CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Seydi, Siavash |
|---|---|
| Title | A Critique Of Reflective equilibrium's Initial Credibility: The Bias of Appealing to intuition |
| Summary | My claim in this thesis is that John Rawls’ method of justification, Reflective Equilibrium, lacks initial credibility. I will argue that one of the method's admitted content, “considered judgments,” or “intuition”, could carry ideological implications; by ideology, I mean a worldview in service of power to serve their interests. Ideological principles will result in arbitrary distinctions between individuals in a society; therefore, the method will yield unjust results. In the first chapter, I will reconstruct John Rawl’s arguments regarding his principles of justice and his justifications for them, which is applying his method of justification, Reflective Equilibrium, on the hypothetical initial situation of the Original Position. I will mainly focus on discussing Reflective Equilibrium, and especially on considered judgments, one of the two entries of the method, and in doing so, I will refer to other philosophers, such as McMahan, to give a more comprehensive definition of considered judgments. In the second chapter, I will introduce various critiques of Reflective Equilibrium and critical ideas, which will be the foundation for my arguments in the third chapter. I will refer to Singer and his problem with appealing to intuition in methods of justification. I will move on to another approach, however, as I will claim that his critique while making some good points about the nature of intuition, is ultimately implausible since it fails to address the diversity of intuitive thoughts and judgments and does not fit into the theoretical framework of Rawls. The following approach belongs to Fairclough, which, by mixing Marxian theory with Foucauldian thoughts, gives a plausible conception of intuition and defines it as ideological. But I will argue that his approach is also not applicable to the Rawlsian framework, as his Marxian definition of society and power limits normative theorizing. To come up with a solution, I draw on Foucault’s definition of power, which goes beyond the limited scope of the Marxist conception of society. In the third chapter, I will start my critiques by using this new definition of intuition as a container of ideological judgments. I will argue that the ideological implications hidden in our intuitive judgments will create arbitrary distinctions – which goes against our initial aim of justifying principles – whether it is used in the real world or in the Original Position. Then, I will claim that Reflective Equilibrium cannot eliminate these ideological judgments, unlike Knight's argument. Finally, I will suggest adding a ‘critical constraint’ on the method to identify ideological judgments and will argue that the inherent circularity of Reflective Equilibrium and its lack of criteria for making adjustment decisions does not pose a problem, and could in fact help us weed out ideological judgments. |
| Supervisor | Moles, Andres |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/seydi_siavash.pdf |
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