Theodore Dalrymple on the Rush to Nonjudgmentalism

"Apologists for nonjudgmentalism point, above all, to its supposed quality of compassion. A man who judges others will sometimes condemn them and therefore deny them aid and assistance, where as the man who refuses to judge excludes no one from his all-embracing compassion. He never asks where his fellow man’s suffering comes from, whether it be self-inflicted or no: for whatever its source, he sympathizes with it and succors the sufferer…

"If the doctor has a duty to relieve the suffering of his patients, he must have some idea where that suffering comes from, and this involves the retention of judgment, including moral judgment. And if, as far as he can tell in good faith, the misery of his patients derives from the way they live, he has a duty to tell them so—which often involves a more or less explicit condemnation of their way of life as completely incompatible with a satisfying existence. By avoiding the issue, the doctor is not being kind to his patients; he is being cowardly. Moreover, by refusing to place the onus on the patients to improve their lot, he is likely to mislead them into supposing that he has purely technical or pharmacological answer to their problems, thus helping to perpetuate them…

"Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that nonjudgmentalism is at best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised form of sadism. How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and thruthfulness? How can people learn from experience unless they are told that they can and should change? On doesn’t demand of laboratory mice that they do better: but man is not a mouse, and I can think no more contemptuous way of treating people than to ascribe to them no more responsibility than such mice.

"In any case, nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that, in the words of a bitter Argentinean tango, “todo we igual, nada es major”: everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man.”

~Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass