Balance and refinement1993

All of us have moral beliefs. But these beliefs are not in good order. We are unsure what to think about many serious moral issues. Where we do have a firm view it often turns out that we are not really of one mind. Judgments we make in one area do not square with judgments we make about other matters, and the judgments we make at one level of generality do not always cohere with those at a higher or lower level. We are therefore in a predicament that forces us to engage in some sort of moral inquiry.

This book argues that coherence methods offer the only rational way out of this predicament. But the method of balance and refinement defended is not a standard version of coherentism, which is usually intellectualist and mechanical. While arguments surely have an important place in any...