Debates about the ethics of health care and medical research in contemporary pluralistic democracies often arise partly from competing religious and secular values. Such disagreements raise challenges of balancing claims of religious liberty with claims to equal treatment in health care. This paper proposes several mid-level principles to help in framing sound policies for resolving such disputes. We develop and illustrate these principles, exploring their application to conscientious objection by religious providers and religious institutions, accommodation of religious priorities in biomedical (...) research, and treatment of patients’ religious views in doctor–patient encounters. Given that no sound set of guiding principles yields precise solutions for every policy dispute, we explore how morally sound democracies might deliberatively resolve such policy issues, following our proposed principles. Taken together and carefully interpreted, these principles may help in guiding difficult decision making in the indefinitely large realm where government, medical providers, and patients encounter problems concerning religion and medicine. (shrink)

To all appearances, the basic building blocks of reality tend to keep existing unless something intervenes to destroy them. In other words, basic things seem to have existential inertia. But why might this be? This paper considers a number of arguments for and against existential inertia. It discusses arguments inspired by Aquinas, Descartes, and Spinoza, as well as considerations deriving from Occam’s Razor, entropy, and certain views about the nature of time and change.

Democratic societies that separate church and state face major challenges in accommodating religious convictions. This applies especially to determining healthcare policies. Building on our prior work on the demands and limits of religious accommodation in democratic societies, we propose a set of ethical standards that can guide societies in meeting this challenge. In applying and defending these standards, we explore three topics: vaccine resistance, abortion, and concerns about rights to healthcare. We clarify these and other issues of religious accommodation and (...) propose ethical standards for approaching these and other problems. (shrink)

Russian translation of the Chpater 9 of Audi R. Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision. – London, N. Y., 2006. Translated by Andrei Zavaliy with kind permission of the author.

Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has its (...) advocates, most theorists have sought a middle way that accommodates both the common-sense view of mind and the metaphysical conviction about the physical world. This volume presents a collection of new, specially written essays by a diverse group of philosophers, each of whom is widely known for defending a particular conception of minds and their place in nature. Contributors include Robert Audi, Lynne Rudder Baker, Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Fred Dretske, Ted Honderich, Jennifer Hornsby, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ruth Garrett Millikan, H. W. Noonan, Philip Pettit, Ernest Sosa, and Robert Van Gulick. (shrink)

Intention takes various forms. Must its objects be acts or activities? How much can be encompassed in the content of a single intention? Can intentions can have the content: to A for R, where ‘A’ ranges over act-types and ‘R’ over reasons for action, for instance to keep my promise? The question is particularly important on the widely accepted assumption that, for concrete actions that are rational and have moral worth, both their rationality and their moral worth depend on the (...) reason for which they are performed. If intentions can have content of the form of ‘to A for R’, should we conclude that we have direct voluntary control of the reason for which we act? If intentions cannot have such content, how can we intend to do, not just what we ought to do, but to do it with ‘moral worth’? This question is also raised by the idea that we can be commanded to treat others as ends in themselves – which presumably has moral worth. If the commandable is intendable, then, to understand commands and other directives, we need a theory of the scope of intention. This paper explores kinds and objects of intention, outlines an account of its scope, and brings out some implications of the account for moral responsibility. (shrink)

The latest offering in the highly successful Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, The Philosophy of Action features contributions from twelve leading figures in the field, including: Robert Audi, Michael Bratman, Donald Davidson, Wayne Davis, Harry Frankfurt, Carl Ginet, Gilbert Harman, Jennifer Hornsby, Jaegwon Kim, Hugh McCann, Paul Moser, and Brian O'Shaughnessy. Alfred Mele provides an introductory essay on the topics chosen and the questions they deal with. Topics addressed include intention, reasons for action, and the nature and explanation of (...) internal action. A selective bibliography is included as a guide to further reading. Comprehensive and up-to-date, this collection provides an accessible and stimulating introduction for readers interested in the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind, and moral philosophy. (shrink)

An influential belief/desire analysis of intention proposed by robert audi does not provide sufficient conditions for intention. Intending to "a" entails being settled upon "a"-Ing (or upon trying to "a"), And it entails being willing to "a". But an agent can satisfy audi's conditions for intending to "a" and yet be neither settled upon "a"-Ing (or trying to "a") nor willing to "a". The objection raised poses a serious problem for belief/desire analyses of intention in general.

Many religious people are alarmed about features of the current age - violence in the media, a pervasive hedonism, a marginalization of religion, and widespread abortion. These concerns influence politics, but just as there should be a separation between church and state, so should there be a balance between religious commitments and secular arguments calling for social reforms. Robert Audi offers a principle of secular rationale, which does not exclude religious grounds for action but which rules out restricting freedom (...) except on grounds that any rational citizen would accept. The book describes the essential commitments of free democracy, explains how religious and secular moral considerations can be integrated to facilitate co-operation in a world of religious pluralism, and proposes ideals of civic virtue that express the mutual respect on which democracy depends. Audi offers a balanced and sophisticated treatment of the relations between religion and politics in a modern, secular society. (shrink)

This volume is a welcome contribution to the philosophy of action. Audi employs a host of subtle distinctions and carefully crafted arguments in defending a unified position on the major issues in action theory. In his characteristically lucid prose, he makes vivid the location of those issues at the intersection of ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. Given the tight organization and the unifying introduction, this volume is an exceptionally cohesive collection of essays. It will make a lasting (...) contribution to the literature in action theory. (shrink)

The book's key questions concern whether we have a right to believe whatever we choose and whether we have significant control over our beliefs. After exploring four case studies in which the question of a right to believe arises and querying what epistemic obligations are, we consider how epistemic obligations might be grounded, whether in prudence, morality, or human virtues. Some argue that epistemic excellence is less concerned with our obligations to believe the truth and avoid falsehood than with seeing (...) that the beliefs we hold are justified. We argue that our epistemic responsibility is best fulfilled somewhere in between the strict objectivist and strict subjectivist views. We proceed to defend the thesis that we have not only indirect but direct control over our beliefs. We then examine the nature of belief, contending for belief as both disposition and an action. In the final chapter we discuss the relation between epistemic obligations and moral accountability. (shrink)

For over thirty years, Robert Audi has produced important work in ethics, epistemology, and the theory of action. This volume features thirteen new critical essays on Audi by a distinguished group of authors: Fred Adams, William Alston, Laurence BonJour, Roger Crisp, Elizabeth Fricker, Bernard Gert, Thomas Hurka, Hugh McCann, Al Mele, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Raimo Tuomela, Candace Vogler, and Timothy Williamson. Audi's introductory essay provides a thematic overview interconnecting his views in ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of action. The (...) volume concludes with his comprehensive response essay that yields an illuminating dialog with all his critics and often extends his previous work. (shrink)

Much epistemological theorizing is the attempt to specify what makes for meritorious cognition, but epistemologists have not, despite meritorious effort, achieved unity when it comes to picking out the feature and principles that are distinctive of epistemic normativity. In this essay we explain why this is the inevitable outcome. We isolate important but overlooked variations in the link between epistemological theorizing and the idea of epistemic unification, and then argue that much epistemological theorizing is misguided because it aims toward complete (...) epistemic unification when only partial epistemic unification, at best, is possible. But our arguments — based on work in moral epistemology and philosophical psychology — stop short of epistemological eliminativism, and thus we stake out a middle ground between philosophers such as Descartes, the earlier Alston, Audi, and the earlier BonJour on one hand and Rorty, Fish, and Patricia Churchland on the other. (shrink)

In an article entitled ?The Ontological Status of Mental Images?, Robert Audi rejects the view presented in Hannay's Mental Images: A Defence, and proposes ?the property account of imaging? as an alternative. Some of the strengths and weaknesses of Audi's proposal are discussed, and a more detailed and specific version of the property account offered; it is suggested that imaging ? should be described as entertaining the thought that if one were looking at (or smelling, touching, hearing, etc.) (...) x, things would appear ? (shrink)

This collection of papers (including three completely new ones) by one of the foremost philosophers in epistemology transcends two of the most widely misunderstood positions in philosophy--foundationalism and coherentism. Audi proposes a distinctively moderate, internalist foundationalism that incorporates some of the virtues of both coherentism and reliabilism. He develops important distinctions between positive and negative epistemic dependence, substantively and conceptually naturalistic theories, dispositional beliefs and dispositions to believe, episodically and structurally inferential beliefs, first and second order internalism, and rebutting (...) as opposed to refuting skepticism. These contrasts are applied not only to rational belief, but to rational action and the rationality of desires and intentions. The overall position is a pluralist, moderately rationalistic, internalist theory of justification and a partly externalist conception of knowledge. However, by virtue of offering a theory of rationality as well as an account of knowledge and justified belief, it will interest philosophers of ethics, science, and the social sciences and teachers and students of epistemology. (shrink)

According to the subset account of realization, a property, F, is realized by another property, G, whenever F is individuated by a non-empty proper subset of the causal powers by which G is individuated (and F is not a conjunctive property of which G is a conjunct). This account is especially attractive because it seems both to explain the way in which realized properties are nothing over and above their realizers, and to provide for the causal efficacy of realized properties. (...) It therefore seems to provide a way around the causal exclusion problem. There is reason to doubt, however, that the subset account can achieve both tasks. The problem arises when we look closely at the relation between properties and causal powers, specifically, at the idea that properties confer powers on the things that have them. If realizers are to be ontically prior to what they realize, then we must regard the conferral of powers by properties as a substantive relation of determination. This relation of conferral is at the heart of a kind of exclusion problem, analogous to the familiar causal exclusion problem. I argue that the subset account cannot adequately answer this new exclusion problem, and is for that reason ill-suited to be the backbone of a non-reductive physicalism. (shrink)

Abstract I distinguish various ways in which human life may be thought to be meaningful and present an account of what might be called existential meaningfulness. The account is neutral with respect to both theism and naturalism, but each is addressed in several places and the paper's main points are harmonious with certain versions of both. A number of important criteria for existential meaningfulness are examined, and special emphasis is placed on criteria centering on creativity and excellence, on contributing to (...) the well-being of persons, and on human relationships, particularly those pervaded by love. In the light of a conception of intrinsic goodness, the good life is compared with the meaningful life, and the relation between the two notions is explored. I argue that goodness in a life counts towards its meaningfulness and that the goodness of a life is sufficient for an important kind of meaningfulness. I also suggest that the overall notion of rewarding elements in a life-intrinsically good elements that are typically but not necessarily pleasurable-is a significant unifying concept that helps both in understanding existential meaningfulness and in integrating the various kinds of constituents in a life that conduce to its meaningfulness. (shrink)

I distinguish various ways in which human life may be thought to be meaningful and present an account of what might be called existential meaningfulness. The account is neutral with respect to both theism and naturalism, but each is addressed in several places and the paper's main points are harmonious with certain versions of both. A number of important criteria for existential meaningfulness are examined, and special emphasis is placed on criteria centering on creativity and excellence, on contributing to the (...) well-being of persons, and on human relationships, particularly those pervaded by love. In the light of a conception of intrinsic goodness, the good life is compared with the meaningful life, and the relation between the two notions is explored. I argue that goodness in a life counts towards its meaningfulness and that the goodness of a life is sufficient for an important kind of meaningfulness. I also suggest that the overall notion of rewarding elements in a life—intrinsically good elements that are typically but not necessarily pleasurable—is a significant unifying concept that helps both in understanding existential meaningfulness and in integrating the various kinds of constituents in a life that conduce to its meaningfulness. (shrink)

Conduct is determined not just by what we do, but also by why and how we do it. Written by an internationally high-profile philosopher, this is the first full statement of an ethics of conduct, spanning moral theory, practical ethics, and theories of obligation and value.

The power of skepticism depends on the apparent possibility of rationally asking, for virtually any kind of proposition commonly thought to be known,howit is known or what justifies believing it. Moral claims are among those commonly subjected to skeptical challenges and doubts, even on the part of some people who are not skeptical about ordinary claims regarding the external world. There may be even more skepticism about the possibility of justifying moralactions,particularly if they are against the agent's self-interest. Both problems-how (...) to justify moral claims and how to justify moral action - come within the scope of the troubling question “Why be moral?” Even a brief response to moral skepticism should consider both kinds of targets of justification, cognitive and behavioural, and should indicate some important relations between the two types of skeptical challenge. I will begin with the cognitive case- with skepticism about the scope of theoretical reason in ethics - proceed to practical skepticism, which concerns the scope of practical reason, and then show how an adequate account of rationality may enable us to respond to moral skepticism. (shrink)

This is the leading, full-scale comprehensive dictionary of philosophical terms and thinkers to appear in English in more than half a century. Written by a team of more than 550 experts and now widely translated, it contains approximately 5,000 entries ranging from short definitions to longer articles. It is designed to facilitate the understanding of philosophy at all levels and in all fields. Key features of this third edition include: • 500 new entries covering Eastern as well as Western philosophy, (...) and covering individual countries such as China, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain • Increased coverage of such growing fields as ethics and philosophy of mind • More than 100 new intellectual portraits of leading contemporary thinkers • Wider coverage of Continental philosophy • Dozens of new technical concepts in cognitive science and other areas • Enhanced cross-referencing to add context and increase understanding • Expansions in both text and index to facilitate research and browsing. (shrink)

Après avoir subi au début des années cinquante une sorte de procès public en raison de ses idées et traversé en conséquence une crise existentielle d'une rare intensité, Albert Camus, se retrouvant face à lui-même, a estimé que le problème majeur auquel l'humanité est désormais confrontée consiste dans ce besoin impérieux qu'ont les hommes de s'accuser mutuellement et de faire ainsi de leur existence un procès permanent, transformant tour à tour les mêmes personnes en prévenus, en procureurs, en avocats, en (...) témoins et en juges. Le problème, qui n'est autre que celui du jugement que les hommes portent les uns sur les autres, tient donc au fait que ceux-ci, alors même qu'ils ne croient plus au jugement de Dieu, continuent de croire qu'être juste c'est être juge. Pour expliquer que la dissociation de la justice et du jugement devrait révéler un horizon de sens nouveau à une humanité privée de boussole, Paul Audi s'applique d'abord dans cet essai à mesurer la profondeur de la crise qui a conduit l'auteur de La Chute à coucher sur le papier, quelques mois seulement avant sa mort, ce terrible ultimatum : "Je me fais la guerre et je me détruirai ou je renaîtrai, c'est tout". (shrink)