Characterizing a person's syntactic competency by formulating a grammar that accounts for it may be the main task of descriptive syntactic theory, but determining that a person's moral competency is characterized by a particular set of principles is not the main task of moral philosophy. To be sure, moral philosophy must formulate precise statements of different moral conceptions. But it also must face the task of choosing between competing moral conceptions, of solving the problems of justification and theory acceptance in the moral domain. Because I believe the method of wide reflective equilibrium reveals a complexity in the structure of ethical theories that makes the problem of theory acceptance more tractable than it is on other approaches, I would like to free wide equilibrium from an unnecessary or, at least, overstated analogy to linguistic method. That analogy, first proposed in Rawls' A Theory of Justice only reinforces the erroneous view that the moral philosopher interested in reflective equilibrium has confused moral anthropology with moral philosophy.

I shall first distinguish narrow and wide reflective equilibria, showing in the process that narrow equilibrium has a strong similarity to methods in syntactic theory. It is wide equilibrium, however, not narrow, that is of interest to the moral philosopher - and for just the features which distinguish it from certain features of syntactics. As we shall see, because of these features choosing between competing moral conceptions in wide equilibrium has a close analogy to the problem of choosing between alternative deductive logics.