A virtue turned into confusion

In the therapeutic, educational and social fields, but also in our families, our institutions and our circles of friends, non-judgement is often presented as an absolute virtue. We are supposed to welcome, to understand, to suspend our conclusions, not to lock the other person into an over-hasty moral category. I believe deeply in this demand. To reduce a person to their act, their symptom, their failure or their violence is always to risk losing part of their humanity.

But a confusion has taken hold. Not reducing a person to what they do does not mean giving up on naming what is done. There is a major difference between saying:

When silence speaks

The problem begins when non-judgement becomes an elegant way of no longer naming anything. We do not judge, so we say nothing. We do not want to take sides, so we let things pass. We want to preserve complexity, but we sometimes end up preserving the comfort of the group, the reputation of the institution, the peace of mind of the witnesses or the position of the one who already holds power.

In those moments, silence is not empty. It speaks.

The bond also holds through justice

This is where systemic thinking seems essential to me. A relationship can never be understood through individual intentions alone. It is also understood through positions, loyalties, asymmetries, invisible debts, implicit rules and silent gains.

This reflection also applies to clinical work. If we speak of psychological suffering without speaking of the world that produces it, we risk psychologising what is also social, political, economic or institutional. A person never suffers in a vacuum. They suffer within relationships, within contexts, within histories, within power relations. The WHO reminds us that the social determinants of health — the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age — weigh heavily on health and well-being. To act as though everything played out solely within psychic interiority is to reduce the very complexity we claim to respect.

Not all silences are equal

We must nevertheless remain precise: not all silences are equal. The silence of a dominated person can be a survival strategy. Staying silent when speaking out would expose you to more violence, rejection or discredit is not the same thing as staying silent from a protected position.

Recovering moral discernment

The question, then, is not to become a permanent judge of others. That would be another form of violence. The question is to recover a form of moral discernment.

• Not humiliating people, but naming acts.
• Not reducing individuals, but identifying mechanisms.
• Not crushing complexity, but refusing to let it become an alibi for injustice.