Kant defined an aesthetic, in contrast to a logical, judgment as "a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective".
Beauty in modern thought is tied to a notion of "correct" aesthetic judgment whose founding text, Kant's Critique of Judgment, argued that the only true taste is one that is unaffected by the pressures of real life and hence free to recognise the beautiful.
According to Kant, this is the task of reflecting judgment, whose a priori principle is to regard nature as purposive or teleological, "but only as a regulative principle of the faculty of cognition" (5:197).
Frege says that "the apodictic judgment [i.e., roughly, the judgment whose content begins with a "necessarily" governing the rest of the content] is distinguished from the assertory in that it suggests the existence of universal judgments from which the proposition can be inferred, while in the case of the assertory one such a suggestion is lacking" (Frege 1879, §4).
Whose leadership, whose judgment, whose values do you want in the White House when that crisis lands like a thud on the Oval Office desk?
Judgments about whose bonds to buy, and the risks of making a loss, would take the bank beyond pure monetary policy into murkier waters best navigated by politicians.
It seems we have entered the age of "thought crime", when the police make judgments on whose views are extreme or radical.
The US, the UK and France are now hostage to their Polish and Baltic states' Nato-allied governments – the maturity and judgment of whose leaders I have no great confidence in.
The voters have sometimes been happy not to get bogged down in the expertise sweepstakes and instead made a judgment about whose character and vision they felt most comfortable with.
So if you are to make an intelligent judgment about whose lever to pull (or chad to punch) in November, you need to be able to tell the difference between principle and prevarication (that's so Romney, yes?).
