(Click here to continue on the main path)

Reflective equilibrium doesn't provide foundations of the sort that some philosophers want. Rawls knows that. But I want to make two points about his "coherence" argument.

First, the basis of this coherence argument is partly ideas about justice that are widely held in America and partly our own firmly held individual views on specific cases involving justice. If the coherence we arrive at is a coherence among our own views, doesn't that give it binding power? We have to accept it on pain of contradiction, don't we?

Second, if Rawls is correct, he is tracing out the implications of our own views on justice. He is broadening the area of agreement. And the benefit of that is that whatever principles he arrives at can be used to settle disputes about justice.

Look -- ethical foundations based in logic and conceptual analysis or theology or science are a great idea but hard to come by. We may never find them. But we have to ask ourselves what morality or a theory of justice is for. If the answer is that it is meant to settle disputes, then maybe it doesn't matter whether we have rock solid foundations as long as we have a way of coming to an agreement and ending our arguments.