JUDGEMENT Jithin Mathew P.

Judgement
Judgment means a formal utterance of an authoritative opinion or the
process of forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and
comparing; an opinion or estimate so formed or a proposition stating
something believed or asserted. Moral judgments are evaluations or
opinions formed as to whether some action or inaction, intention,
motive, character trait, or a person as a whole is Good or Bad as
measured against some standard of Good. The moral judgments of actions
are usually the primary focus of any discussion of Moral Judgments in
particular, and Ethical analysis in general. This is because the
judgments of intentions, character traits, and persons are generally
based on the judgment of actions that the intention, motive, character
trait, or person might potentially do or not do. So limiting
discussion to the moral judgments of actions will also, with suitable
obvious modifications, address the moral judgment of intentions,
motives, character traits and people.
What distinguishes moral judgments from non moral judgments, is the
context of the statement. Philosophy, and particularly Ethics, differs
from the sciences in one very important way. All of the sciences, both
'hard' and 'soft', deal with descriptions of Reality. They purport to
describe in varying levels of detail, what is about Reality. Ethics,
on the other hand, is that branch of Philosophy that describes what
one ought. All of the various philosophers, in all of their various
works on Ethics, are detailing what you "should" do or how things
"should" be, not what is. In answer to the questions "What should I
do?"
A second major distinction of moral judgments is that they can only be
made of an agent with the freedom or will to choose. Moral judgments
are judgments of certain choices, or potential choices, where the one
who chooses is aware that there is a choice, and has the capability to
choose. A person who cannot do other than what was done, is not
subject to moral judgment.
The third important distinction is knowledge. In order to be able to
make a choice, you have to be aware that there are alternatives. If
your knowledge about your current situation is thin, or your knowledge
about how reality behaves is thin, then you might come to the
conclusion that there are no better alternatives.