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value judgement

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value judgement

an ethical or moral evaluation, especially where this leads to a statement of what, on ethical or moral grounds, ‘ought to be done’. In Logical Positivism (see POSITIVISM) the assumption is sometimes made that no ‘value judgement’ can ever be derived from a purely 'scientific’ statement (see FACT-VALUE DISTINCTION). However, two other possibilities exist:
  1. that ‘facts’ and ‘theories’, although they can never dictate our ‘values’, can inform us about causal connections, etc., thus also indicating how we might go about achieving our ethical goals (this approximately was WEBER's view; see also HYPOTHETICAL IMPERATIVE);
  2. that the notion of an insurmountable divorce between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ is false, and that whenever possible we should always seek to ground our ethical and moral positions and our value judgements on firm sociological foundations (the position, for example, of COMTE or DURKHEIM, or the FRANKFURT SCHOOL OF CRITICAL THEORY).

All three positions continue to be held by different sociologists in modern sociology. See also CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE, KANT, BECKER, HIERARCHY OF CREDIBILITY.

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000
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References in periodicals archive
(8) Under this analysis, exercise of a 'discretion' and the attachment of the House rules may extend to the application of a general standard, a value judgment in which there is room for reasonable differences of opinion and a value judgment otherwise not governed by the application of a fixed rule to the facts as found.
Analyzing the exposed request, ECHR judges concluded that the article published by the applicant is, essentially, a value judgment, is not justified State interference in the freedom of expression.
(2) Wilhelm Ropke, "A Value Judgment on Value Judgments," Revue de la Faculte des Sciences Economiques de l'Universite d'Istanbul 3, nos.
Ethical (or emotive) words can be used in different ways to lead the interlocutor to a value judgment on the target.
The question is, "Can the state enhance economic efficiency--or, what is the same, increase society's income--without a value judgment that favors some and harms others?" Although the complete demonstration requires a deep knowledge of economic theory and the help of mathematical or graphical analysis, we can get a good intuitive idea of how it proceeds.
It has long been a dogma in some quarters that value judgments are radically different from factual judgments, that they are "subjective" or "untestable" in a way that factual judgments are not.
Recent philosophical and economic treatments of the problem are overtly normative, but even this mathematical approach is not completely devoid of value judgment.
"In vain" is a value judgment on the emptiness of one's endeavors.
General, ambiguous, value judgment questions serve five purposes.
The Viewcatcher [TM], from THE COLOR WHEEL CO., is a new tool created to help the artist achieve powerful results in the areas of composition, value judgment and true color.
Such a condition was permissible, in the Court's view, because the government should be allowed to make a value judgment favoring childbirth over abortion and to implement that judgment through the allocation of public funds.
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