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.

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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.
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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.
The neutrality principle: the Supreme Court will soon reconsider Washington State's revoking of Joshua Davey's college scholarship after he decided to major in theology. Will its decision render the Blaine amendments, provisions of state constitutions that prohibit aid to religious schools, unconstitutional?

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