Christopher McMahon

The paper distinguishes two ways of understanding a wise society. A society can be wise by virtue of possessing mostly true evaluative beliefs. Or it can be wise by virtue of employing rational procedures of collective belief formation. If the first possibility involves the society’s being, in Margaret Gilbert’s sense, a plural subject of evaluative beliefs, social wisdom will, as Gilbert says, entail an abridgement of individual freedom. But, this paper argues, if a society’s being wise is understood as its employing rational procedures of collective belief formation, social wisdom positively requires individual freedom.

We all know, or think we know, what it means to say that something is 'reasonable' or 'fair', but what exactly are these concepts and how have they evolved and changed over the course of history? In this book, Christopher McMahon explores reasonableness, fairness, and justice as central concepts of the morality of reciprocal concern. He argues that the basis of this morality evolves as history unfolds, so that forms of interaction that might have been morally acceptable in the past are judged unacceptable today. The first part of his study examines the notions of reasonableness and fairness as they are employed in ordinary practical thought, and the second part develops a constructivist theory to explain why and how this part of morality can undergo historical development without arriving at any final form. His book will interest scholars of ethics, political theory, and the history of ideas.

This book is a collection of essays on various problems arising in connection with John Rawls's theory of justice. Its focus is the method of wide reflective equilibrium. The first half of the book begins with Daniels's well-known essay "Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics" and ends with an excellent discussion of the role of reflective equilibrium in Rawls's Political Liberalism. The essays in the second part discuss justice in health care. They are of interest in their own right, and also as illustrating Daniels's view that for those practicing the method of reflective equilibrium, applied moral philosophy is integral to the process of moral theorizing. Daniels says that the essays do not constitute a systematic treatment of wide reflective equilibrium. But they display a much higher degree of thematic coherence than is usual in a collection, and they read much like the chapters of a monograph.