Is Reflective Equilibrium Greater Than the Sum of its Parts?

By Scanlon’s lights, in RE, the weight of epistemic access is placed primarily on the considered judgments. I’ve argued that either (a) considered judgments can’t do the work required of them, or (b) human beings may never have considered judgments. But even if none of the three steps that make up Scanlon’s conception of RE can themselves meet MJR, the defender of RE could still argue that when all of the steps are combined together, epistemic access is achieved. In other words, the whole of RE is epistemically greater than the sum of its parts. This alternative is worth briefly considering, even though I don’t think it is one that Scanlon endorses.

It is relatively easy to see how RE as a whole could be in certain respects epistemically superior to any of its parts. For example, suppose that considered

judgments are highly fallible, only correct 51% of the time. If this were the success rate of considered judgments, they would not by themselves be on very good epistemic

standing—surely not enough to themselves be justified. However, even if having a considered judgment alone is not enough to be justified in a particular moral belief, it could turn out that considered judgments provide “justification enough”. What I mean by this is that they may provide enough justification on their own such that the extra epistemic boost from applying the second and third coherence steps of RE may be enough, when coupled with their minimal level of justification, to provide justification full stop. This is because it is reasonable to expect the coherence steps of RE to weed out at least some of the outlier intuitions while systematizing the accurate ones, thus

providing further inferential support for the (foundational) considered judgments.30 This is all right, so far as it goes. But even though it is possible (perhaps even common) for the entirety of a process to be epistemically superior to its parts in certain ways, it is more difficult to see how the entirety of a process could be superior to any of its parts at meeting MJR. Coherence measures alone can in some circumstances improve the epistemic standing of a set of beliefs, but they cannot alone provide us with

epistemic access to mind-independent facts. The mind-independent qualification is important here, for there is one way that the process of RE could as a whole meet MJR without any of its parts doing so. It could do so if the truth-makers for moral claims was

constitutively tied to the results of RE, properly applied. This is, in fact, the metaphysics

of moral facts that some proponents of RE could give, and in such cases, I agree that

30 _{This isn’t exactly the picture developed in Mark van Roojen’s (forthcoming) response to skeptical worries about} intuitions, but I owe a direct debt to that paper for helping me to see this point.

MJR is met. In fact, this is how I understand Rawls to construe the relationship between RE and the moral facts, at least in some moods.31 _{Rawls interpretation aside, this is the} limiting case in which RE in its entirety can meet MJR without any of its parts

individually doing so—call such accounts constructivist.32

Scanlon once endorsed constructivism.33 _{But he now explicitly rejects it, at least} as a global thesis about reasons in general.34 _{When Scanlon considers the constructivist} view that for something to be a reason is for it to remain at the end of the process of RE, he says:

“[T]he normative status conferred on a judgment by its being in a set that is in reflective equilibrium depends on the quality of the decisions that are made in arriving at that equilibrium—decisions about what to count as a considered judgment at the outset and about what to modify in situations of conflict. So the most that could be said is that p is a reason for x to do a if the judgment that it is such a reason would be among x’s evaluative judgments in reflective equilibrium

if the judgments x made in arriving at this equilibrium were sound. So understood,

however, this is not a constructivist account of reasons…The process of seeking reflective equilibrium in one’s beliefs about a subject matter is therefore not a characterization of the facts about that subject matter but rather a method for arriving at conclusions about that subject matter”.35

Scanlon is clear, then, that he does not intend to be a constructivist, even of the sort which constitutively ties the reason-facts to his favored method of RE. Now, of course, one could just depart from Scanlon on this point and embrace constructivism. And, as I

31 _{On this, see Kelly and McGrath (2010), Section 4 and Bagnoli (2011), Section 1.} 32 _{See Bagnoli (2011).}

33 _{Scanlon (1998), though Aaron Elliott has convinced me that given his other commitments in that work, he was} already committed to some form of mind-independent realism. See Elliott’s (ms) “Realist Contractualism”. 34 _{See Scanlon (2014), Lecture 4 for his extensive discussion of various kinds of constructivist theories. There may,} however, be locally constructed sets of reasons, e.g. if justice-reasons are constructed out of the reasons of agents in Rawls’ Original Position.

noted above, I think this would provide a way of meeting MJR. However, embracing constructivism would be to give up stance-independence, a crucial feature of what makes a particular metaethical view realist. A view counts as stance-independent when “the

moral standards that fix the moral facts are not made true by virtue of their ratification from within any given actual or hypothetical perspective.”36 _{Though Scanlon doesn’t use the term} “stance-independence”, he does endorse it.37 _{Since Scanlon’s concern, and the concern} of this paper, is how the realist can meet MJR, this would be to concede the argument in question.