On There Being Wide Reflective Equilibria: Why it is Important to Put it in the Plural

• Main Author: Kai Nielsen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Windsor 2008-10-01
• Series: Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice
• Online Access: https://wyaj.uwindsor.ca/index.php/wyaj/article/view/4544

Wide reflective equilibrium [WRE] is a distinctive coherentist method of justification or explanation or both, depending on the domain or purpose for which it is deployed. I deploy it principally as a method of justification for accounts of morality and normative political and social theory. But it is also used in many domains from the philosophy of mathematics and science to ethics and aesthetics. When deployed in domains as I deploy it for here, WRE starts with a cluster of societies’ specific considered judgments and uncontroversial empirical beliefs and theories and seeks to forge them into a coherent whole along with other considered judgments at all levels of generality. I use it here principally for a justification of political liberalism where it can and should be used for an internal justification, as John Rawls uses it, and as an external justification as Richard Rorty uses it. I use it for both. While these two modes of justification are distinct, they are compatible and importantly so. And for a more complete justification, both are required.