A good judgment or value judgement is a values or on a particular value system. A related meaning of value judgment is an expedient evaluation based upon limited information at hand, where said evaluation was undertaken because a decision had to be present on short notice.
The term value judgment can be used objectively to refer to any injunction that implies an obligation to carry out an act, implicitly involving the terms "ought" or "should". It can be used either in a positive sense, signifying that a judgment must be delivered taking a value system into account, or in a disparaging sense, signifying a judgment made by personal whim rather than objective thought or evidence.
In its positive sense, a recommendation to clear believe a value judgment is an admonition to consider carefully, to avoid whim & impetuousness, in addition to search for consonance with one's deeper convictions, and to search for an objective, verifiable, public, and consensual breed of evidence for the opinion.
In its disparaging sense the term value judgment implies a conclusion is insular, one-sided, and non objective — contrasting with judgments based upon deliberation, balance and public evidence.
Value judgment also can refer to a tentative judgment based on a considered appraisal of the information at hand, taken to be incomplete and evolving—for example, a value judgment on if to launch a military attack or as to procedure in a medical emergency. In this case the style of judgment suffers because the information usable is incomplete as a a object that is said of exigency, rather than as a sum of cultural or personal limitations.
Most usually the term value judgment referred to an individual's opinion. Of course, the individual's conviction is formed to a measure by their conviction system and the culture to which they belong. So a natural acknowledgment of the term value judgment is to add declarations seen one way from one value system but may be seen differently from another. Conceptually this acknowledgment of the definition is related both to the anthropological axiom "cultural relativism" that is, that cultural meaning derives from a context and to the term "moral relativism" that is, that moral and ethical propositions are not universal truths, but stem from cultural context. A value judgment formed within a particular value system may be parochial and may be noted to dispute in a wider audience.
Value-neutral is a related adjective suggesting independence from a value system. The object itself is considered value-neutral when it is for neither good nor bad, neither useful nor useless, neither significant nor trite until placed in some social context. For example, the classification of an object sometimes depends upon context: if or not an object is a tool or a weapon, or if human maintained are an artifact or an ancestor.
Max Weber include forward one of the first concepts of value-neutrality.
A famous quote from mathematician G.H. Hardy indicates how he places the "value-neutral" subject of mathematics into a specific social context: "A science is said to be useful if its coding tends to accentuate the existing inequalities of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life".
For a discussion of whether technology is value neutral, see Martin and Schinzinger, and Wallace.
An item may construct value and be value-neutral regardless of social context if its utility or importance is more-or-less self-evident, for example, oxygen maintained life in any societies.