Why Foundations …? Evaluation as Civil Commitment

This contribution introduces some of the theoretical, methodological and operational issues that value judgement science faces in the climate of the radical anthropological, social, political and economic changes due to the progressive accentuation and spread of the humanitarian, climate and energy crises. These issues prompt the science of value judgement to further reflections on the meaning of the content and on the validity of the evaluative statements, hence on their referents and their representation in value measures consistent with the prospect of sharing the planet’s resources and peoples’ destinies. The proposed considerations invite us to go back and reflect on the foundations of Appraisal, which stands out for its original reference to distributive justice, on which it bases its essential civil commitment. The main aspects of a reflection on the fundamentals are: the conditions of truth of the judgement; the elements of authenticity of its contents; the originally normative nature of the valuation; its implicit prospective dimension; the relationship between subject’s agency and social mechanisms’ impersonality through which the references of the valuations—market prices and preference orders—are identified as the more or less relevant terms of the value judgement.