Sources & Extracts

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Norman Daniels describes some of the elements to be included in wide reflective equilibrium as follows:

It is important that we see how diverse the types of beliefs included in wide reflective equilibrium are, as well as the kinds of arguments that may be based on them. They include our beliefs about particular cases; about rules, principles, and virtues and how to apply or act on them; about the right-making properties of actions, policies, and institutions; about the conflict between consequentialist and deontological views; about partiality and impartiality and the moral point of view; about motivation, moral development, strains of moral commitment, and the limits of ethics; about the nature of persons; about the role or function of ethics in our lives; about the implications of game theory, decision theory, and accounts of rationality for morality; about human psychology, sociology, and political and economic behavior; about the ways we should reply to moral skepticism and moral disagreement; and about moral justification itself. (Norman Daniels, Justice and Justification: Reflective Equilibrium in Theory and Practice, p. 6.)