Aesthetic relativists argue that beauty is not inherent to objects, but rather an outcome of comparison. According to relativists, a portrait might be judged beautiful compared to the person it is modeled on, or to another comparable portrait, but might not be judged as beautiful in a vacuum. Thus, to adherents of this philosophy, beauty is essentially a matter of individual judgment, as it arises as a product of evaluating one piece of artwork to another. Without a mind that actively compares things, there can be no beauty or ugliness, and thus beauty truly is "in the eye of the beholder" (according to relativists).
Kant and his followers discuss individual judgment extensively. Taste is an issue of primary importance to Kant, who argues that taste is essentially subjective. However, Kant's idea of subjectivity is a little more refined than the popular view of it. According to Kant, a subjective judgment is based on pleasure and displeasure, both of which are real phenomena. For Kant, aesthetic judgments are individual in the sense that they are given to individual consciousness and not fundamentally alterable by rational argument.
Hermeneutic philosophers, such as Gadamer and Ricoeur, discuss individual judgment extensively. However, their concept of individual judgment is very different from that of Kant. According to the philosophical hermeneuticians, truth arises out of a historically conditioned "horizon of understanding," out of the historical situation that a person grew up in. Gadamer, for example, maintains that while final judgment is individual, it is conditioned by larger historical and social forces, and thus is conditioned by things larger than the individual. This view of judgment could be characterized as partially individual, partially collective.
Individual judgment has occasionally been discussed outside of aesthetic philosophy. The analytic philosophers of the early 20th century argued that all morality was based on individual judgment, in the sense that it was arbitrary or non-philosophical. The American pragmatist philosophers were also somewhat interested in the question of judgment, as it figured heavily into the pragmatist theory of truth. The pragmatist theory maintains that truth, with respect to a statement, is the property of being helpful or instructive. This theory implies that truths, whether or not they can be described as objective, are relative to priorities, which are products of judgment.