What we've lost (9): Moral judgement
National Post, 13 March 2026
The reluctance to judge arises from the attraction of evading responsibility for our choices
It’s very judgmental, isn’t it? This National Post series on What we’ve lost?
Who are we to judge?
Add to our list of manners, marriage and masculinity, that we have lost our confidence in making moral judgments.
Moral judgments are inescapable. Each time we act, we at least implicitly decide that this is either a good or bad thing to do, and then decide whether to do it.
We cannot get out of bed in the morning without engaging in moral judgment. It’s proper to be at work on time; honouring a commitment to visit my relatives is the right thing to do — therefore I get up even though I might welcome sleeping in. Driving to work in the early hours, before there is any traffic on a deserted residential street, we observe traffic laws, even though there are no police at the local stop sign. We judge it the right thing to do.
Moral judgments are fundamental to being human. Why then are we so reluctant to be judgmental, or ready to accuse others of that failing? The charge of judgmentalism itself is a form of judgment, sometimes harshly made. We can’t get away from it.
We can’t avoid making moral judgments, but we don’t like to be judged or, to be more precise, to be judged negatively. Everyone is happy to do well on an exam; no one likes to get a poor grade. Praise is always welcome; criticism can hurt.
As our culture has become more sensitive to the subjective, to the individual, the reluctance to suffer a negative judgement has become an aversion to making judgments at all. A negative moral judgment upon me might, after all, be correct, requiring some contrition on my part, and some change, perhaps even conversion. More comfortable to avoid it altogether by making judgment itself out of bounds.
Moral judgments insert themselves into sensitive spheres of life. No one much minds being judged afoul of traffic laws, but being considered a bad husband, a negligent father? That hurts. But the man who abandons his family for a mistress is a bad husband and a bad father. He may indeed be a moral reprobate. He might therefore find a certain attractiveness in judgment suspended. A great many people find the suspension of moral judgment to be convenient, comfortable.
It is also true that judgments can be mistaken, or incomplete, or even cruel. There was an entry in this series on stigma. Stigma arises when a moral judgment identifies a particular behaviour, and those who engage in that behaviour, as worthy of disdain. That may well be hard on that person; perhaps culpability is hard to calculate. Better not to stigmatize, better not to judge.
Pope Francis famously asked, “Who am I to judge?” It was in relation to a question regarding homosexuality, and his answer was lauded as a model of tolerance. Yet the Holy Father made plenty of moral judgments. It is essential to the mission of his office. He spoke frequently in moral terms about climate change, or the arms trade, or economic greed, or hostility to migrants. Judgments there were most often lauded too. Some judgments are more welcome than others, especially when a negative judgment falls upon impersonal social phenomena.
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