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Not the OP, but I will bite - yes, it is appropriate with possibly the exception of "small". I can judge people especially for things that can be under their control: that they are weak, that they are anorectic, that they lack personal hygiene, that they have bad breath and other things including things like tattoos, piercings, foul language and so forth.
Now I have a question for you: why do you think it is appropriate to judge me for my criteria I judge for? Why should I care for what you judge as judgmental? Are you some ultimate meta-judge, who is going to set the standards of judging for all people? Who elected you into this position?
Well, I'm not really interested in judging others (beyond ways that are immediately useful). Fundamentally, people base their judgment not on their own, spontaneously generated values, but on the values they were taught by society. I don't think it's possible or even worth trying to truly escape from those values, though of course you can react against them superficially or engage in dialogue with them.
I don't believe you (90% of the time when Alice criticises Bob for being "judgemental" all she means is that Bob routinely expresses judgements that Alice doesn't agree with), but even if that really was the case, I think you should be.
That's silly. Of course you should make a judgment on the people you live with and whether they will steal from you or not. That is an example of a very useful judgment. Judging people on the TV is not useful.
Well, I would counter that forming assessments of people is a muscle, and if you don't use it, it might atrophy. That's the whole reason behind "learning from other people's mistakes" or "learning to recognise red flags": recognising that behaviour X is toxic and harmful in a person you don't know personally will make it easier to identify when someone you DO know starts exhibiting that behaviour. (Who knows, maybe there are people who started watching My 600 Lb Life for entirely base, ignoble reasons, but came away from it better equipped to spot warning signs of problem eating in their own friends and family.) If you only ever express judgements of people when being on the wrong side of a judgement call could have a severe negative impact on your life, but remain stubbornly agnostic at all other times, you run a severe risk of making the wrong judgement call when it really matters, or perhaps even failing to recognise that you're in a situation in which a judgement call is required. (Basically https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/09/constant-vigilance/)
Imagine two social workers, one who is extremely credulous and endlessly forgiving for all the bullshit excuses her junkie asshole clients offer her (after all, it doesn't affect her one way or the other); the other who sees through their bullshit instantly and tells them to get their shit together or she's cutting their social welfare. Which of these do you think is more likely to get ripped off when her own son gets into meth?
Or to use a less emotionally loaded example: imagine two employers, Alice and Bob, who make hiring decisions in their respective firms. Sometimes Alice's contacts in other firms will send her a CV and say "I'm thinking of hiring this candidate, what do you think of him?", and Alice always does her level best to provide an honest and fair assessment of the candidate's strengths and weaknesses according to their CV. The same thing happens to Bob, and he generally just tells the contact what he thinks they want to hear - after all, hiring decisions in another firm have no impact upon him personally. I would argue that Bob is far more likely to make a bad hiring decision in his own firm than Alice is, as by passing up valuable opportunities to assess candidates in other firms, his skill in this area will be more poorly honed than Alice's.
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I went to a Catholic primary school and was inculcated with a set of values on how I ought to judge people. More recently, as an adult, I have been bombarded with messaging about how I ought to judge people, coming from a woke perspective.
Truthfully, I don't really think either inculcation attempt was successful. I'm not claiming that I'm some kind of independent freethinker who Does His Own Research unlike you #sheeple. Rather, I think that, to the extent that I judge people, I'm relying heavily on heuristics bestowed on me by natural selection. Obese people, junkies and certain other groups inspire a primitive disgust reaction in me which feels deeply innate, an instinctive knee-jerk response similar to the reflexive stomach-turning sensation you get when you smell vomit or rotten food.
(Not that I'm saying all of my instinctive disgust reactions are appropriate or reasonable! There was a thread this week asking why some people feel uncomfortable around people with Down's syndrome, and I will cop to that - I know it's not fair of me to have that reaction. Likewise people born with horrific facial deformities.)
Maybe when I judge people on a higher level of cognitive reasoning, that's something that can be consciously inculcated or taught. I don't really know, though. A lot of my moral reasoning seems to ultimately come down to "what's good for the goose is good for the gander", an evolutionary heuristic we share with chimpanzees.
I concede that in addition to society's values, you also inherit a bit from evolution. Either way, you are not forming your values. For example, you say that it's not fair of you to have a negative reaction to DS people. But you didn't invent that notion of fairness independently.
No, I didn't independently of my own accord arrive at the conclusion that you should treat people with Down's syndrome with respect. Probably there are very few people who can truly claim to be moral innovators in this regard.
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Catholics aren't big on Matthew 7:1 I guess?
Yes, but there's still much judging to be done. Luther and Calvin are clear.
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John 7:24
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I don't buy it. Society pounds me with messaging about how I shouldn't judge, that people could be fat for any reason or no reason at all, that we barely even have control over our own bodies. In stark contrast, my personal experience is that I can manipulate weight and body composition by simply making choices and developing consistent habits. This isn't difficult at all for me. The reason that I judge fat people isn't because society told me to, it's that my personal experience makes me believe that they have serious character defects. I can believe that making choices and developing habits is much harder for some people than others and still recognize that this is a product of poor executive function, which manifests as a character defect.
There is a small coterie of fat acceptance activists that is occasionally wheeled out like the Washington Generals or the Libertarian Party to be laughed at, but for the most part, no. That's why 600lbs Life even exists in the first place, it's a show that as we have just discussed in this thread, make fat people look even worse. Why does such a show exist? So people can watch it and feel justified in hating fat people. Which is to say, it makes them feel better about something they were already doing. It's not by accident that you are, yet again here, casually mentioning how easy* it is for you to gain fifty pounds of muscle or lose fifty pounds of fat on a dime. It's not because you're embarrassed.
I train a lot and I don't think I've ever claimed otherwise. The easy part is identifying what needs to be done to gain muscle, lose fat, increase strength, or increase aerobic endurance. My claim isn't that people don't need to actually make changes, it's that failing to do so is a character defect. Denying that it's even possible to do so is even worse, diminishing people below the level of having agency over their own bodies. As with other addicts, it's easy to observe that they're telling the truth about their inability to regulate their own behavior, but it is a defect.
So people need to make changes - to what end? What ideal body type are people supposed to be striving for? I mean even over thirty years I've seen expectations of what men should look like change a fair bit.
If someone was stretching me out on the rack, I wouldn't need a complete answer for what my happiest possible state looked like to know that I would be a lot closer to it if the torture stopped. You don't need to fully flesh out (no pun intended) the ideal body type to argue it's better not to be obese.
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I don't believe you, unless maybe you have a very broad definition of immediately useful. For instance, what use did you have scolding the OP for judging people outside of their "character"?
I openly admit that I am very interested in judging. Judgment is necessary when analyzing all actions or things as good/moral or bad. What I wanted to point out is a very common trope of some people, who lack even basic self awareness and who can with straight face say things such as "unlike all those nasty bigots, I am very open-minded and non-judgmental person". The ask by anybody not to judge, is often just a manipulation technique to normalize and shelter from criticism what they themselves judge as a good thing. With no such treatment offered to what they deem as bad things such as bigotry, which has to be judged and punished harshly.
I didn't scold the OP at all. It's quite normal to judge others, particularly men, for being small or weak, and I've been on the receiving end of that judgment many times. Of course, there is a difference between observation and judgment. I can observe someone's behaviour without forming an opinion on it. I also don't agree that judgment is always necessary. This is not meant in a cuddly liberal way. Rather in a kind of sense that one should treat events and people sort of like passing clouds. And I would add that I also think that I am very judgmental - I just don't think that's a valuable or desirable trait in myself.
Even for stoics it is absolutely okay to judge others and especially themselves in accordance with stoic virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. For instance Seneca was very critical of Nero, and Epictetus had no problem judging emperor Domitian for his tyrannical actions.
In fact Stoics would be the first ones to point to fat people as negative example of what happens if one lacks self-control, which is the core basis of the virtue of temperance. I know this, because they actually did condemn gluttony and other excesses of Roman elites.
I am not sure where you came to this idea that stoics are some silent monks never to talk and make judgements. One of they key values of stoicism is courage, which includes courage to tell the truth even in face of tyrants like Caligula who wanted to order Seneca to commit suicide, then let it go given Seneca's poor health.
Fine, I have deleted the word stoic from my post. I would not have added it if I knew this would mislead you so badly.
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This would be easier if the non-stoic side of the anti-judgment movement were able to keep their behavior restrained. A lot of people do act like you; though they don't pretend they don't judge. They just judge silently but choose to be polite. But forbearance is mistaken for weakness which is followed by an attempt to deny that the judgment is legitimate.
Since We Live in a Society someone is going to have to be disagreeable and tell the truth that being fat is usually a lack of virtue and trying to cover that fact up is also lack of virtue. If only for the kids, who can't be expected to have a philosopher's judgment and stoic detachment.
You might benefit from reading what I said. I said I'm not interested in judging others, not that I didn't - I of course, pass judgment on others, naturally and uncontrollably, and according to values I did not generate. But that judgment is rarely useful - if someone irritates me, or displeases me, what can I do about it other than seethe? Isn't that the real poison in whale watching on reality TV? Why not watch Sam Sulek instead?
Oh, come on now. You literally have reality TV shows devoted to displaying fatties like circus freaks for the people in this thread to hate on. If you needed to be told by your television set that it's okay to hate fat people, then you're not being brave. If you're watching it, it's for you - people watch shows like this to be told they're right, not to be challenged.
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Are you judging them solely on aesthetics here? Or do you think these things actually give you meaningful insight about their character?
I certainly do, or at least I think one can draw meaningful inferences from these things. At the banal level, you can look at certain tattoos and reasonably infer that the person got it when they were in prison. More broadly, a person with prominent facial tattoos or piercings is making (or has made) a conscious decision to transgress certain standards of how people are expected to comport themselves in a particular society, which implies a disregard for social convention and perhaps an elevated* willingness to transgress social norms other than mere dress and comportment.
I have one tattoo but it's on my torso.
*When compared with someone without prominent facial tattoos or piercings.
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If by character you mean moral character, then yes, aesthetics can be used to signal moral character. If I see somebody with MS-13 face tattoo or wearing Hells Angels bike jacket, I have no problem with that.
And sometimes I will also judge outside of moral character. If I want a partner for pickup basketball, then I may judge a 5 foot tall nice god-fearing guy as unsuitable for that role. In fact if he is of a good moral character, then I expect him to accept it with stoicism and plow through the situation with grace and respect as opposed to complaining about it. If he did whine, then I would also judge him as a little whiner unsuitable for other activities as well.
The issue with gang tats isn't that they have ink in their skin; it's that they are openly advertising that they are a member of a murderous gang. You're conflating the message with the medium. Do you not actually judge all people with tattoos in general? If you do, can you explain what you're judging them for/about? The same goes for piercings and swearing; what about these things leads you to make character judgments?
Yes, I judge people with visible tattoos for it. Specifically, they’re valuing self expression over not looking like ruffians.
“Like ruffians”? Piercings and non-facial tattoos aren’t that taboo anymore. Almost half of adults under 45 have at least one tattoo. It’s been over a decade since the “tatted-up barista with full sleeves” archetype became a thing. Workplace rules about covering up tattoos have also become far more relaxed in most industries. Sure, face tats are still pretty taboo outside of the traditional subcultures you'd find them (line cooks, construction, etc.), but the OP didn't specify face tats in particular.
Personally, I don’t have any tattoos, but that's because I’ve never felt the desire for any, not because I think I would be ostracised for violating a social norm. The worst I would have to endure is my parents giving me shit cause they think all tattoos look ugly.
You can say it about other things as well. More than 20% of people in USA are obese, 1 in 5 people un USA experience mental illness, 25% of women are expected to get abortion, 28% of black males and 16% of Hispanic males will be incarcerated during their lifetimes. We can go on. I do not think that just because something is common, that it automatically means it is also a good thing.
So yeah, maybe it is not such a good thing that we normalized former taboos. What is also interesting in this debate is that the word judging really has negative connotations for many people - except of course if you "judge" something positively. Fat Cosmopolitan model? No problem if somebody judges her overflowing fat as beautiful and herself as stunning and brave person. Somebody has neck tattoos and sleeves? No problem complimenting them for their bravery and confidence. Of course you can judge somebody if he has Make America Great Again sleeve, in that case it is disgusting and not a signal that this person is actually brave to wear his beliefs literally on his sleeve.
It is not about being judgemental or non-judgemental. It is about judging certain things positively and other things negatively, while claiming the moral high ground.
My point wasn’t that because tattoos and piercings are now common that they’re now good; my point was that they're now so common that they’re no longer a useful signal of if someone is a “ruffian,” I.e., a criminal, member of the underclass, or otherwise the type to get in bar fights (e.g., tattoos have long been associated with marines and sailors).
You now have to actually look at the tattoos to potentially get any useful information about the person with said tattoo. If they have prison tats that tells you different things than if they have a USMC globe and anchor which tells you different things than if they have generic normie tattoo art.
Being fat is different. No one wants to be fat for the most part (aside from maybe young women who put it on only in “all the right places” in subcultures into that look), and absolutely no one actually wants to be obese; anyone saying otherwise is coping. So when you see someone who is fat, you see someone who, for one reason or another, either can’t or doesn’t even try to manage their weight. That does give you some amount of information about them, but as more and more people get fat, the information is starting to go from “this is a person on the lowest end of the self-control spectrum” to “this person is not on the highest end of self-control”.
I am not disputing the fact, tattoos may have different meanings in different time and places. In the past, sailors got tattoos indicating if they crossed Atlantic, or other deeds. Prisoners got their own tattoos and so forth. All useful signals for judging people. In modern time, some girl has a tramp stamp or flower tattooed on her ankle, somebody else can have some other patterns tattooed. However it still is a signal of some behavior. I do not have interest to now have PHD style post analyzing all the tattoos, I will generalize.
In fact I can go even deeper. What if I find tattoos stupid, disgusting and weird. That is my judgement and I do not care why you got them or any other excuse. That is my judgement and I do not give shit about what you think in the same way people with tattoos often claim that they themselves do not give a shit what other people think about their tattoos. In fact it may be a lie and maybe the think that my disgust with their tattoos is also some sort of signal and they will judge me for my "bigotry" or lack of empathy or whatever.
In the end the argument stands: people do judge other people and I do not see any problem with that.
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fucccccckiinnnnnnnn BOOT!
There is a 90% chance he got that within a week of stepping off of Parris Island
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Sure, the MS-13 face tattoo was just an obvious example that was meant to show the principle - if you present yourself or behave in certain way, you will be judged, it is inevitable.
Let´s say that I know that somebody has tattoos and piercings, and I do not know anything about it: if it is some face tattoo or tramp stamp or nipple piercing etc.
I could judge such a person as having been at certain point in time as reckless, vain, possibly with some body dismorphia or at least self-esteem complex. It is not some gamebreaker for me, but neither is obesity. But it is a hint.
But there is another level here I want to touch. Sometimes there are situations, where we are speaking about very deep concepts, which evade “rationalist” thinking and endless scrutiny. One famous example is when Plato went about in his Academia, thinking about definition of what is a man, he came up with definition of “featherless biped”. Then he met Diogenes:
This is such a rationalist story. Everybody knows what is a man, even a child or village idiot. A good example of trying to ruminate and categorize definitions of what is X, only to completely miss the point and ontology of the problem. This is similar to me: being a fat, weak, tatooed person with a ton of piercings who swears like a sailor is weird and stupid. We may endlessly harp on it, adding epicycles to our definitions but it will not capture the essence. Also there is the tactic of “dont be judgemental” and accept the expert definition, in order to shame you out of your instinct, that even a small child learns somehow without knowing that fat people have higher risk of diabetes according to this metastudy.
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Aesthetics give a meaningful insight about character.
Now you have to have some cultural substrate to read it properly as for instance tats could mean extreme religiosity or irreligiosity depending on where you are, but it is a signal. Consciously or unconsciously people use their looks to communicate something to you.
A book's cover isn't the entire story, but it does give good insight about the content most of the time. The title is usually accurate, and if it's lined with that arsenic green, you know to grab gloves just in case.
This does not appear to be the case, if you’re judging someone’s moral character based on the mere presence of tattoos.
People marking their bodies in a way that they know leads people to make assessments about their personal characteristics and then complaining that people make those assessments tells me something about their character. Personally, I like quite a few tattoos, have had great friends and serious romantic relationships with tattooed people, but yeah, there are assessments that you can make based on tattoos that are reasonable.
Being visibly Jewish in a place whose inhabitants hate Jews by your reasoning also says something about one's character. Or kissing one's gay partner in front of a homophobe. Or having a bumper sticker proclaiming your political party in a place where people oppose that political party.
If doing X leads to bad reactions, those bad reactions can't be justified with an appeal to "they know it'll have bad reactions".
Doing X knowing full well that it will inspire a negative reaction doesn't necessarily tell you anything about a person's moral character, but it absolutely does suggest that they are reckless, foolish, prone to taking unnecessary risks, lack forethought etc.
Supposing a broker was telling me that I should invest in company X because it was an absolute sure thing. I notice that he has a tattoo on his bicep reading "MAN U PREMIER LEAGUE CHAMPIONS 20XX" when in fact Arsenal won that year, and he explains that he got the tattoo when Man U won the semi-final. I'm sure he's still a nice guy, but it's only reasonable for me to heavily discount his claim that such-and-such is a "sure thing".
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Those things all do say something about one’s character. Some degree of rebelliousness, courageous, or social obliviousness is required to do things in public you know will garner negative reactions. The fact the reactions are negative do not make the actions negative per se, but they do change what information you can gather from the action.
In your example: there are presumably other gay couples that don’t kiss in front of homophobes, and that allows you to judge them in other ways. Maybe they’re cowardly, or just very polite.
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It certainly does in all such instances. Absolutely.
You are the one turning a purely analytic argument into a moral one here. Figuring out one's moral character doesn't directly have much to do with what sort of moral character is appropriate or just or what have you.
It can be good or it can be bad that you're the sort of person who is covered in tats or engages in risky ostentatious displays.
But it is something.
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The objection in these cases isn't that someone wearing a Star of David is identified as a Jew, it's to the antisemitism downstream of it. Likewise, if someone kisses their gay partner, it's reasonable to infer that they're not straight and that someone with a bumper sticker is a supporter of that candidate. All of these things are examples of appearances that lead to correct identifications of people.
I didn't write anything about bad reactions specifically. I wrote that people will make assessments based on tattoos and that this is a fine and reasonable to thing to do. Of course, I do think some bad reactions are legitimate - treating people with gang tattoos (or apparent gang tattoos) as threats is a good decision. But really, even the most mild, inoffensive tattoos imaginable still provide information about the individual with them.
Yes, but isn’t it reasonable to complain when someone reads way too much into a mild and inoffensive tattoo?
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It's an analogy.
And I can tell with a high degree of accuracy that someone who bears permanent tatoos is unlikely to be a serious practitioner of most Abrahamic religions or other such naturalistic philosophies since they ban the practice with a small number of exceptions.
This does tell me something about their moral character. In that they do not hold their body's form to be sacred. Which itself is correlated to other things.
Of course none can read minds and have perfect knowledge of circumstances. Hence the phrase about the book and its cover.
But only a fool blinds himself to the obvious in the name of deeper inquiry.
When people tell you who they are. Including by making aesthetic choices. Believe them.
And what correlated negative moral judgments might that be?
Once upon a time in ancient China, it was forbidden to cut your hair because that would be violating the sanctity of the body your parents gave you. Obviously, we find this to be a rather silly judgment nowadays. In fact, conservative Chinese people these days look down upon long haired males.
It's a common mistake to look at tradition from this empty standpoint of pure reason and think that just because it's arbitrary, it signifies nothing.
The fact it was so strongly forbidden informs you very strongly as to the behavior of people vis a vis social norms and is a good proxy for their beliefs given the basis of such social norms if they violate it.
Ancient Chinese people who sought to honor their parents in the ways of their culture at this time wouldn't break the taboo. Which makes the existence of it valuable to signal familial loyalty. Indeed a common occurrence in early modern China would be the opposition between this particular norm and new modern norms. How people negotiated this opposition told you much about where they stood at that pivotal time. Symbols are meaningful.
That the cultural mores change and the signals with them is not a failure of tradition. It is in fact how tradition works and how it is eternal, despite the specific instantiations of it being ephemeral.
I agree that the signals send important information. I would say that:
You are successfully making the Liberal argument against social norms. It's a convincing one, especially if one has been seeped in liberal propaganda their whole life as I have been.
But let us recognize the argument for nomos.
All those avenues of expression and signalling can only exist if a norm to render them meaningful is maintained. If the hairstyle is just a hairstyle, it's unable to convey the information that society needs to function properly.
Liberal society, in its moral agnosticism, renders all such norms meaningless. What used to be a centuries old ritual with deep meaning is now just another garment or hairstyle, everything is ground down into mere fashion. And all that is left in the end is pure sensate animalistic expression. As was desired and predicted by Rousseau.
We can't actually find another way of signalling familial loyalty, because Liberals would complain that one too is exclusionary and prevents society from being maximally accessible to the individual. Even something as naturally obvious as parental authority or the very concept of sex wasn't safe from this. Nothing is.
But the problem is that all these traditions and norms are things that even Liberalism actually needs to maintain itself because an incomprehensible society is a brutal unstable mess where everyone suffers.
Much has been said here about the vanishing of sex segregated spaces and its effect on mental health. Traditional institutions must not reduce the individual into a fungible shapeless good, and that makes them impossible. But human life if it is to be tolerable cannot be that atomized.
The charge against the arbitrary restrictions of tradition is also by necessity a charge for the disenchantment of the world. And this has had disastrous ends.
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What @hydroacetylene said below.
There is even a subculture of (admittedly very online) RadTrads who almost encourage getting a Christogram tattooed on you somewhere.
And there's the tradition of sicanje. That is, however, largely cultural as opposed to theological.
I've personally always wondered why the aesthetic traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy do seem to bump up against an invisible force field when it comes to tattooing.
Having double-sleeved up young priests (all images being reverent, of course) might help The Youths feel like the Church is no cap fr fr.
Muslims have Henna despite stronger (but not coranic) prohibitions. I am not talking here in the absolute, but the general tendency of Abrahamism is to disavow such practices and people who disavow such practices are therefore more likely to be Abrahamists, which is useful information.
As I have said previously, reading cultural signals requires knowledge of the relevant cultures to be satisfyingly accurate. And it never bears certainty because we are all individuals. But generalizations are still useful and informative, despite the fanatical attempts by many to deny that they are.
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There are traditional tattoos given at the end of pilgrimage routes in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Full tattoo sleeves aren't looked on very kindly by either tradition because God made our bodies about the way he wants them to be, but it's not a sin per se.
And obviously self consciously relevant posturing is more likely to be cringe than relevant.
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No, Christianity does not ban tattoos. It doesn’t look particularly kindly on the practice but there’s no hard ban.
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