Something I read and found about two years ago, but which is still relevant, especially those parts about self-reflection and judging yourself and others. Absolute moral relativity, often found in certain quarters of academia, and often out of good intent – for who are we to judge? But a person without judgement is a person without responsibility – hidden high up in the ivory tower, looking down upon the massacres. When is intervention justified and how do we reach consensus about it?

“There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging . . . [B]ehind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done. . . . Who am I to judge? actually means We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone. Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person.”

“Socrates provided her model of thinking. In the agora or the gymnasium, he questioned others to see what ideas would not stand up. When he was alone, thinking continued as an internal version of that same dialogue. It was “the silent dialogue between me and myself,” Arendt wrote. It made the thinker like two speakers internally, “two-in-one,” always testing possible beliefs and actions, grappling with the reality of the outer situation by a kind of inner company.”

“But we would think it arrogant for one person to stand up and coolly say to another-”I, so-and-so, having considered it carefully, judge that what you, Mr. X, did, was morally wrong. I need no more authority to judge you than the fact that I am a fellow human being, and that I have judged by good examples, and asked myself what I, myself, could not live with doing.” Of course, it would be a very curious world in which one constantly dared to judge others, and not so much one’s enemies. As Arendt always insisted, the real moral issue was never with one’s enemies, who like the Nazis could be so obviously evil) but with one’s friends, and those one loved.”