually live and judge based on our frame of reference, our standards. Yet other people do the same thing, and quite often their frame of reference is different from ours. This is one of the first problems we run into when attempting to judge others.

Additionally, almost always our judgment against some standard involves a comparison. That comparison could be against ourselves or others. Jenny got 90% on her test. This is a respectable grade, derived from an objective standard. However, last test Jenny got an 85% (this would be comparing her to her past self). She had the capacity and ability to get 100% (comparing her to her potential self). But everyone else in the class got a 65% on their tests (comparing her to others). She still got a 90%, yet each comparison causes us to look at the fact differently. Perhaps we would like to know how hard the test was, or how much Jenny studied and prepared for the test before we judge her performance. This is what output and input is all about.

Output vs. Input

Consider the following examples: two people slam-dunk a basketball with the same level of skill and intensity. Two university students both have a 4.0 G.P.A. Two men run a mile in seven minutes. A woman drops her books and two men both stop to help her pick them up.

Now what if I told you that with the basketball dunk enthusiasts, one of the individuals was 6’6” and the other was 5’8”? One of the university students has a young child, a part-time job, and a learning disability and the other has no financial worries or other time constraints. The two men running are both 25 yet the one is 170 pounds and the other is 250 pounds. One of the men who stopped to help was already running late for a class and the other had nowhere to be.

All of these examples illustrate the relationship between output and input. Output is the observable action, the result, the product, what the person is doing or has done. Input is related and is usually how we interpret output. The basketball players had the same output – they could both pull off a mighty fine slam-dunk – yet their input (their height) was different. That difference in input affects to a great degree how we look at what they did. Having a 4.0 is an impressive output, yet when we learn what obstacles the one had to overcome (or their input) we are much more impressed by what was accomplished. The same principle applies to the other examples.

Input can be observable, yet in a majority of cases it cannot be with the naked eye. The sheer amount of input involved with any given act or feat is also staggering. Obviously the height of a person is not the only input for dunking a basketball. There are hours spent practicing, the type of ball, shoes, clothing, and court all are a factor. How much sleep they both got would be a part of the input, and there could be emotional factors as well. Perhaps one of the two recently lost a loved one, which could potentially affect performance. There are genetic dispositions, inheritances, limitations, and countless other factors that all play a role in shaping this outcome. If something as simple as a dunk has so many different possible factors, think of the more complicated decisions and questions we face as individuals each day.

We often judge people by their output – by what we can see them do. Yet for every output we can see there are countless pieces of input that went into that – the factors and circumstances that defined that action and allows it to be understood. But we never know all of the input. Most of the time we don’t know most of it, which leaves our ability to judge the action or the person extremely limited.

Motive

While input helps us to interpret output, motive helps us understand and interpret both. Motive becomes important as we are judging other people’s worth as people (he is a bad guy, or she is a good person) and not as something else (as students, basketball players, runners, etc). If the young woman with the 4.0 was trying to gain intelligence in order to take over and enslave the world, it would not change what we thought of her as a student, yet it would affect whether or not we judged her to be “good.”

Motive is part of our input, yet it is so important that it deserves consideration of its own. A good motive can in some cases outweigh bad output and unfavorable input. And as shown directly above, a good output in the face of insurmountable odds can be darkened by a bad motive.

The example of the woman dropping her books and the two men stopping to help her illustrates this concept. We noted that one was late and the other had nothing to do. Many would judge the one who stopped in spite of being late more favorably. However, what if the man had a corrupt motive? What if he stopped because she was pretty and he just wanted an opportunity to ask her out? What if his designs were more sinister and he just wanted to earn her trust and then hurt her later? The other man had nowhere to be, but he stopped merely from a desire to help with no other intention. Motive changes the way we look at both output and input.

We cannot see another person’s motive for action. Regardless of how well we know someone and how much we think we know about the situation, it is close to impossible to be certain. It is possible that the person themselves do not know what their fundamental motivations for acting are. If the person is unaware of the many levels of input and motive, what makes us think that we can understand all of those things about them simply by observing their output?

The Great Leap

Let’s assume that you have super natural powers. Let’s say that you observe a situation and you understood it as it happened. Let’s say that somehow you became instantly aware of every piece of input involved with that action, and you could see into their heart and feel their motive. Would you be an appropriate judge? Of the action, most likely, but what about the person? This is the next big mistake that we make when judging another individual. We make a leap from what a person does to what they are.

This mistake is based on a truth. There is a relationship between what we do and who we are, yet it is not absolute. What we so often do is observe behavior and then make a judgment about who that person is – what their character is like. We hear about the 4.0 and say they are a good student. We see someone run the mile quickly and say they are a good athlete. We see someone stop to help someone with their dropped books and say they are a good person.

How accurate is this reasoning? It’s true that the young lady that got the 4.0 probably was a good student. Does that mean that every person who has a 4.0 is a good student? No. They could have cheated, they may know how to work the system, or they could be a computer hacker and have changed their transcript. Who knows? The man who helped with the books did a good thing, but does that make him a good person? We have considered examples where his motive changed our idea, but what if he had a good motive? Maybe this is the first time he has ever helped anyone in his life. Maybe he is in a good mood and so he feels helpful, but when he is stressed and tired he would be more likely to kick the books as he walked by. Again the possibilities are endless and we simply do not know.

We cannot assume something about a person’s character and make up because of their actions alone. Even if we know someone their whole life and see them act in different circumstances we still do not know all of the different types of input and their motive for acting.

People are complex. Life has never been simple. As we consider all of the factors that come together to make us who we are, and what guides the decisions we make each moment, we begin to see how little we know about ourselves and how much less we know about others. Hopefully this knowledge will lead us to be more understanding, more compassionate, and more accepting of other people and more prone to assume the best and truly see the best in people. Indeed it is sound counsel to “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.”