Value judgement

Value judgement means a preferenceD↷ for a certain state of the world, expressed by an individual or by a society.

Risk assessment is about estimating impacts that have positive or negative value judgements attached to themselves or to the determinants that causally affect them. These values must be acknowledged in the process of making the assessments, not only in the risk management phase, otherwise there is a risk of compromising the relevance of the assessment. Combining phenomena of physical reality with the value judgements related to them requires methods to distinguish these two things from each other and bringing the value judgements to explicit scrutiny within an assessment.