Does reflective equilibrium (RE) provide an appropriate and illuminating account of moral understanding? The answer depends on what we wish to capture with an explication of moral understanding and how we interpret RE. In this talk, I argue that a straightforward and unambiguous account of RE can be used to explicate moral understanding. It is true that merely holding a RE does not suffice for understanding, and articulating an RE-account of moral understanding requires some caution. Still, these challenges can be met. The problem, though, is that the resulting notion of moral understanding is fairly narrow, focusing on normative explanations of why certain moral judgments hold. There are arguably additional abilities or achievements we might want to cover with a notion of moral understanding, e.g., sensitivity to a broad range of moral concerns, understanding of alternative ethical viewpoints, or the ability to transform moral insight into action. I discuss how we may integrate these things into a richer RE-based account of moral understanding without moving too far away from RE or diluting its core idea. In any case, I suggest, going through the process of RE makes a central contribution to deepening our moral understanding.

While moral epistemologists have traditionally been concerned with moral knowledge and what makes such knowledge possible, there has been a growing interest in the notion of moral understanding. One reason for this shift in focus is that moral understanding appears to involve more than merely knowing why some moral proposition is true. It involves, according to several philosophers, “grasping” the relation between a moral proposition and the reasons why it is true. Here, my aim is to clarify in what sense, precisely, moral understanding involves having a grasp of the relation between a moral proposition and the reasons why it is true. To this end, I will argue that moral grasp – the grasp involved in moral understanding – is best conceived of as a type of knowledge that is grounded in a subject’s moral appreciation, and show how and why the relevant notion of moral appreciation is connected to moral virtues.

There is skepticism about how helpful the method of reflective equilibrium (RE) is in relation to the epistemic aims of knowledge and justified belief. An argument that is often offered for such skepticism is that there is little reason to expect that competent users of RE will converge in their moral views. What I shall discuss in my presentation is how this non-convergence objection relates to the viability of RE if we assume that the relevant aim is that of moral understanding rather than knowledge or justified belief.