Wither Reflective Equilibrium

Some thoughts on Richard Posner's hastily sketched moral skepticism and Jon Mandle's reply centered on Rawlsian reflective equilibrium will be placed below the fold as meta-ethics is no longer really an area I work on.

I think that a more fleshed-out version of Posner's views (such as that provided in The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory) can be made compatible with most of the insights of reflective equilibrium theory. The remaining issues regard the status of reflective equilibrium and its utility, rather than the validity of the basic account.

First to status. We face the world with a jumbled-up set of moral beliefs -- some strongly held views, some fairly vague principles, some issues we haven't thought about, and some questions where we have mixed feelings. From time to time, almost all of us are faced with a situation where we would like to come to some reasonably sharp conclusion about a moral issue we may not have strong antecedent convictions about. Rawls' reflective equilibrium puts itself forward as a good way of trying to reach conclusions in these cases. We start by looking at our strongly held convictions, and asking which of our somewhat vague principles seem relevant to them. Then we ask if it isn't possible to come up with sharper formulations of these principles, such that the sharp formulation still support our strongly held convictions. Reflection may prove that this is impossible, but that a given formulation supports most of what we deeply believe in, and supports something close to our other settled convictions. Once you have some sharp principles in hand, you can try to apply them to novel cases and to reach conclusions.

Importantly, nothing about the viability of this procedure really tells us anything one way or the other about moral skepticism. All it requires is that we not be skeptics about the possibility of doing inferences from broad principles to narrower conclusions. Rawls at times writes as if reflective equilibrium is supposed to be a defense of moral realism (in some sense) and certainly one could try and make this argument work. But you don't need to. You could take the root intuitions as having no special validity, and the procedure just as a way of crafting something more workable out of these root intuitions. You might think that the process is ill-motivated without a belief in objective moral rightness of some sort, but I think a reply is available. It just happens to be the case that (many) people are (often) bothered by the vagueness or apparent inconsistency of their beliefs and are therefore motivated to develop something more systematic. Hence, reflective equilibrium.

That's not an argument for moral skepticism, but it is an argument that reflective equilibrium is not something that, as such, leads us to any robust meta-ethical conclusions. Rawls comes close to this view -- call it meta-ethical agnosticism -- in Political Liberalism and it's implicit in some passages of Theory, though its converse is also implicit in some other passages. The ambiguity is well captured by the title of Rawls' first paper "Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics." On one level, this seems to be promising us a discovery procedure for moral truth. On another level, it's simply observing that people want to make up their minds, and that we're getting a procedure through which decisions might be made in the face of perplexment which persists irrespective of our meta-ethical views.

On to the utility of reflective equilibrium. Posner's main point is that this method is of limited usefullness in the face of moral disagreement. The only way two parties to a dispute are going to use reflective equilibirum such that one person can convince the other one (or that the two will agree on a third procedure) is if they already agree about a great deal. Unless there's an awful lot of overlap about core commitments and vague principles, the sort of reasoning Rawls advocates won't get you anywhere. Faced with serious disagreement about deep matters, you have basically two option -- you can fight, or you can bargain. Fighting, though sometimes necessary, is generally undesirable. Often, two parties can reach an agreement centered around some set of rules such that they both prefer following the rules rather than fighting. This, however, is negotiation, not genuine moral agreement. Posner takes all this to be a major flaw in Rawls' approach. It's not clear, however, that this is right. Reflective equilibrium is put forward primarily as a way for a person to argue with himself and reach decisions, not as a way for different people to reach consensus. Since I'm naturally enough going to agree with myself about most things -- even if I'm "of two minds" as the saying goes about others -- reflective equilibrium works well enough.

Posner, as a judge, is naturally geared to circumstances where people disagree. This is just a somewhat different orientation. One of the observations he makes in his aforementioned book -- and it's an observation I agree with -- is that in many cases you can reach policy agreement without achieving moral agreement. This is because moral disagreements are often pre-empted by facts from social or natural science. Famously, courses in normative ethics or political theory involve a lot of "stylized facts," where you stipulate this or that to motivate a purely moral dilemma. In the real world, this tends not to happen. You rarely get clear-cut, zero-sum tradeoffs between economic efficiency and the well-being of the poor. Ill-motivated wars of conquest are not pragmatically advisable, making ethical considerations somewhat obscure. A question like, "suppose you had to choose between pressing a button that wiped out the entire population of Africa, and a button that led everyone to survive, but dropped the world's median income to the current level observed in Africa" is an interesting one, but these issues do not, in practice, happen.

Hence, pragmatism has, as it were, a pragmatic justifcation. This remains the case whether or not (some) people find questions of moral truth interesting and worth debating.