As a coach, being nonjudgemental is seen as a virtue, an
ideal to aspire to, a badge of honour.
We coaches, along with other caring professions, tend to agree it is an
essential attitude to adopt for our clients to grow.
However, we don’t have to travel very far to encounter a
community who take exception to our mutual reverence of the nonjudgemental
attitude. This is a community who pride
themselves on the rigour of their thinking and questioning. To find them, we have to pass the offices of
our natural bedfellows in the psychology department, wander down several
corridors and around a number of corners, until we find the department of
philosophy.
Philosophers, old and new, have pondered on the nature of judgement
and concluded that nonjudgementalism is in fact the precise opposite of a
virtue. It is a vulnerability, if not a
delusion. This view is expressed in the plainest terms by Theodore
Dalrymple: ‘Experience has taught me
that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that nonjudgementalism is at
best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised form of
sadism’. (The Rush from Judgement, 1997)
The view is not just a recent one, C.S. Lewis in ‘The
humanitarian theory of punishment’ (1949) asserts that ‘Mercy, detached from
Justice, grows unmerciful’. Abstaining
from judgement, while appearing merciful, in fact shows no respect for the
other person, treating them as a child rather than an adult. Judgement is seen as essential to respect for
individual responsibility. For others,
such as William Clifford in ‘The Ethics of Belief’ (1877) , the failure to
exercise judgement in forming a belief according to the evidence is a
dereliction of duty.
As coaches, are we really saying that we do not believe in
exercising sound judgement? Or that we
do not believe in holding other functioning adults to account for the choices
that they make? No, that does not sound
right, so what on earth do we mean by adopting a nonjudgemental attitude?
Well, it turns out that the very word judgement is a slippery thing.
Judgement has a number of meanings, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, of which the two most relevant to us are:
(i)
The formation of an opinion or conclusion
concerning something, especially following careful consideration or
deliberation.
(ii)
The pronouncing of a deliberate opinion upon a
person or thing, or the opinion pronounced; criticism, critique, comment;
(sometimes) spec. censure, publicly stated
disapproval.
The first definition is associated with phrases such as
‘exercising sound judgement’, while the second definition is associated, in
some cases, with phrases such as ‘passing judgement on someone’.
Already, we can see scope for considerable ambiguity when
the word ‘judgement' is used without a clarifying context, and indeed much of
the conflict between proponents of judgement and nonjudgementalism is riven
with a basic semantic misunderstanding between a benign interpretation of
judgement as in ‘I value her judgement’ and a malign interpretation of
judgement associated with excessive criticism.
The latter interpretation appears particularly stressed in
the uses of the adjectival form, ‘judgemental’ which, according to the OED, is
defined as:
(i)
Of or relating to judgement; involving or
requiring the exercise of judgement.
(ii)
Inclined to make moral judgements; having or
displaying an overly critical point of view.
Of these two definitions, the more common seems to me to be
the second. “Stop being so judgemental”
is almost certainly a request to form a more generous, and less overly
critical, interpretation, than a request to cease exercising sound
judgement.
The term ‘nonjudgemental’ also therefore inherits this
ambiguity. It can mean (i) avoiding or
suspending judgement or (ii) avoiding being overly critical. So when adherents of judgement and
nonjudgementalism lock swords, they might be genuinely opposed or they might be
strenuously and paradoxically declaring the same thing: “exercise judgement
appropriately!”.
So what does this all mean for coaches? I think the term nonjudgemental is too deeply
rooted in our coaching culture to change it now, but the ambiguity in the word
may cause us to under-appreciate the value and role of judgement in the
coaching process. What exactly is an
appropriate use of judgement? The same
lack of precision in our language also means we do not ask ourselves a deeper
question, and a true philosophical question: are there times when it is
appropriate to suspend judgement according to all its meanings? This the subject of a future article on this
topic. In the meantime, if you meet a
philosopher, consider having a dictionary to hand.
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