Robert Audi

A central concern in recent ethical thinking is reasons for action and their relation to obligations, rights, and values. This collection of recent essays by Robert Audi presents an account of what reasons for action are, how they are related to obligation and rights, and how they figure in virtuous conduct. In addition, Audi reflects in his opening essay on his theory of reasons for action, his common-sense intuitionism, and his widely debated principles for balancing religion and politics. Reasons are shown to be basic elements in motivation, grounded in experience, and crucial for justifying actions and for understanding rights. Audi's clear and engaging essays make these advanced debates accessible to students as well as scholars, and this volume will be a valuable resource for readers interested in ethical theory, political theory, applied ethics, or philosophy of action.

How far may Americans properly rely on their religious beliefs when they make and defend political decisions? For example, are ordinary citizens or legislators doing something wrong when they consciously allow their decisions respecting abortion laws to be determined by their religious views? Despite its intense contemporary relevance, the full dimensions of this issue have until now not been thoroughly examined. Religious Convictions and Political Choice represents the first attempt to fill this gap. Beginning with an account of the basic premises of our liberal democracy, Greenawalt moves to a comparison between rational secular grounds of decision and grounds based on religious convictions. He discusses particular issues such as animal rights and abortion, showing how religious convictions can bear on an individual's decisions about them, and inquires whether reliance on such convictions is compatible with liberal democratic premises. In conclusion, he argues that citizens cannot be expected to rely exclusively on rational, secular grounds.

In this chapter Robert Audi argues that cognitive diversity is inherent in the human condition. People differ greatly in what they believe even when they do not disagree. But most of us also disagree with many others on various important matters. Nor are cognitive disparities limited to what is _believed_: we also differ in what we presuppose, presume, accept, suspect, and surmise. Even where we agree, and thereby coincide in the _content_ of certain cognitions, we may differ in our degrees of _conviction_ regarding the mutually accepted propositions. This paper considers the kinds of cognitive disparities—_intrapersonal_ as well as _interpersonal_—of major interest for epistemology. These include rational disagreements even on self-evident propositions, which some have thought obvious in a way that precludes rationally rejecting them. On the basis of the account of cognitive diversity and several distinctions within that category, the paper indicates a number of ways both to understand rational disagreement and to resolve it when possible.

Nearly everyone is at times an advocate. By professional role, some people act quite regularly as advocates: lawyers, legislators, executives, merchants, and, in many contexts, educators. Lawyers often consider themselves obligated to maintain a special “zeal” toward their clients' interests, and there are many laws and principles of legal ethics that govern advocacy by attorneys. This article concerns the ethics of advocacy, not its legal aspects. Indeed, I cannot even address the full range of moral issues raised by advocacy; I focus mainly on an area rarely addressed by writers in legal ethics and insufficiently examined in the genral literature of ethics. It is the domain of individual conscience, the arena of internal states and processes, such as desires, beliefs, and thoughts. I am particularly interested in how moral standards apply to the use of reasons in the practice of advocacy. My broadest thesis is that advocacy needs an ethics of reasons, and not just of external behavior.

The concept of faith is central in the philosophy of religion, and the concept of virtue is central in ethics. Both can be clarified by exploring their relationshipswith each other and their connection with conduct, reasons for action, and the good. One important question is whether faith is a virtue. Answering this requires at least a partial account of what constitutes faith and of what makes a characteristic a virtue. The answer also depends on whether we are speaking of religious faith or of faith in general, and on what “content” the faith in question has. This paper approaches the question by contrasting faith with faithfulness, connecting both with trust, and exploring conditions under which each may count as a virtue.