Judges only have to determine if someone has broken the law. They normally don't care why.
We do. Because what other people see us do is just one ingredient in the mix that makes us good or bad. And it’s not even the most important.
Since we aren’t God, the only moral acts that we see in full are our own. We know what we do, and why. However, when it comes to others, the picture gets a lot smaller. We can only see their external actions, not their moral acts.
They aren’t the same thing. True, there are cases in which a physical action can have only one possible moral object. Like we mentioned a few posts back, arrows aren’t anesthesia (Hunger Games: Do No Evil). However, many physical actions do leave open a lot of possibilities.
Take a pair of sunglasses. A man at the bus stop takes them off and puts them back on. What did he do morally? He could have just been fidgeting, getting a good look at something across the street, trying to look cool. Or he could be a terrorist giving the pre-arranged signal to set off the bombs, and in that case he just committed murder. By taking off his sunglasses.
Every day we brush shoulders with hundreds of people. Our own well-being, and sometimes theirs, depends on our assessment of others. Steering clear of danger, seeing who needs help, lending a hand—or a shoulder to cry—mean judging the people around us.
To do that, you need to go beyond the externals, and understand the heart.
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