In an influential article, Simon C. May forcefully argued that, properly understood, there can never be principled reasons for moral compromise. While there may be pragmatic reasons for compromising that involve, for instance, concern for political expediency or for stability, there are properly speaking no principled reasons to compromise. My aim in the article is to show how principled moral compromise in the context of moral disagreements over policy options is possible. I argue that when we disagree, principled reasons favoring (...) compromises or compromising can assume a more significant part of what makes a position all things considered best, and in this way disagreement can ground moral compromise. (shrink)

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The wide reflective equilibrium (WRE) is considered the most important method of ethical justification and is intensively discussed in the scientific community. However, it is unclear to what extent it is actually applied in the ethical literature. The objective of this paper is to fill this gap by providing a critical overview of its explicit applications. Explicit application refers to studies that, following Daniels’ definition, contain three levels, name their elements, and provide a connection between the levels. Philosophers Index, ProQuest, (...) PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus were searched for studies that explicitly used the WRE method and were written in German or English. All topics, disciplines, and publication forms were considered. Nineteen studies were found in which the WRE was applied 23 times. In the 23 applications, 50 equilibria were discussed, and 19 times it was reported that an equilibrium state was reached. The authors applied the WRE in various disciplines, for different purposes, and to diverse topics. The applications themselves differed considerably regarding the application procedure and the scope. Differences can be seen in particular with regard to the presentation of the adjustment process and the WRE criteria used. The results indicate that the WRE can be successfully applied, but the number of explicit applications is still very low. Further research is needed to develop the WRE into an established method of justification. In particular, standards are needed for adjustment and for WRE criteria. (shrink)

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Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and fundamental. It is actualist in that it (...) fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification. (shrink)

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Recent scholarly attention to ‘legitimate expectations’ and their role in legal transitions has yielded widely varying principles for distinguishing between legitimate and non-legitimate expectations. This article suggests that methodological reflection may facilitate substantive progress in the debate. Specifically, it proposes and defends the use of a wide reflective equilibrium methodology for constructing, justifying and critiquing theories of legitimate expectations and other kinds of normative theories about legal transitions. The methodology involves three levels of analysis — normative principles, their theoretical antecedents, (...) and considered judgements about their implications in specific cases — and iteration between these three levels in an effort to ensure coherence. The payoffs from applying this methodology to the legitimate expectations debate are illustrated through a discussion of examples from the existing literature. Some proposed innovations to the methodology, including the incorporation of insights from the ideal/non-ideal theory debate, are likely to be of wider interest to political theorists. (shrink)

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It has been alleged against divine command theory that we cannot justify our acceptance of it without giving it up. For if we provide moral reasons for our acceptance of God’s commands, then those reasons, and not God’s commands, must be our ultimate moral standard. Kai Nielsen has offered the most forceful version of this objection in his book, Ethics Without God. My principal aim is to show that Nielsen’s charge does not succeed. His argument crucially relies upon the assumption (...) that the moral judgments one employs to justify acceptance of a normative theory are more fundamental to one’s moral outlook than the theory itself. I argue that this assumption presupposes a questionable foundationalist view of theory justification, and if we instead adopt a coherentist reflective equilibrium stance, we can thoughtfully evaluate DCT without abandoning it. (shrink)

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