Reflective Equilibrium: Epistemological or Political?

Abstract

One of the reasons for ongoing interest in the work of political philosopher John Rawls is that he developed novel methods for thinking systematically about the nature of justice. This paper examines the moral and epistemological motivations for Rawls’s method of “reflective equilibrium,” and the tension between them in Kai Nielsen’s use of “wide reflective equilibrium” in the service of critical and emancipatory social theory.