Balance and Refinement: Beyond Coherence Methods of Moral Inquiry

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 philosophical inquiry into morality, they are not the whole story. A significant part of moral inquiry is concerned with refining our ability to make sensitive moral judgments. We must both seek to improve our judgment and fit our judgments together into a systematic moral outlook. Contemporary writers concerned with moral methodology have focused almost exclusively on the latter element of inquiry. DePaul shows that methods that do not pay serious attention to the development of our capacities for making such judgments cannot guarantee inquirers so much as rational, let alone warranted beliefs.
Thus DePaul discusses moral conversions, the possibility of naivete and corruption, and the significant, nearly essential, role of life experience and experience with literature, film, theater, music, and art in moral inquiry. In this way, he moves away from orthodox understandings of the coherentist conceptions and suggests that moral inquiry involves a blend of the individual inquirer developing and improving her moral sensibility and the individual seeking to fit together and to construct a theoretical account of the various judgments her refined sensibility produces.
Balance and Refinement's challenge to conventional approaches to moral inquiry will interest and provoke all students and teachers of epistemology and ethics.