Think of your most treasured possessions. You might be imagining your new car, or your mobile phone or tablet, your game console, your house, surfboard, bicycle, first edition of Dickens (not bad!), or your model train set. All material possessions – tangible, visible, saleable, heritable, solid and stable, for yours and my admiration. At least that's what our culture encourages you to focus on. But in that case you would forget something far more important.

What about that invisible, intangible, priceless, inalienable, ethereal possession that ranks far above all the others – your good name? Wouldn’t you rather lose every material possession than have others think badly of you? I don’t mean a few people – that’s unavoidably true of all of us. Nor do I mean that anyone thinks badly of you in some light or trivial way – say, that you are known for being stingy with restaurant tips. I am thinking of the case where you have an all-round bad reputation as a person, or where on one or more serious matters you are harshly judged by others. Even if the reputation is deserved, being so reputed is still painful to all but the most hardened of us.

Everyone treasures their reputation, and so they should. Being thought well of – at least not thought ill of – is not supposed to be an invitation to smug self-satisfaction. It is about external reinforcement of your sense of self-worth, about not being a scandal to others, about being, instead, a model for others, an inspiration to their own virtue. There’s the rub. As I said on a recent radio programme, the best way of ‘virtue-signalling’ is by being virtuous. What we really want is a good reputation that is earned, for anything less is – as with material possessions – something endowed with the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Most of us are, I presume, sensitive to the vagaries of reputation. We want ours preserved. We don’t want merely to be liked but to be thought well of. We know that admiration might be too much to ask; we are all too conscious of our vices. At least, we hope, our vices will not be made manifest, for who could weather the judgment of their fellows? At least let us be of decent repute. And so we hesitate to judge others. ‘Do not be judgmental’, we think and say. ‘Who am I to judge?’. ‘There but for the grace of God go I’, we opine sagely. And we have high authority for such a stance: ‘Judge not, that you may not be judged.’ So Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount.

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“Double standards are better than no standards”

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Yet the following words explain what is meant: ‘For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.’ In other words, if you judge, then use no higher standard than you would want applied to your own self. Only passing acquaintance with the Gospels makes clear Jesus’s own harsh judgment of scribes, Pharisees, and unrepentant sinners. As for the rest of us, with far less moral authority, how can we not judge each other? After all, if charity demands that we judge positively, when the good names of others are at stake, who would object? It is adverse judgment that poses the main problem, of course. ‘Judge not’ means, primarily, ‘do not judge negatively’.