We are all familiar with the notion of a moral judgment. In the vocabulary of ethical debate, this term is so common as to be a cliché. While we have different theories about how we make such judgments, it would seem distinctly odd to observe that “judgment” is a term transferred from another semantic domain and to attempt to sort out its meaning by scrutinizing its source or to impugn the clarity or usefulness of the term on the grounds that it began its conceptual career as a mere metaphor. Whatever origins the term may have had, they now seem irrelevant.

But is this really so? I want to argue that moral judgment has not always been taken as a bland general synonym for moral decisions and that it need not be; to see that, we can consider uses of the terminology of moral judgment in which the original semantic sphere for such language (the judicial sphere) is still relevant to understanding how it is used. One such use comes from the Stoic Seneca, and I argue that he did take the notion of moral judgment as a live metaphor, one that he used to develop his own distinctive Stoic views on moral thinking.

That the particular language we use in talking about moral decision and moral assessment should matter is not surprising. Even for us, this is not the only way to talk about such matters; we also invoke the notions of deduction, calculation, and analysis, for example.