Reflective equilibrium
from 1971 Named by Rawls; the procedure is Goodman's from 1955
Move back and forth between your principles and your judgements about cases, adjusting each to the other, until the two stop pulling apart.
- Active
- from 1971
- Where
- Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Analytic tools
What it is
Reflective equilibrium abandons the idea that either principles or particular judgements come first. Neither is foundational. When a principle conflicts with a considered judgement about a case, either may give way, and the work is deciding which.
The end state is not agreement with anything external. It is coherence: a set of principles and judgements that fit each other and that you are prepared to hold together after reflection.
How it works
Collect your considered judgements about particular cases, setting aside those made in haste or self-interest. Formulate principles that would produce them. Where a principle produces a judgement you cannot accept, decide whether to revise the principle or the judgement. Iterate until it settles.
In the wide version you also test the resulting set against rival theories and background knowledge, which is what stops the narrow version from merely tidying up your prejudices.
The moves, in order
- Collect considered judgements about particular cases
- Formulate principles that would generate them
- Find the conflicts between principles and judgements
- Revise whichever has less claim on you, case by case
- Repeat until principles and judgements no longer pull apart
The procedure
Proposition The penalty schedule should not step at fixed speeds.
- The proposed principle is that penalties rise with the amount over the limit, in fixed bands.
- A considered judgement: 25 km/h over the limit outside a primary school at three in the afternoon is worse than 25 over on an empty highway at midnight. The panel is not willing to give this up.
- The principle as stated produces the same penalty for both, so principle and judgement conflict.
- The panel could give up the judgement, but on reflection it will not, because the whole purpose of the schedule is harm reduction and the two cases differ in expected harm by an order of magnitude.
- So the principle is revised: penalties rise with the amount over the limit and with the risk of the setting, which now generates both the original judgements and this one.
Therefore The schedule bands on speed and on setting together, and every case the panel felt strongly about now falls out of the principle rather than being an exception to it.
Note that the principle gave way, not the judgement. Either could have. What makes it this method rather than either of its alternatives is that the direction was decided case by case and not fixed in advance.
What it is good for
Ethics, political philosophy and any practical rule-making where there is no external standard to check against and both principles and intuitions have some claim. It is the standard method in contemporary moral philosophy.
Where it fails
It can systematise a prejudice as easily as a truth. Nothing in the procedure reaches outside the set of beliefs you brought to it, so a coherent and thoroughly objectionable position is a possible resting point — and has been, historically. Rawls added the wide version to answer this, and it helps without settling it.
It also has no unique solution. Different starting judgements reach different equilibria, all internally coherent, and the method gives no way to choose between them. That is the standard objection and it has not been answered.
Common misconceptions
That it means splitting the difference. It is not compromise; at each conflict one side gives way entirely, and which side does is the whole content of the deliberation.
Where it came from
Nelson Goodman describes the procedure in 1955 for the justification of rules of inference, arguing that we adjust rules and inferences to each other. Rawls names it and applies it to justice in A Theory of Justice in 1971.
What became of it
The default method in analytic ethics and political philosophy, and increasingly used to describe how any body of rules actually gets built.
Lasting influence
A Theory of Justice is its most famous product. So is much of the way modern law reform commissions actually work.
Why it still matters
The most-used method in contemporary moral philosophy.
Put another way
Truing a wheel. You tighten one spoke, the rim moves, and you go round again.
Texts
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Sections 4 and 9 set out the method. The rest of the book is the largest worked example anyone has produced.
Where to start
Goodman's few pages in Fact, Fiction and Forecast state it more sharply and in a quarter of the space.
The surprising bit
Goodman devised it to explain the justification of deductive logic itself, arguing that rules of inference and accepted inferences are adjusted to each other — which makes even logic a matter of equilibrium rather than foundation.
In their own words
A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend
Who held it
Norman Daniels
Connections
- Relies on
- The method of cases
- Set against
- Apodeixis
- Parallel to
- Endoxa
The verdict
The most honest available method where nothing external can adjudicate, and it cannot tell a well-organised conviction from a well-organised prejudice.