What if John is choosing not to be with you because John has decided to stay home night after night to get himself drunk and is developing into an alcoholic. Could you not then just decide, “Well, John is not choosing to be available to help me with my companionship, so I’ll just have to choose someone else who can meet my needs. John is free to choose what he needs, he’s choosing to medicate whatever pain is in his life with booze, so I’ll let him be, because after all, who am I to say what he’s doing is wrong?”

Granted, there’s only so much you can do to help out another person. John could stubbornly refuse your intervention, and maybe you’re only option at some point is to bid John adieu … but … is there a way for you to reconcile stopping down to try and help John without judging him? Wouldn’t it require you judging his actions as wrong regardless of their impact on you?

I like to see it as being accurate/honest/genuine in your communication. All I really know is true is what I feel. The judgement is either a guess and/or a way to protect my feelings.

Re: Chris’s comment
Can you help someone and not use judging statements? Yes. I’ll let Dale fill in the details on that one…
I think it’s more important though to realise when we’re being dishonest in our day-to-day communication before we look at extreme cases.

If my friend John were hurting, I would offer my help—not out of judgment that his behaviors were “wrong,” but out of love for my friend.

I try not to imagine that I know better than other people—other adults at least—what is in their best interest. If I were to intervene in John’s life against his will, to force him to do something he didn’t want to do, then I would be acting out of my desire for John to care for himself.

As for “selfishness,” I’m guessing that you mean acting in my interests regardless of the harmful effects to other people. I see that not as a moral issue, but as a question of what works for me. I always act in what I perceive to be my best interests. I’ve found that my life works better when I construe my interests to include the interests of the people around me.

Without making a judgment, how is it you can even say he needs help? How can you say that confronting an apparent alcohol problem is helping him unless it’s directly tied to your own needs? If you really mean “to each his own” then you cannot say you’d help him, because you have no foundation from which to work.

“I’ve found that my life works better when I construe my interests to include the interests of the people around me.”

Interests defined by who? I assume you’d say, defined by those who own the interest. If John says his only interest is drinking himself to death — your interest is him taking care of himself and addressing his apparent drinking problem — who decides who is Right?

About interests: Only John defines John’s interests. If he defines his interest as drinking himself to death, and I define my interest as him not drinking himself to death, then obviously our interests conflict. Who’s right? I don’t see the concept of “right” as being helpful to me here. The issue for me is what will I choose to do, given that my interests conflict with John’s.

And given that my interests very likely collide with each other. I’ve never had a close relationship with an addict of any kind. I suspect that I would have a complex mix of desires, some of them perhaps conflicting with each other. I want my friend to be healthy. At the same time, I want to respect my friend’s freedom to make choices for himself. And I’m sure I would have other desires as well. Ultimately, given my complex, conflicting mix of desires, I will act based on what I define to be my highest interests.

Openness and Awareness

Perception

Discernment

Qualitative Analysis

Distinction

Differentiation

Determination of Meaning [as in Understanding]

Self-Awarness [as in how I feel about something, and where my preconceptions lie].

Determination of Relative Value [as of Better or Worse]

Personal Assignment of Value or Worth [as of Guilt or Innocence]

Moral Prejudice [as in I know what your kind are like]

Critique of Character///AKA Naming [as in "YOU ARE attractive, smart, capable, responsible, OR YOU ARE mean, lazy, careless, or stupid]

Punishment (or Mercy) [as in choosing my behavior in order to influence others]

How we see the concept of Judging is strongly influenced by whether or not we allow our understanding of it to be clouded by our relationship to power and authority, long companions of judgement in human cultures. If I assume that making a judgement about an idea or a situation is the same as rendering judgement on or towards another person, I am blinding myself to the reality of my relationship to power, and cannot truly understand judgement on its own.

Discerning one’s perception of truth does not make the thing true. It also does not make the thing untrue. Since we are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, it behooves us as human beings to admit that judgement is a dangerous tool, like a sharp knife….it can be used to carefully cut vegetables, i.e. to help us live well in this world….or it can be used to impose our idea of how things should be on our world and those in it. Both involve judgment, yet the results spring from very different intentions. Now that I think of it, the value of judgement is all about whether or not it is used with the most effective foil for a sharp knife or a sharp tongue…compassion.

Another sort of judging which may enter into the picture is diagnosing. Is John an alcoholic? Once you’ve owned your reasons for wishing to help and avoided making moralistic judgements (”what John is doing is wrong”), you no longer need to justify with diagnoses, you use clear observations. Perhaps John only drinks once a year at best, but you could still be furious because you value his family’s safety. Once you’ve owned that this is yours, John is much more likely to respect your opinion. Anyone can dodge and weave definitions of alcoholism or moralistic judgements or other judgements or comparisions by pointing out small logic differences, and they are very likely to do so because being judged is not pleasant. But it is much more difficult to dodge what your friend may feel about your behavior and what he says he needs, and there is not much motivation to do so if in the process your friend has conveyed that he will not judge you and he is still willing to respect you.