But is what is essentially a public vote rather than peer-judgment necessarily a bad thing?
If moral judgments necessarily motivate, even in the absence of further desires, the theory seems to entail that they cannot be genuine beliefs.
In light of this distinction, it may seem that to reject premise (3) for the reasons given is to suppose that moral judgments necessarily have both directions of fit simultaneously.
If the strongest version of transcendental idealism is correct, then to every true empirical judgment there necessarily corresponds an actual empirical fact, and conversely, and also to every true a priori judgment there necessarily corresponds some objectively real conceptually-represented or intuitionally-represented structure across a complete set of logically or experientially possible worlds.
The trouble arises, I think, from the current confusion over the whole idea of "moral judgment" as necessarily involving red robes, wigs and hypocrisy.
None of these errors of judgment were necessarily an argument against going to war if you believed, as I do, that overthrowing Mr. Hussein was in the best interests of the Iraqi people.
And it reflected a common belief in presidential politics: That many viewers base their judgment not necessarily on debate performance but on what they read and see in the days afterward.
This is the opposite of obsessional thought, which, as Freud puts it, endlessly returns to "those subjects upon which all mankind is uncertain and upon which our knowledge and judgment must necessarily remain open to doubt" – a form of thought which can't bear human ambivalence.
But he then goes on to point out that judgments too involve abstractions, since the subject matter of any judgment is necessarily detached from its background (as, for example, 'Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon' detaches the river from its location and the general from his army) and this process inevitably misrepresents the way things really are.
12 This intuition is therefore conceptually separate from clinical impression a mode of clinical assessment requiring a holistic judgment but necessarily explicable in terms of defined symptoms and signs.
