Saying No to Judgmentalism

Journal of Value Inquiry, 2022

There are a class of moral virtues that have an intimate relationship with agential evaluation, following Gary Watson we can call these 'second-order virtues,' e.g., modesty, blind charity, being judgmental, etc. Julia Driver has argued that these virtues are distinguished by being virtues which require ignorance. Richard Y. Chappell and Helen Yetter-Chappell have argued that these virtues are distinguished by being virtues of salience. Aside from the disagreement about the distinguishing features of these virtues, there is an intrinsic interest in the second-order virtues and vices. For these virtues and vices play an integral role in moral education and character formation. This paper seeks to deepen that discussion by examining a second-order vice, namely, the vice of being judgmental. I argue that being judgmental requires a salience structure which exhibits undue attention to the negative features of others (pace Jessie Munton). Modeling being judgmental as a vice of attention helps to unify the various characteristics of judgmental persons, namely, a tendency to excessive standing, excessive epitomization, and relational qualification. As an upshot, we receive another reason to adopt an attention model of the second-order virtues and vices.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2010

People often sincerely assert or judge one thing (for example, that all the races are intellectually equal) while at the same time being disposed to act in a way evidently quite contrary to the espoused attitude (for example, in a way that seems to suggest an implicit assumption of the intellectual superiority of their own race). Such cases should be regarded as "in-between" cases of believing, in which it's neither quite right to ascribe the belief in question nor quite right to say that the person lacks the belief. The simplifications and assumptions inherent in belief ascription break down. Views of belief on which sincere avowal of a proposition is sufficient for believing it invite us to a noxiously comfortable view of ourselves, according to which once we have our avowals right we have right the cognitive condition, belief, which philosophers regard as central to philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of action.

A few decades ago, Nobel Prize winner H. A. Simon started to build the concept of bounded rationality. There is still not a comprehensive theory of this concept in a way to be possible for us to give it a precise definition, but in general words it can be understood as the idea that decision makers have to work under three unavoidable constraints: (1) not all information related to the scenario is available; (2) even if all of the information was available, our mind wouldn't be capable of evaluating it (it still isn't when it asses only part of it); (3) the time to make a decision is limited. For this reason, individuals are limited to make only satisficing choices rather than optimizing ones 1 . Bounded rationality is, then, a new way to look at how people make decisions. It moved from the fully rational model that economists previously had towards a model that fits better into human psychology and the way that our mind processes the decision-making situations, also considering outside factors 2 .

Philosophical Investigations, 2017

An other-directed moral judgement is contrasted with a moral evaluation of one's own behavior; it is argued that having a capacity to make self-directed moral judgments is at the core of being within morality, while a lack of disposition on the part of a mature individual to judge others is indicative of the corresponding lack with regard to the self-directed evaluations. Our readiness to evaluate the behaviour of others measures the level of our commitment to a system of morality. Consistent nonjudgementalism subverts the interpersonal nature of moral values and points to a deeper issue – an unwillingness of a nonjudgementalist to apply moral categories to her own choices.

dialectica, 2011

In this paper I argue on two fronts. First, I press for the view that judging is a type of mental action, as opposed to those who think that judging is involuntary and hence not an action. Second, I argue that judging is specifically a type of non-voluntary mental action. My account of the non-voluntary nature of the mental act of judging differs, however, from standard non-voluntarist views, according to which 'non-voluntary' just means regulated by epistemic reasons. In addition, judging is non-voluntary, I contend, because it is partially constituted by the exercise of a non-reason-governed skill. This skill, which I call 'critical pop-out', consists of an unreflective, often unconscious, ability to detect the kind of situations in which the reflective abilities that also partially constitute our acts of judging should be deployed. We are responsible for our judgments, I conclude, because in identifying such reflection-inviting situations, we reveal the kind of epistemic agents we are. †

Taking cue from L. Horn's masterpiece on "the history of negation" I argue some attempt of resolution about such a paradox.

An Exploration of the Different Meanings of "Judgement" in Theological Discourse, with particular reference to the illicit use of "non-judgmentalism" made by the ecumenists.

Semantic relativists hold that disagreements of taste are " faultless disagreements " , i.e. the speakers are expressing contradictory contents while neither of them is at fault. This paper argues that we should distinguish between subjec-tivist and objectivist uses of predicates of taste and only the former fits the pattern of faultless disagreements. Objectivist uses are made on the basis of an objectivist " folk " theory of taste which holds that there is an objective truth of the matter and hence, only one of the disagreeing parties can be right. Moreover, they constitute the majority of uses and hence the semantic theory should primarily be concerned with them. The problem is that objectivism as a metaphysical theory of taste is quite plausibly false. I argue that if one accepts the so-called " principle of semantic competence " (Stojanovic, 2007) as the recent theorists systematically do, the semantics of predicates of taste should be objectivist (i.e. non-judge-dependent). Objectivist semantics coupled with the falsity of metaphysical objectivism about taste leads to an error theory of taste discourses.

2020

In this chapter I reconstruct Dewey's conception of judgment as situated in a larger process of inquiry that is permeated by both aesthetic-qualitative and reflective experience. I discuss the conception of judgment in connection with Dewey's notion of experience and his method of inquiry. I show that Dewey thought of judgments as emerging from a conception of inquiry that integrates both aesthetic and epistemic conditions of experience, and that he should have thought of judgments as being oriented towards "getting it right" (despite his own reservations in that regard). I do that by explicating how the notions of judgment and inquiry relate to his conceptions of experience, warranted assertibility and truth. I will present the pattern of inquiry with a clear focus on the statement that judgments are the temporary end products of an investigative process that has a transformative and expressive character starting from an undetermined and problematic situation on the basis of a holistic concept of experience. I will use Dewey's own juridical metaphor to conceptualize the process of inquiry in terms of a trial by jury, and the resulting judgment as a verdict. It is here in this chapter that it will become clear how Dewey thought of judgments as being a special form of human action: namely an intelligent, controlled form of inferential action. Forming judgments as the outcome of inquiry-processes is thus the result of a specific epistemic form of activity, namely judging. Keywords Theory of judgment • John Dewey • Epistemology • Inquiry • Experience 1 Recent publications have argued that there exist strong intersections between classical British Conservative thought and classical American Pragmatist philosophy (e.g. Lacey 2016; Vannatta 2014). While some elements of Dewey's philosophy (primarily his conceptions of "habit" and "custom") acknowledge the historical situatedness of human agents, his philosophical outlook can hardly be described as sharing a conservative methodology with classical British Conservative thought, as his theory of inquiry and judgment is underpinned by a progressive ideal of democratic association that defies any conservative bonds.

The Philosophical Forum 44(4): 395-412., 2013