Reflective equilibrium is a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among general principles and particular judgements.
Dietmar Hübner [de] has pointed out that there are many interpretations of reflective equilibrium that deviate from Rawls' method in ways that reduce the cogency of the idea.
Rawls argues that a set of moral beliefs in ideal reflective equilibrium describes or characterizes the underlying principles of the human sense of justice.
He can discard his general principle in search of a better one, such as obeying only the Ten Commandments; or modify his general principle by choosing a different translation of the Bible, or letting Jesus' teaching from John 8:7 "If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to cast a stone", override the Old Testament command; or change his opinions about the point in question to conform with his theory, by deciding that witches really should be killed.
On this view, the method of reflective equilibrium serves its justificatory function by linking together the cognitive and motivational aspects of the human sense of justice in the appropriate way.
The method of reflective equilibrium serves the aim of defining a realistic and stable social order by determining a practically coherent set of principles that are grounded in the right way in the source of our moral motivation, such that we will be disposed to comply with them.
[6]Paul Thagard has criticized the method of reflective equilibrium as "only like a smokescreen for a relatively sophisticated form of logical and methodological relativism" and "at best incidental to the process of developing normative principles".
[7] Among the "numerous problems" of reflective equilibrium, Thagard counted "undue reliance on intuition and the danger of arriving at stable but suboptimal sets of norms".