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Show Chapter X. Rawls's Instrumentalism 462 this process is in fact much closer to the rational scientific procedure analogy with which supplied Rawls his original inspiration in 1951. How should we then evaluate each of these two procedures relative to Rawls's identification of his view as an instance of pure procedural justice? Since the instrumentally rational procedure of deliberation undertaken by the parties in the original position leads to a contradiction, it fails to meet Rawls's characterization of pure procedural justice, by definition. Rawls's deemphasis and indeed rejection of this procedure in later writings, and subsequent elaboration of our participation in delineating the conception of a well-ordered society which forms one of his last projects in Political Liberalism 36, constitutes a sacrifice of this procedure to the more purely deductive procedure of formulating the premises of his arguments in such a way as to derive analytically what is contained within them, such that both premises and conclusion cohere with and preserve our most central commonsense moral intuitions. This is part of the process of achieving wide reflective equilibrium. Hence just as the analogous procedure in scientific theorizing - in which we, on the basis of our intuitions, formulate the hypothesis and its experimental predictions in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of the latter confirming the former - would count as a case of perfect procedural truth, similarly Rawls's procedure of wide reflective equilibrium would seem to count as one of perfect procedural justice. However, there is more to the process of achieving wide reflective equilibrium than this. Rawls clearly acknowledges that "a person's sense of justice may or may not undergo a radical shift" as the result of undergoing the process of achieving wide reflective equilibrium (TJ 49). He thereby leaves open the possibility that the commonsense moral intuitions that anchor the process of achieving wide reflective equilibrium may be sacrificed not only to the theory-constructive requirements of coherence and deductive consistency, but also to the influence of competing moral views with which those intuitions are compared. So the scientific analogy is rather with the attempt to square one's hypothesis, its experimental predictions, and the underlying intuitions that anchor both with recognizedly anomalous data - perhaps unexpected experimental results, or competing hypotheses that are more powerful or comprehensive - that call all three into question. This process would be one of pure procedural truth. Similarly, the process of achieving wide reflective equilibrium makes our commonsense moral intuitions vulnerable to revision in light of demonstrations that a competing moral theory is, for example, more adept in the casuistry of particularly problematic cases, or more comprehensive in its application, or better grounded in the psychological facts about human beings. 36 Op. cit. Note 3. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
