Who are we to judge?

A lot of arguments and wars can be said to be attributed to reason that we are much to quick to judge others. Its the basic mistake of drawing a conclusion on the basis of a small sample size that is not representative of the whole of facts. My past few months in the army living close to other people has shown the acuteness of this problem.. Criticising that the in-charge is lousy, or laugh at the way other people talk, speak, make decisions, actions, etc. Sometimes, I find myself falling into the same trap of hasty judgement.

Who are we to judge? If you were one day given the same mythical ring of Gyges, a ring that grants its user the power of invisibility, would you be able to resist the temptations of power? Is it wrong if the user is corrupted in this case? If you say yes, that means you understand that the idea to steal or do other such activities is wrong. Or you believe yourself capable of withstanding the lure of the power. You who have never been tried in the same circumstances, will never know whether you truly is capable of remaining free of the temptation. Should you one day be presented the same ring, perhaps its a little too late now to reject it. Perhaps its even a greater pity that you cannot use it. Once you use it, it is only a fine line between moral usage and immoral usage.

It is precisely the same point here about judgement. How are you to know whether you can do better? Even if you really can do better, it may not be under the same circumstances. We tend always to think to ourselves too highly, and therefore, we are not as flawless as we seem to think ourselves. We overestimate ourselves, and thus we will make definitely make mistakes, if not the same ones, when it is our turn.

Our tendency to classify and dichotomize things into good and bad fails to take into account that there is really no solid definition for good and bad; nothing to compare against at all, except for cultural norms, and these have often proved to change fluidly with time. Certain things may be both beneficial and harmful, in different aspects, in different measures. If I might go further, I would say that all such things are like that, there is nothing that only consists of positively goodness, or 'badness'. Since there is no solid measure to say something is either good or bad, then why judge at all?

Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right.