ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that practical judgment is crucially dependent upon perception and even might be said to be identical with it. Aristotle recognizes better and worse actions, good and bad judgments. There is more to be said about the development of judgment, but it should be clear that practical judgment in an Aristotelian world is quite different from judgment in the Kantian or utilitarian sense. Pragmatic Aristotelian virtue ethics, by contrast, requires that we impute degrees of goodness to choices and action. In fact, practical judgment evaluates the extent to which an act will be brought to completion and in conformity to reality. For pragmatic virtue ethicists, judgment is not merely an intellectual exercise of subsuming a particular under a rule or hypernorm. Judgment is an activity of perceiving being while simultaneously perfecting the capacity to judge actions and choices and to conceive and perceive being.
