Abstract

This project attempts to isolate the methodology employed in modern moral philosophy. In particular, it seeks to make sense of the seemingly paradoxical attitudes assumed by contemporary ethicists with regard to the role of prereflective moral intuitions. What we want is an approach capable of reconciling the widespread practice of invoking a moral theory's ability to account for our prereflective convictions as a criterion of its adequacy with the equally prevalent expectation that such theories serve to correct and reform our untutored moral opinions. I argue that, given its characteristic sanctioning of mutual adjustments between raw and theorized beliefs, a version of wide reflective equilibrium makes an ideal candidate for this task. One of the more significant aspects of reflective equilibrium for my purposes is the great variety of intuitions, ranging from very specific judgments about particular persons or situation to what Rawls calls "formal and abstract conditions on moral conceptions." Because it subjects even these very general convictions to the same sort of balancing process that normative moral beliefs go through, the method of wide reflective equilibrium remains substantively neutral between these various higher-order intuitions. This feature of the model allows us to elude the popular charge that reflective equilibrium is simply a revamped version of "bad old" intuitionism. More significantly, however, it enables reflective equilibrium to function as a model for doing metaethics as well as normative ethics. For here, too, ethicists tend to treat intuitions--in this case, our commonsense views about the nature of morality--as both constrainers and constrainees of theory. A liberal reading of reflective equilibrium, which takes the neutrality thesis seriously, explains how metaethical insights can, within the same agenda, be subject to extensive revision, yet still be the stuff that metaethical theory is made of. Moreover, if one accepts the further hypothesis that normative and metaethical beliefs are contiguous, then reflective equilibrium not only provides us with a method for use in both metaethical and normative inquiry, but also unifies in the two realms, solidifying its claim to the title of "the" method of ethics