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I had an argument (I'd guess this is what spurs many top level comments) about tattoos, and how much you're allowed to judge people for them.
My argument was that I think tattoos are a sign of distasteful character and went something like
These, I think, give me plenty of room to be wary of strangers with tattoos, especially where I am located in a pretty methed up rural area. The beautiful thing is that it's not a protected characteristic, so you can actually judge it as much as you like!
The other party's argument was
I actually don't think I could agree with that, ever! While it is more true the more "normal" people get tattoos, it is still a fact that pretty much any mugshot I see of any likely violent incarcerated individual is going to have a ton of them. They are also something you have to go out of your way to get, and thus, they make a decent indicator that you shouldn't trust someone if they're in the Venn diagram of "has tattoos".
But now I'm curious what is acceptable to judge people about. Let's say you're walking to your workplace or your university class or your school and you see, purposely avoiding anything like a bumper sticker or T-shirt that makes any more clearly identifiable statement or symbol:
Or perhaps we could change the context of how you're seeing this person. Let's say you work at a gas station or other commonly-visited public-facing third-place and you see people
The stance of the refuses-to-judge-on-tattoos individual is a little perplexing to me. I'm certain that I am similarly perplexing to him. But for me, pretty much all of these, plus other considerations like height, sex, and age add up to an impression of the character and of the threat level of said individual. Personally, I think everyone has this kind of unconscious thinking, even if they don't know it or if they have suppressed it significantly. My guess is that people left of center tend to be uncomfortable with associating behaviors like that with anything negative, even though they are not protected characteristics, and even though they almost certainly do it themselves for various things, like word choice (do you say gay people or do you say queer people?), vehicle choice (drives a truck...), or sex and likely choice of gender.
How much should you judge people? On what should you judge them by? Is there something you think it's wrong to judge people for?
"Do not judge" (as stated)/"judge only deniably, or based on a narrow set of acceptable criteria (socks with sandals etc.)" (as implemented) is an American cultural value. You could argue that it serves some purpose on a societal level, in a Chestertonian way, but many societies without it mostly work fine, which puts an upper bound on how important it can be.
To maximise personal advantage, it is rational to always update/"judge" on everything that you can extract a meaningful evidential signal from, which surely includes all of your examples. It seems like a pretty complex question which criteria should be kept to maximise the elusive societal advantage (i.e. what set of judgement taboos maximises social welfare?) - the most obvious advantage of any such taboos is that they facilitate coexistence between different groups with divergent aesthetic values, and thereby also encourage such groups to form to begin with, enabling distributed experimentation on value systems. For example, if it turns out pro-tattoo values actually carry some unexpected advantage (aliens invade and kill everyone without?), the societies which did not suppress pro-tattoo aesthetics because they had a taboo against judging based on tattoos would come out ahead.
Beyond just different groups, even just between individuals. Most people have a few preferences that are weird or non-conforming, even if they're otherwise very similar. It's just nicer to not sweat the little things in general, and I'd argue the vast majority of tattoos are in that category.
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