When Did Not Judging People Become a Virtue?

By Kachi Obata '28 | The Babcock Torch

Picture a room. A few friends, an evening, the kind of easy conversation that moves between topics without much friction. Someone new walks in — a friend of a friend — and within minutes she's holding court. She's talking about a man she's been stringing along, proud of it, animated about it. Four days of conversation and he's already sent her five hundred thousand naira. She doesn't like him. She never did. That was never the point. The room listens. The room laughs. Someone calls her cool. Nobody flinches. Nobody goes quiet. Nobody even shifts uncomfortably in their seat. And when she leaves, the energy in the room is warm, light, entertained.

I heard about this secondhand. What struck me wasn't the girl. It was the room.

Because later, when I said I found it troubling that nobody had said anything, not even a quiet "that's a bit much" — I was told: "I don't know her and I'm not judging her either."

And just like that, the real conversation began. Not about her. About that line.

When did that become the right thing to say? More than that — when did it become the good thing to say? When did "I don't judge" become a personality trait people wear proudly, like it signals something about their depth or their emotional maturity? Because somewhere between genuine tolerance and the world we live in now, something got quietly inverted. Holding a moral position used to be called having principles. Now it gets called being judgmental. Being unbothered used to be called indifference. Now it gets called being evolved. The language of virtue has been reassigned, and most people haven't noticed because the reassignment was gradual and it came dressed in the vocabulary of open-mindedness.

Let me be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying anyone has the right to march into other people's lives and audit their choices. I am not saying self-righteousness is a virtue or that moral grandstanding improves anything. What I am saying is something smaller and more important: that silence is not neutrality. That apathy is its own form of participation. That "I don't feel any type of way about it" is not a morally clean position — it's a choice, and it has weight, and we should stop pretending otherwise.

When the room laughs with someone about behaviour it privately finds questionable, the room is communicating something. Not in words, nobody said "what you're doing is great, keep going." They didn't have to. The absence of any objection said it for them. The warmth of the room said it. The "she's so cool" said it. That girl walked out of that room having received a form of social endorsement, and the people who gave it will tell you they didn't take any position at all. That's the trick. That is exactly the trick. You are never not taking a position. The only question is whether you are honest about the one you're taking.

Here is the thing that made this particular conversation cut deeper for me. I have never been quiet about what I think of men who use women. Men who pursue with false intention, who take emotional labour and time and vulnerability from someone who is genuine, and give nothing real in return. I find it wrong. I say so, plainly, and without much hedging.
And so when I found myself looking at the same dynamic running in the opposite direction — a woman deliberately performing intimacy she doesn't feel, leading a man toward something she has no intention of giving him, and taking his money in the process — while the people around it respond with warmth and entertainment and zero moral friction, the inconsistency was hard to sit with. Not because one wrong justifies another. It doesn't. But because a moral position that only applies in one direction isn't a moral position. It's a preference. And preferences dressed as principles are one of the more dishonest things a person can carry.

But this is bigger than one conversation. That room is everywhere now.

An entire generation has been raised on the idea that tolerance is the ceiling of virtue, that withholding judgment is enlightenment, that having strong moral opinions about other people's behaviour is really just insecurity or arrogance in disguise. And somewhere in absorbing all of that, something atrophied. The capacity to look at something and say plainly, without performance, without needing it to be about you — that it is wrong. Not wrong for me personally. Not wrong in my particular cultural context. Just wrong. That muscle has gone soft from disuse. And a generation without it doesn't become more free. It becomes more directionless. It becomes a room that calls things cool because it's lost the ability to call them anything else.

The most insidious part is that the performance of non-judgment has its own social reward system. The person who shrugs and says "it's not my business" reads as chill, unbothered, mature. The person who says "actually, I think that's wrong" reads as uptight, moralistic, threatened by something. The social incentives have been arranged to make indifference look like wisdom. And so people perform indifference. They perform it until they can no longer tell the difference between performing it and actually having no moral sense at all. At which point the damage is done.

I want to be careful here, and very clear. The girl in the story can make whatever choices she wants to make. That is genuinely not my business, and I mean that. What is my business, what's everyone's business — is what we communicate when we respond to the choices we witness. The room had options. It could have said nothing and meant it — kept quiet out of genuine discomfort rather than enthusiastic approval. It could have said something small, something light, something that registered at least a flicker of moral awareness. It didn't. It laughed and called her cool and let the moment pass as entertainment.

That is what I cannot let go of. Not the girl. The room.

Because the room is the culture. And the culture has decided that the most sophisticated thing you can do when you see something wrong is feel nothing about it, say nothing about it, and congratulate yourself for your restraint.

I don't think that's restraint. I think it's abdication. And I think we have spent long enough calling it a virtue.

Kachi Obata ‘28, Head of Sponsorships & Partnerships, lives in Welch Hall