Abstract
When John Rawls publishes his Theory of Justice in 1971, he was the first to use the expression "reflective equilibrium" (RE). Even if this kind of idea had been employed before by Nelson Goodman (Goodman, 1955), Rawls employs it as his method, to build a complete theory of justice and sort out this concept which is now highly debated. We will not dwell on the complete definition of reflective equilibrium, but it is worth keeping in mind the definition given by Rawls himself: "It is equilibrium, because at last our principles and [considered] judgment coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of their derivation" (Rawls, 1971). We won't dwell on the problem of the wide and narrow equilibrium either, and chose instead to follow Norman Daniels who considers essentially the wide reflective equilibrium (Daniels, 1996, chap 1). We will weigh how RE is a general and important question, by trying to involve both an inductive and deductive approach as a method to build a theory in social justice, which is a particular subject of philosophy.
