Value Judgements

Abstract

One may define value judgements as judgements of approval or disapproval claiming objective validity. Many of our judgements of approval and disapproval do not involve such claims. When I say that I like a particular dish, I do not mean to imply that other people ought to like it too or that those disliking it are making a mistake. All I am doing is expressing my personal preference and my personal taste. (But an expert chef or an expert food critic may very well claim that his judgements about food have some degree of objective validity – in the sense that other gastronomic experts would tend to agree with his judgements. Of course, it is an empirical question whether his claim would be justified and, more generally, how much agreement there is in fact among expert judges of food.) Yet when I say that Hitler’s murder of many millions of innocent people was a moral outrage, I do mean to do more than express my personal moral attitudes and do mean to imply that anybody who tried to defend Hitler’s actions would be morally wrong.

This chapter was originally published in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition, 2008. Edited by Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume