One of Montaigne’s most important thoughts is buried in the middle of his 7th essay:

We cannot be bound beyond our powers and means. For this reason—that we have no power to effect and accomplish, that there is nothing really in our power but will—all man’s rules of duty are necessarily founded and established in our will.

This is a thought with significant implications. Montaigne is saying that people can only be held responsible for what they have the power and the means to accomplish. Think of an airline pilot who deftly maneuvers around bad weather and lands the plane safely, only to be criticized for arriving 15 minutes late. That flight in the eyes of many is a failure. Little do the passengers know, their lives might have been saved at the cost of those 15 minutes.

The pilot in this example has the will to decide that passenger safety comes first. If an external reward structure wants to judge him purely on the metrics of ETAs, that’s forfeiting the value of the pilot’s expertise and judgment. This is why Montaigne is so contemptuous of laws, they are built to bracket out the individual necessities of the moment.

We often judge people based on small errors, not taking into account a broader context that might better explain what was going on in that moment. We formulate words often to answer questions not raised in the flow of events, but move to the head of our conscious queue for reasons we can’t explain.

In this sense, our minds are not that different from Large Language Models. Current AI systems have been criticized by many for being nothing more than sophisticated autocomplete systems. And while this is true, it’s also true for human beings in many circumstances. We cannot explain why certain concepts and analogies come to mind in the flow of life and find a need to be expressed.

While I often do not buy the excuse when someone declares that they are “only joking” after saying something harsh, we shouldn’t assume that the phrases uttered were fully intentional either. People mindlessly mimic the conversations of others, and those imitations can come out at the wrong moment. People share private discussions publicly, forgetting the importance of context. And if a room feels open to humor, it becomes more likely that someone will feel excessive comfort in the moment and take a joke too far.

Rules can train us to shut our mouths and say nothing that might offend. But the rules themselves do not teach us to understand how words might affect someone else. That takes empathy and understanding — things that are more difficult to form if we never have open, free-flowing conversations with people.

Context matters in every circumstance. Often the most impressive personal acts are invisible to us. We do not understand the restraint another person is showing by keeping quiet about something that could hurt our feelings. Our ears don’t pick up how the bassist inserts an extra note to pull the lead guitarist’s mistake back in key.

The world functions best through little selfless acts of attunement, the kinds of things you can’t put in a manual or rule book. They require us to be aware and caring. So when Montaigne says that we should be judged for the way we live and for our intentions, that’s what he means.

We don’t prove ourselves to be good people by always following the rules. We adopt practices, often invisible to the world, that demonstrate we care about others, even if no one stops to say thanks.