Reflective Reflective equilibrium. A method for justifying moral knowledge from practice.

In this paper, I attempt to show that practical philosophy offers us at least one fundamental tool to defend the use of moral knowledge as a practical guide in decision-making situations. In particular, I will argue that the method known as “reflective equilibrium” is appropriate for justifying moral knowledge that can guide our decisions—both personal and collective—within the pluralistic and democratic contexts in which we live. The main idea of this method is that having moral knowledge means having a method to determine the morally right course of action in conflictive situations.

To do this, I will divide the paper into the following sections. The next section will be devoted to addressing the skeptical doubt regarding moral knowledge and to reconstructing a classical picture of how we conceive its justification. I will attempt to show, however, that this picture is not adequate for the pluralistic and democratic contexts in which we live. In the third section, I will reconstruct the method of “reflective equilibrium” and show its usefulness in justifying moral knowledge both on a personal level and on an intersubjective level that takes into account pluralistic and democratic contexts. Finally, in the last section, I will respond to a brief but powerful objection and highlight the main advantage of this methodological proposal.

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