Is Rawls' version of "Reflective Equilibrium" a defensible method of theorizing about social justice?

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When John Rawls publishes his Theory of Justice in 1971, he was the first to use the expression "reflective equilibrium" (RE). Even if this kind of idea had been employed before by Nelson Goodman (Goodman, 1955), Rawls employs it as his method, to build a complete theory of justice and sort out this concept which is now highly debated. We will not dwell on the complete definition of reflective equilibrium, but it is worth keeping in mind the definition given by Rawls himself: "It is equilibrium, because at last our principles and [considered] judgment coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of their derivation" (Rawls, 1971). We won't dwell on the problem of the wide and narrow equilibrium either, and chose instead to follow Norman Daniels who considers essentially the wide reflective equilibrium (Daniels, 1996, chap 1). We will weigh how RE is a general and important question, by trying to involve both an inductive and deductive approach as a method to build a theory in social justice, which is a particular subject of philosophy.

Extraits

[...] Let us just accept some totalitarian features as widely accepted by the philosophy now. [...]

[...] If we look at the definition of the RE, we can see that this method actually involves the “considered judgements” of human beings, or what we could call the “opinion”. Moreover, before finding the solution to a problematic, according to the RE we must always back and forth” (Rawls p.20) between these judgements and the principles. Thus, this method seems to have the main characteristics we mentioned before. Moreover, on two particular points, the RE both responds to our criteria and can create the conditions to think the social justice. First, as we said, the RE takes into consideration every person concerned by the process in their own subjectivity. [...]

[...] Is Rawls' version of ‘Reflective Equilibrium' a defensible method of theorizing about social justice? When John Rawls publishes his Theory of Justice in 1971, he is the first to use the expression “reflective equilibrium” (RE). Indeed, even if this kind of idea had been employed before by Nelson Goodman (Goodman, 1955), Rawls employs it as his method to build a complete theory of the justice and sort out this concept which is now subject to many debates. We won't come back on the complete definition of the reflective equilibrium, but we can remember the definition given by Rawls himself: is an equilibrium because at last our principles and [considered] judgement coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our judgements conform and the premises of their derivation” (Rawls, 1971). [...]

[...] So, if the question of how to construct a theory of social justice is a political process let us examine what it implies. One of the most famous recent philosophers about politics is certainly Hannah Arendt. Our point will be to show why we consider that there is no truth in politics, and our work can help us. Indeed, in her essay “Truth and politics” (Arendt, 1993), she aims at showing how the political scene is (or should be) an arena where agents confront their opinion, and not a place where a certain conception of what the decision should be must be imposed. [...]

[...] In other words, how can the RE answer the problem of constructing a moral theory applying to a human society? For this purpose, we will try here to show how we can justify the RE, the logic that can lead to its use. We are conscious that this way of proceeding can forget some problems that a critical approach would have pointed out more, but we aim here at finding a way to justify a theory of social justice. We will start by studying the particularity of ethics and especially justice as a political process, to define some characteristics necessary to build a theory in this area. [...]