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The Importance of Reflective Equilibrium
Sometimes when our moral theories give us highly counterintuitive or weird sounding suggestions, we need to say, well, maybe I have the wrong moral theory, right? Well, that's actually something that Rawls thought. A utilitarian chooses a function over all utility, which is to say, add it all up and maximize it. And you've in some sense chosen a function over utility,. But if there's a matter of fact about which actions create more cooperative behavior than others, then just like if the doctor tells me to stop smoking, we do need to make some choice about whether or not we discovered that fact of the matter through our moral theorizing.