How I see it is that who we are and what we do are quite different things. What we do is based on doing our best in any given moment based on what we know, our current mental state, habits, desires etc. What generally acts are the many layers of our personal culture. These things are malleable, removable and can compound against each other creating complexities. Even when what we do we may know as 'wrong' and we don't want to do it, a compulsion may still make us do it. There goes free choice.

However, the actions we make are what people see and they then attach some representative sticker to the forehead. We can all think back to the school bully, and when we think of them we remember them the way they were, not the way they are now. Perhaps, they are the most compassionate, perhaps even worse than they were but our memory of them is not them. We see them walk down the street and we paint them with the insensitive brush of memory, not the sensitivity of awareness in the moment. We convict them, rarely considering that they may no longer be guilty of the crimes they perpetrated earlier in respect to the current moment.

Who we are would be something below all of these layers yet it can not be investigated if the layers exist. Removing each layer would reduce conflicts and complexity making our movements more authentic with each layer gone. Whether it is possible to discover what truly is below I am not sure but I would assume at that point, true enlightenment happens.

In practice, I give people a break as my judgement is biased and based on a very limited amount of information and probably, if I was transplanted into their body with their skills and experiences, I could do no better than they. Which would make me no different to them.