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Valerie Tiberius Department of Philosophy University of Minnesota January 29, 2010 Friday, 3:30pm-5:30pm Wardlaw College, Room 126 Reflective equilibrium has been the default method for philosophers working in ethics for decades. The method is coherentist; it seeks to reach an equilibrium among our considered judgments (intuitions) and principles. But reflective equilibrium is not without problems. Concerns about the possibility of coherent but erroneous systems of moral judgments were raised early on. Recently, the concern that our intuitions are unreliable, unstable, and subject to manipulation has taken center stage. It has been suggested that to solve some of the problems for RE, we ought to seek a wide reflective equilibrium, that is, one that includes background theories in the mix. It may be true that paying attention to background theories (including empirical psychological theories) will help meet objections to reflective equilibrium, but as of yet little work has been done to show just how a truly wide reflective equilibrium (WRE) would work. The aim of this paper is to articulate a specific version of wide reflective equilibrium using the virtue of practical wisdom as a case study. In explicating this method, we (my co-author Jason Swartwood and I) aim to show that WRE is not just the method we're stuck with because we don't have anything better in normative theory. Instead, WRE (or at least a suitably precise version of it) has a positive advantage, namely, that it helps to capture the normativity of ethical notions such as wisdom. This is so because, as we will argue, our method connects the philosophical analysis of wisdom to norms and ideals that people already care about. |
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