Misrepresenting Judgement — And A False Dichotomy

Martin & Rose (2007: 32):

Judging people's character 

As with affect, judgements of people’s character can be positive or negative, and they may be judged explicitly or implicitly. But unlike affect, we find that judgements differ between personal judgements of admiration or criticism and moral judgements of praise or condemnation.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misrepresents the appraisal system of judgement by reducing its scope, since judgement is not simply limited to assessments of people's character, as explained here:

The attitudinal sub-system of JUDGEMENT encompasses meanings which serve to evaluate human behaviour positively and negatively by reference to a set of institutionalised norms. Thus JUDGEMENT is involved when the speaker provides an assessment of some human participant with reference to that participant's acts or dispositions … The social norms at risk with these JUDGEMENT assessments take the form of rules and regulations or of less precisely defined social expectations and systems of value. Thus, under JUDGEMENT we may assess behaviour as moral or immoral, as legal or illegal, as socially acceptable or unacceptable, as laudable or deplorable, as normal or abnormal and so on.

[2] The opposition of 'personal' vs 'moral' is a false dichotomy, since the alternatives are not mutually exclusive.  A judgement that is not 'personal' is not necessarily 'moral', and a judgement that is not 'moral' is not necessarily 'personal'.  This is very poor theorising.