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Show Chapter X. Rawls's Instrumentalism 436 has been doctored; or turn their attention to all the additional errors that can accumulate in the process of intersubjective replication of results by different laboratories. That is, they may, in effect, conceive objective validity as imperfect procedural truth, in which one begins with a prior conception of scientific truth, for the discovery of which one has devised rather vulnerable procedures of reasoning and experimentation that do not always work. If the outcome of these procedures in a particular case deviates too wildly from one's preconceptions about what an objectively valid outcome should be, the inference is available that it is the procedures, rather than one's preconceptions, that are at fault. 5.2. Wide Reflective Equilibrium Rawls's early analogy with scientific procedure, carried through here, illuminates the question of which account of justice - pure procedural, perfect procedural, or imperfect procedural - in fact best fits Rawls's account in A Theory of Justice of the eventually deductive relationship between the original position and the well-ordered society as structured by the two principles of justice. Like experimental procedure among scientists, deliberative procedure among the parties is stipulated to generate an outcome that is objectively valid in virtue of its history. Like an experimental result, the deliberative result may cast doubt on the care or precision with which the procedure was executed. Or, in case these standards have been verifiably met, it may reveal that our commitment to the procedure as an index of objective validity is in fact outweighed by our commitment to an independent preconception about what an objectively valid outcome can be - to which this result has perhaps failed to measure up. Is the relationship between the original position procedure and the two principles of justice more like the procedure and results of gambling? Or is it more like the procedure and results of a criminal trial? So far we have examined Rawls's metaethics from the perspective of the original position. We have traced just a few of the basic relationships between the conditions that define it and the principles it is claimed deductively to generate. What we have not yet done is the analogue of what scientists do in assessing the status of their experimental results relative to the hypotheses that predicted them, namely decide whether they are in accordance with their trained judgment, intuitions, and practice as scientists; or whether those results, the procedures that generated them, the hypotheses those procedures were intended to test, or indeed the training and practice on which all depend require rethinking or revision. Analogously, we have not yet assessed whether the metaethical and normative scheme Rawls offers conforms to our commonsense moral intuitions about what a free, equal and impartial consensus in deliberation entails, or in what a just distribution of moderately scarce social goods in a © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
