If wrongness is partly explained by what principles individuals could not reasonably reject, then feeding wrongness back into contractualist deliberation is not circular but reflects the reflexive structure of moral justification Rawls recognized in reflective equilibrium.

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Reasons For

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Reason for

1.Reflective equilibrium requires iterating between principles and judgments; contractualism similarly cycles between rejectability and principles.
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2.Wrongness as unexplainable by reasonable rejection creates a regress; acknowledging it grounds contractualist deliberation without infinite circularity.
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3.Moral justification is inherently reflexive: standards justify conclusions that partly constitute those standards, avoiding vicious circularity.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

1.If wrongness partly explains what's rejectably wrong, the contractualist criterion becomes uninformative about which rejections are actually justified.
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2.Reflexive structure doesn't eliminate circularity—it merely names it; the claim conflates acceptable mutual dependence with logical independence.
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3.Rawls's reflective equilibrium works because considered judgments and principles are logically distinct inputs; contractualism lacks this separation.
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Key Terms

Circular reasoning(the trap that occurs when trying to define counterfactuals): A logical mistake where you use the very thing you're trying to prove as part of your argument, like saying 'I'm trustworthy because I said I am'—this goes in circles and doesn't actually explain anything.
Contractualist deliberation(the method of reasoning being discussed): The process of thinking through what's moral by asking what principles everyone could reasonably agree to.
John Rawls(the original philosopher whose ideas are being discussed): An influential 20th-century American philosopher who created an important theory about how a fair and just society should be organized.
Reflexive structure(how moral justification works): A back-and-forth process where ideas are tested against each other and refined, with each part informing the others.
contractualism: A moral theory presented as a genuine alternative to both consequentialism and Kantian ethics, one that coheres with distinctively non-utilitarian intuitions in certain key cases
reasonably reject(as used in ethics): Has good, rational grounds to object to or refuse to accept something as justified or fair.
reflective equilibrium(Introduced by Goodman in the context of justifying induction): A methodological state reached when considered judgments and the inference rules that best explain those judgments are mutually coherent, achieved by iteratively revising either judgments or rules when conflicts arise
wrongness(Offered as an example of a proposed naturalistic constitutive explanation, used to illustrate the failure of such accounts): According to meta-ethical utilitarian naturalism, for an action to be wrong is for it to fail to maximize the general happiness.

Connections

2 topics

Justice & Punishment1 linked Moral Responsibility1 linked

If wrongness partly explains what's rejectably wrong, the contractualist criteri...Moral justification is inherently reflexive: standards justify conclusions that ...

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 2 (1 for, 1 against)
Edits: 1 edit