The three basic ethical principles in the Belmont Report: 1) Respect for Persons, 2) Beneficence, and 3) Justice provide general judgments to justify and guide research involving human subjects.
Do respondents struggle to provide a judgment, or do they struggle to justify their judgment?
It might be objected, for example, that possessing a given concept simply requires being able to make de facto justified judgments involving that concept rather than being able to justify judgments involving that concept.
Now, some might contend that these wimpy resources are still rich enough to justify judgments of moral responsibility, and are, furthermore, readily shown to be compatible with determinism.
Or it might be objected that the ability to justify judgments involving some concept is not necessarily linguistic, since it is possible to identify the justification for a judgment without engaging in communication.
It is important to notice that while Reid uses the term 'evidence,' when describing the role that memory plays in first-personal knowledge of one's own past, memory is not used by persons to justify judgments or beliefs about their own pasts.
The good judge would then be able to justify her judgment by pointing out salient features of what is being judged that others might miss.
He regards this recognition as judgmental or propositional, and that may lead some to push the propositional horn again: we need something further to justify the judgment of fit, and so the regress of justification has not yet come to an end.
While we can meaningfully debate the aesthetic merit of a painting or a flower garden by giving reasons to justify our judgment, it is difficult to imagine an equivalent discussion of my experience of bodily engagement when executing brush ink painting or digging the ground and planting flowers for the flower garden.
Kevin Mulligan (1998) advances a related view: though not direct perceptions of value, emotions can be said to justify axiological judgments.
