Do The Criticized Deserve The Personal Attacks of The Criticizer – Ethics Essay

Do The Criticized Deserve The Personal Attacks of The Criticizer – Ethics Essay
In front of their faces, most of us act civilly to the people in our lives. Yet all of us have criticized some of them behind their backs. I too, have done this in the past. However, now that I am older, my experiences

with my family, friends and even acquaintances have led me to become repulsed with the whole notion of criticizing people behind their backs. Keep in mind that I am not talking about war criminals and murderers; I am talking ordinary people whom we encounter on a daily basis in our lives, like the school bus driver or the cashier at the supermarket. In almost all the situations which I have witnessed I find the criticizer to be unjust in one or more of three ways.

Firstly, if the attacks are personal in nature, it has been my experience that the criticized never deserve the personal attacks of the criticizer. In almost every instance, the victims’ characters are abused base on one of their minor flaws or annoying habits. From the time when I was young, I was taught to hate the sin, not the sinner. (As simple and logical as that is, I find that very few people follow this rule.) Everyone has many different sides, and it is unfair to judge someone based on just one act or one aspect of their personality.

Besides this tendency to transfer abhorrence of the act to the person, I have found that a lot of the criticizers often act out the very crimes they condemn. My parents, for example, always verbally abuse with great relish drivers who make a rather dangerous move, yet I have seen them drive in a similar manner themselves on several occasions when they were in a hurry. This hypocritical behaviour is not limited to my parents. When circumstances prescribe it, many of my friends and acquaintances have
done the deeds which they denounce when another acts it.

If the attacks don’t fit into either of the two situations above, I still find a problem with people criticizing each other behind their victims’ backs. More often than not, I see the criticizers to act perfectly pleasant when their victim is doing the very act which bothers them. Why don’t they try to eliminate that which is bothering them by honestly explaining how they feel to their faces? That is because most people don’t like to deal with the consequences of their actions. Rather than pointing out the mistake to their victims’ faces so that they may correct the situation, people prefer to avoid the confrontation that will invariably follow and to hurt their victims in a way that leaves no messy business for themselves to deal with. They put people down, feel good about themselves, and the only thing that lasts is the tarnish upon their victim’s reputation.

Granted there are exceptions to this rule. There are certainly people who criticize the behaviours of other people only after countless fruitless confrontations. The extreme rarity of it in my experiences, however, has done nothing to change my disgust in the act.

Despite my heated comments, I don’t hate these criticizers. This only one side of them, and I have seen enough of their good qualities to know that they are decent people. Besides harming the reputation of their victims, however, I feel that in doing these acts they also harm themselves. They have wrongly convinced themselves that certain people are annoying and irritating. Unless they break out of this mindset, they will forever be under that illusion and be deprived of the company and things that their victims can teach them. Expand, ENDING

-metaphor
Negative division, if our words don’t build people, keep your backseat comments in the backseat.

I have seen the people around me, my family, friends, acquaintances and even fictional characters, in the roles of the criticizer and criticized, and my descriptions hold true in almost all of these cases.
If the attacks were ad hominem, it has been my experience that the criticized never deserve the personal attacks of the criticizer. If the attacks were ad rem, I find that in a lot of cases, the criticizers do the very act they condemn when the circumstance prescribes it. Even if this isn’t the case, and the act is something which they would never, ever do, I find it unfair that the criticizers blacken the person’s name behind their backs rather than attempt to correct their behaviour by criticizing them to their faces.

Besides these immediate victims, these constant unjustified criticisms can certainly lower one’s view on humanity, as they never think back and analyse, I shouldn’t have thought and said these things. They’d just think, people are al jerks. Some might call it making excuses for lowlife. I call it a logical method that helps you love your fellow man, which is what we are called to do.