1 - Introduction: Reflective equlibrium in theory and practice

Summary

The title proclaims that the essays in this volume are all either about justice or about the justification of beliefs about justice. That is enough unity to warrant collecting them together in this way, at least if there is merit enough to the individual essays. My task in this introduction, however, is to persuade the reader that there is more than this titular unity to this collection of essays and that the whole is something more than the sum of its parts. This may take some persuasion. These essays, mostly previously published, were written over an eighteen-year period, and, with the exception of the two newest ones, they were never intended to be part of this volume. Nevertheless, the themes that link them, and not just their overlapping subject matter, led me to assemble them in this way. Although they do not form a systematic study of those themes, lacking the sustained, exhaustive argument of a monograph, together they suggest an understanding that separately they cannot convey.

The central idea behind this collection is that the broadly coherentist view or “method” of justification that Rawls (1974) calls “wide reflective equilibrium” not only offers a promising account of the justification of ethical theories but also gives us guidance about philosophical method in practical ethics. All of us are familiar with the process of working back and forth between our moral judgments about particular situations and our effort to provide general reasons and principles that link those judgments to ones that are relevantly similar.