Unfortunately, I have realized our judgment often comes from a negative place, with a negative intent which is sad. I try hard not to judge and have been doing so less and less, as I start to recognize my old behaviors but I still have a way to go. As soon as I learned about others in my life being human, I would feel resistance and an upset feeling building up inside me.
I would immediately begin insulting them in my head and sometimes would actually verbalize it if there was someone to discuss it with. Today, I rarely react like this. I have learned not to judge someone based on their actions because everyone makes mistakes, and some people prefer to behave in a way not everyone else can relate to.
In the past, I also judged others when I felt threatened by them, especially those who I perceived to be extremely strong-minded. I compared myself to others because I feared I was not as good as they were, which was clearly a matter of low self-esteem.
To say that someone commits a crime because he grew up poor with alcoholic parents or has a genetic predisposition to violence is to challenge the very assumption of personal responsibility that underlies judgment. And the diminished responsibility of rational actors leads to an unwillingness to judge those who are clearly responsible for what they do.
Finally, the retreat from judgment is a corollary of the overwhelming belief in equality that marks the modern era. Judgment, as thinkers like Arendt and Friedrich Nietzsche remind us, presupposes pride, or what once was called the dignity of man.
Only one who believes oneself right can judge another; thus judgment presupposes a certain authority and superiority. Since Justice Louis Brandeis first introduced social science evidence into legal opinions, judges have sought to buttress their judgments with rationalizations and empirical support intended to lend objective and scientific authority to particular judgments.
But only one who is unsure of his or her right to judge feels the need to offer statistics, studies, and rationalizations to justify that judgment. It is precisely this arrogance of the judge that is increasingly absent in our age. From the fact of such a deeply ingrained distrust of judging, Arendt drew an essential lesson: namely, that morality in our times cannot be taken for granted.
In the absence of judgment, and amidst doubt about the possibility of justice, she argued that we need to foster, support, and embolden morality. To keep the idea of justice alive does not require curricula in ethics or a return of the catechism. Morality, as Immanuel Kant wrote in his famous footnote responding to Professor Sulzer, cannot be taught through rules in a classroom.
Only by example can one be inspired to emulate moral action. But decisively resisting the desire to employ torture as a means, or courageously saying no to an order to torture, will do more to inculcate a moral duty in others than any amount of ethical education. Similarly, bringing someone who has tortured to judgment will inculcate a common sense of the wrongness of torture more meaningfully than any amount of philosophizing and moralizing.
Arendt offered just such an example of judgment at the end of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem , where she argued that Eichmann must die even though he had not broken a specific law. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang. Eichmann needed to be judged and executed, Arendt writes, not because he was a bad person—after all, she called him a banal bureaucrat—nor because he broke laws, but because justice requires that evil acts be judged and punished.
Such an act of judgment assumes the pride of knowing oneself to be right. Rather, it announces a truth. At a time when religion and tradition no longer buttress universal or public claims to truth, acts of judgment claim that we all must agree that this bad thing was wrong and it must be punished. It is in judgment that we singularly and together make sense of what is new, challenging, and horrible in our world.
The crisis of judgment in our time has become so pronounced that it has come to affect the one place in which it should be most at home: the law. Consider the paradigmatic space of judgment, the trial, which focuses attention on a person and his act. It is in a courtroom that the fear of judgment can no longer hide behind the obfuscations of systemic blame, bureaucratic irresponsibility, and a discomfort with judging.
Did Dick Cheney authorize torture? The trial, and specifically the jury trial, is, as Alexis de Tocqueville understood, one essential incubator of democracy. If the experience of sitting in judgment as a juror is a bulwark of our democratic freedoms, we should be worried.
In spite of the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a right to a jury trial in criminal cases and the Seventh Amendment right to a trial in civil cases, jury trials are increasingly rare. The meteoric rise of plea bargaining is one factor behind the fact that only 4. In civil law, experts have come to question the ability of jurors to judge correctly and thus have removed all kinds of complicated trials from the judgment of a jury.
Today, only 1. And even when a case does come before a jury, tort-reform laws frequently make jury judgments meaningless as federal judges typically throw out or radically reduce the punitive judgments made by jurors.
Formed long before the first supertanker plied the seas, the traditional rules of maritime law, the Supreme Court reasoned, limit liability for accidents at sea and trump the judgment of a jury as to the proper punishment for Exxon.
It is a paradox that judgment by jury is both so revered and feared in the modern age. Just this year, England, which enshrined trials by jury in the Magna Carta in , held its first criminal trial without a jury since the abolition of the notorious Star Chamber in Civil jury trials in England are largely a remnant of history.
And in the United States, while federal trial judges continue to profess great faith in American juries, they express deep contempt for jury verdicts. In one survey from , more than 30 percent of Texas trial judges and 27 percent of federal judges thought juries should decide fewer cases, and 27 percent of federal trial judges thought the right to jury trials should be reduced or eliminated.
If judges and legal experts worry about the capacity of laypeople who serve on juries to understand complicated disputes, the distrust is mutual. As much as our legal establishment fears the judgment of juries, equally do our politicians and citizens scorn the judgment of judges.
Consider one of the most powerful and least understood movements in modern legal culture: the push for sentencing guidelines in criminal law. The essential aim of sentencing guidelines is to replace what critics label the discretionary and unchecked judgment by judges with a more consistent, fair, and scientific system. Frankel told the story of two prisoners.
He was out of work and needed the money for food and rent. He had no prior record. Also out of work, he was of similar race and background and had one prior conviction on an alcohol-related charge.
Sentenced by different judges, the first man received a year prison term. The second received 30 days. One response to such a divergence would be to say that one of these judges judged badly. Frankel did not blame the judges another ironic example of the pervasive unwillingness to judge. Instead, Frankel—U.
What was needed, he argued, was a legislatively approved system of consistent and scientific guidelines for sentencing. For liberals, the failure of judges was evident in the sterner penalties often meted out by white judges to African-American defendants or for crimes with white victims.
For conservatives, the failure was clear in the tendency of soft-hearted judges to cite mitigating circumstances such as poverty, poor upbringing, and genetic predispositions to reduce punishments. What both liberals and conservatives agreed upon was that there existed a crisis in judgment according to which similarly situated criminals were receiving radically divergent sentences.
Nearly every state in the nation has passed some version of sentencing reform. The bill was signed with great fanfare by Ronald Reagan. Sentencing reform was, as Justice John Paul Stevens has written, a bipartisan attack on the power of judges.
Whereas previously judges had unlimited authority to sentence criminals to the punishment they deserved, now every punishment began with a base number. That number could be raised or lowered based on specific sentencing factors—the number of prior convictions, the use of a gun, or the existence of racial animus. Some of these sentencing schemes set up mandatory guidelines for judges to follow. Others made the guidelines advisory. And alongside the guidelines exist hundreds of state and federal laws that mandate minimum sentences for particular crimes.
What all the various state and federal sentencing reforms share is a distrust of judicial judgment and the desire to limit judicial authority. In the case United States v. Each person is different from the other: Remember people have one thing in common; they are all different. So ask yourself how you would feel if you were judged? Acceptance and tolerance: It is good to have enough tolerance.
There are several ways to train yourself to become wiser and more tolerant. Live and let live. Appearances are often deceptive: Meeting people for the first time we always make a judgment based on their appearances though the proverb tells us not to make such a mistake. And it is one of the most obvious reasons why we should not judge other people.
You actually define yourself: Earl Nightingale has rightly said: When you judge others, you do not define them, you define yourself. Do you want others to think of you as someone who judges everybody? Start a Conversation.
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