We must be a free people in order to judge. Taking away judgment is a means of taking away freedom.

From The Loneliness of Pauline Kael's Opinions by Luke Burgis.  The subheading is A film critic with the courage to judge.

In many respects, judgment has become a dirty word. Nobody likes someone who is judgmental. Many of us grew up learning what the phrase ‘passing judgment’ meant biblically; but perhaps we’ve overcompensated and forgotten what it means phenomenologically.

In everyday experience, we all have to judge constantly. Is this person walking toward me on the sidewalk a threat? We see, judge, act. Sometimes unconsciously, sometimes with intention.

When it comes to those fight-or-flight responses, we don’t have the luxury of forming judgments mimetically, or with the help of others. We must take a position, or we must act.

But when it comes to truth, beauty, or goodness—or even a position about whether a given book or film is worth reading or watching—many people have begun discounting their unmediated experiences and unmediated judgment. Perhaps this is because they do not trust their own instincts, or perhaps it’s because they don’t think communicating their immediate experience is valuable. It might be “wrong.”

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This dramatically lessens the importance of immediate, lived experience, and makes people live feeling alienated from themselves. I think that is tragic.

To be free agents, we must have liberty to decide.  To decide, we have to judge.  To judge we have to balance the evidence, assess trade-offs and otherwise make a decision in the absence of all the data and information we might otherwise wish for.