John Rawls · Philosophy

Reflective Equilibrium: Justifying Principles Without Foundations

Rawls’s method for doing moral philosophy: instead of deducing justice from self-evident first principles, we work back and forth between our considered moral judgments and the principles meant to explain them, adjusting each in the light of the other until they cohere - a justification that rests on fit, not on foundations.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that reflective equilibrium is Rawls’s method of justification: we test proposed principles against our considered judgments and our considered judgments against the principles, revising back and forth until the two cohere. Explain how this coherentist method differs from deducing morality from found…

Leads to David Hume.

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