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Garrett Cullity, Motives, Manners, Reasons and Consequences, Analysis, 2025;, anae097, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anae097
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Extract
Robert Audi’s Of Moral Conduct (2023) is an unusually substantial, wide-ranging and ambitious work of moral theory. The book has four parts. In Part I, Audi sets out the case for thinking of moral conduct as made up of three main dimensions: what is done, why it is done (its motivation) and how it is done (its manner). The first of these dimensions – the action itself – is the target of moral obligation; the second determines evaluations of the agent; and the third has both kinds of moral relevance (18–19, 31–37, 51–54). Part II sets out a substantive theory of moral obligation, enumerating a set of principles of moral obligation, discussing their application and explaining their relationship to each other. Part III supplies an account of the epistemology and metaphysics of morality covering those principles of moral obligation, but also singular moral judgements, understood as exercises of moral perception. Part IV provides a theory of reasons for action, a theory of value and finally an overall theory of right action, ‘consequencism’, which seeks to combine and reconcile the insights of both consequentialism and deontology. The book is an impressive achievement: few philosophers are equipped to attempt work in moral theory on this scale, let alone to carry it out with such uniform attention to detail – drawing as Audi does on his other work in the philosophy of action, the philosophy of practical reason and epistemology, as well as his earlier Kant-, Ross- and Aristotle-inspired contributions to moral theory.
