Value judgment

A value judgment is a judgment of the rightness or wrongness of something, or of the usefulness of something, based on a personal view. As a generalization, a value judgment can refer to a judgment based upon a particular set of values or on a particular value system. A related meaning of value judgment is an expedient evaluation based upon limited information at hand, an evaluation undertaken because a decision must be made.

Explanation

The term "value judgment" can be used both in a positive sense, signifying that a judgment must be made taking a value system into account, or in a disparaging sense, signifying a judgment made by personal whim rather than rational, objective thought.cite book
author=Michael Scriven (KF Schaffner & RS Cohen, eds.)
title=Philosophy of Science Association PSA: Boston studies in the philosophy of science, v. 20
page=p. 219 ff
publisher= Dordrecht:Reidel
location=Boston
year=1974
isbn=9027704082
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=nhY1vAIbdakC&pg=PA220&dq=%22value+judgment%22&lr=&as_brr=0&sig=XpsXOsBYNL5ls6imUMMcwQTrr8k#PPA219,M1]

In its positive sense, recommendation to make a value judgment is an admonition to consider carefully, to avoid whim and impetuousness, and search for consonance with one's deeper convictions.

In its disparaging sense the term "value judgment" implies a conclusion is insular, one-sided, and not objective — contrasting with judgments based upon deliberation, balance and rationality.

"Value judgment" also can refer to a tentative judgment based on a considered appraisal of the information at hand, taken to be incomplete and evolving, for example, a "value judgment" on whether to launch a military attack, or as to procedure in a medical emergency.cite book
author=Kristin Shrader-Frechette (Cohen, R. S., Gavroglou, K., Stachel, J. J., & Wartofsky, M. W., eds.)
title=The case of Yucca Mountain: Science, politics and social practice
page=p. 204 ff
publisher= Springer
location=Dordrecht/New York
year=1995
isbn=0792329899
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=ZIo86_X2FAcC&pg=PA205&dq=%22value+judgment%22&lr=&as_brr=0&sig=hpsRKD85pQNkr-cHZLP64lvWDhQ#PPA204,M1] In this case the quality of judgment suffers because the information available is incomplete as a result of exigency, rather than as a result of cultural or personal limitations.

Most commonly the term "value judgment" refers to an individual's opinion. Of course, the individual's opinion is formed to a degree by their belief system, and the culture to which they belong. So a natural extension of the term "value judgment" is to include declarations seen one way from one value system, but which may be seen differently from another. Conceptually this extension of definition is related both to the anthropological axiom "cultural relativism" (that is, that cultural meaning derives from a context) and to the term "moral relativism" (that is, that moral and ethical propositions are not universal truths, but stem from cultural context). In the pejorative sense, a value judgment formed within a specific value system may be parochial, and may be subject to dispute in a wider audience.

Nonjudgmental

Nonjudgmental is a descriptor that conveys the opposite meaning to the pejorative sense of value judgment: it expresses avoidance of personal opinion and reflex "knee-jerk" reactions.

Judgment call

Judgment call is a term describing decision made between alternatives that are not clearly right or wrong, and so must be made on a personal basis.

Value-neutral

Value-neutral is a related adjective suggesting independence from a value system. For example, the classification of an object sometimes depends upon context: Is it a tool or a weapon, an artifact or an ancestor? The object itself might be considered value-neutral being neither good nor bad, neither useful nor useless, neither significant nor trite, until placed in some social context. For a discussion of whether technology is value neutral, see Martin and Schinzinger.cite book
author=Mike W Martin & Schinzinger R
title=Ethics in engineering
page=p. 279
publisher= McGraw-Hill Professional
edition=Fourth Edition
location=Boston
year=2005
isbn=0072831154
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=nJBVhEtOQaQC&pg=PA275&lpg=PA275&dq=%22value+neutral%22&source=web&ots=l6wjK0GN7g&sig=o-_pRZisHzvQazPOty6hkWQcW9k#PPA280,M1] Oddly, an item also may have value that is value-neutral to the extent that some of its utility or import were evident "regardless" of social context, for example, oxygen.

Value judgments and their context

Some argue that true objectivity is impossible, that even the most rigorous rational analysis is founded on the set of values accepted in the course of analysis. See [http://www.swif.it/foldop/dizionario.php?find=value Free On-Line Dictionary of Philosophy] . Consequently, all conclusions are necessarily value judgments (and therefore maybe suspect). Of course, putting all conclusions in one category does nothing to distinguish between them, and is therefore a useless descriptor except as a rhetorical device intended to discredit a position claiming higher authority.

As an example of a more nuanced view, scientific "truths" are considered objective, but are held tentatively, with the understanding that more careful evidence and/or wider experience might change matters. Further, a scientific view (in the sense of a conclusion based upon a value system) is a "value judgment" based upon rigorous evaluation and wide consensus. With this example in mind, characterizing a view as a "value judgment" is vague without description of the context surrounding it.

However, as noted in the first segment of this article, in common usage the term "value judgment" has a much simpler meaning with context simply implied, not specified.

Notes and references

See also

*Cultural relativism
*Moral relativism

*Immanent evaluation
*Gilles Deleuze
*Transcendence (philosophy)