[2] In its positive sense, a recommendation to make a value judgment is an admonition to consider carefully, to avoid whim and impetuousness, and search for consonance with one's deeper convictions, and to search for an objective, verifiable, public, and consensual set of evidence for the opinion.
The object itself is considered value-neutral when it is neither good nor bad, neither useful nor useless, neither significant nor trite until placed in some social context.
Hardy indicates how he places the "value-neutral" subject of mathematics into a particular social context: "A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life".
[6] An item may have value and be value-neutral regardless of social context if its utility or importance is more-or-less self-evident, for example, oxygen supports life in all societies.
[8] As an example, scientific "truths" are considered objective but are held tentatively, with the understanding that more careful evidence and/or wider experience might change matters.
However, as noted in the first segment of this article, in common usage the term value judgment has a much simpler meaning with context simply implied, not specified.