Free Monty Python and Philosophy by Gary L. Hardcastle Page B

short, this: that only through a process of argument with other people can most of us hope to come to have true beliefs about matters of any complexity . In explaining this, I am going to focus on my own area of expertise within philosophy, which is moral philosophy. But I think the claim is true in other areas of philosophy, and even beyond philosophy.

The Philosophical Argument and Reflective Equilibrium
    What constitutes a philosophical argument? How does somebody go about constructing one? What, in other words, would the client be getting if he got what he wanted, at least if he got it from a philosopher? Assuming that most readers have a limited exposure to professional philosophy, I want to describe how philosophers go about making arguments, focusing on a particular method popularized by the American philosopher John Rawls (1926-2002), known as reflective equilibrium . 25
    Philosophy is the systematic study of questions, the answers to which cannot be determined simply by gathering observational data about the world and making hypotheses about those data. “What is on the telly?” is not a philosophical question, because ultimately it has to be addressed through observation. “What is the nature of knowledge?,” by contrast, is philosophical. Without experiences we could not address it, but its answer does not rest on observation. Philosophical questions may well have determinate answers. There is a truth about them. But theoretical, rather than empirical, reason is the means to arriving at the truth. My own particular interest is in moral philosophy, the field within philosophy that asks questions about how we should live our lives, and what constitutes goodness. It addresses large general questions such as “What makes a flourishing human life?”; “Does the moral value of actions lie in their consequences or in the motives behind them?” and “Are states of affairs or the characters of persons the ultimate bearers of value?” and also much more specific questions such as “Is abortion morally wrong?” and “Is it ever right to lie?”
    These questions simply cannot be answered by gathering empirical, or scientific, evidence. So how do we try to work out the answers to them? Philosophy rejects appeals to authority. Good philosophers never offer anything like “As the great thinker Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson argues . . .” as support for their claims (although they might preface an explanation of what is wrong with Arthur’s views with a comment on his greatness). So they can’t
resort to The Holy Bible , the Ten Commandments, or the sayings of Spike Milligan, profound as they are. Such appeals replace the question “What is moral?” with “Why are Spike Milligan’s, or The Holy Bible ’s, sayings morally authoritative?” But we can’t answer that question without establishing what is moral in the first place. So we might as well have started with that question.
    Since neither authority nor empirical evidence is decisive, how do we do it? As suggested above, the method that most contemporary philosophers use is what Rawls called reflective equilibrium . This method invites us to approach questions about morality, and philosophical questions generally, in the following way. Taking up a topic like justice, or punishment, or lying, we first list our considered judgments about specific particular cases, and look at whether these all fit together consistently. Where we find that they don’t fit together we reject those judgments in which we have least confidence (for example, those in which we have reason to suspect there is an element of self-interest pressing us to that particular judgment). We also list the general principles, or rules, we judge suitable to cover cases, and look to see if those principles fit together as well, again rejecting the principles in which we have least confidence. Then we look at the particular judgments and the principles in the light of one another—do they fit