Scholar Field Instrument — Robert Audi and Ethical Intuitionism
Scholar Field Instrument — Robert Audi and Ethical Intuitionism
Instrument: Scholar Field Instrument (SFI) v1.0. Instrument architecture: Dave Kelly. Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling’s corpus. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Step 0 — Protocol Activation
Target philosopher: Robert Audi, John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame. Past president of the American Philosophical Association and the Society of Christian Philosophers.
Target commitment: Ethical Intuitionism — the claim that some moral truths are known through direct rational apprehension, not inferred from prior premises or derived from empirical observation.
Audience: Non-professional philosophers engaging the contemporary philosophical landscape.
CPA context: No CPA has been run on Audi. None governs this run.
Field Synthesis note: A Field Synthesis on Ethical Intuitionism was produced in the prior SFI run on Michael Huemer. The target commitment and field are identical. The Field Synthesis is carried forward from that run without modification. Independence is preserved: the Huemer Philosopher Record Layer did not contaminate the Field Synthesis, which ranged the contemporary field as a whole before consulting Huemer’s specific arguments. Carrying it forward for Audi is architecturally sound. The Philosopher Record Layer and Juxtaposition produced here are new.
Political Application Constraint: Confirmed.
Self-Audit — Step 0: Target philosopher named. Target commitment specified. Audience confirmed. CPA context noted as absent. Field Synthesis carry-forward noted and its independence confirmed. Political Application Constraint confirmed.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceeding to Step 1.
Step 1 — Target Specification
Propositional form: Some moral truths are known through direct rational apprehension — not inferred from prior premises, not derived from empirical observation, but grasped non-inferentially by the rational faculty.
Scope: Audi’s published record spans ethical intuitionism, epistemological foundationalism, moral perception, moral psychology, philosophy of action, and political philosophy. This run is scoped to his ethical intuitionism and its epistemological foundations, which constitute his primary contribution to the target commitment. His political philosophy (religion in public life) falls outside scope.
Self-Audit — Step 1: Target stated in propositional form. Scope boundaries stated. Audi’s specific work not consulted at this step beyond general record identification.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceeding to Step 2.
Step 2 — Field Synthesis
The Field Synthesis is carried forward from the prior SFI run on Michael Huemer. It is reproduced here in full for this document’s integrity as a standalone output.
Part A — State of the Field
Ethical intuitionism is a minority position in contemporary analytic moral philosophy. The field is dominated by two large camps that agree on almost nothing except their rejection of intuitionism as typically understood. The first is moral anti-realism in its various forms — expressivism, non-cognitivism, and their sophisticated descendants. The second is ethical naturalism, which holds that moral facts are real but are ultimately facts about natural states of affairs. Both camps reject the intuitionist’s central epistemological claim: that the rational faculty has direct, non-inferential access to irreducible moral truths.
The minority defending something like ethical intuitionism is real and has been growing since the 1990s. Philosophers including Robert Audi, Michael Huemer, David Enoch, Russ Shafer-Landau, Ralph Wedgwood, and David McNaughton have defended non-naturalist moral realism in forms that require intuitionism at the epistemological level. The revival is sometimes called “third wave” intuitionism to distinguish it from the classical British intuitionism of the early twentieth century. But the revival remains a minority against a large and well-resourced opposition.
Part B — Argument Inventory
The historical foundation. G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) established the core non-naturalist claim through the open question argument. H.A. Prichard argued in “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” (1912) that our knowledge of moral obligations is immediate and non-inferential. W.D. Ross’s The Right and the Good (1930) developed the most influential intuitionist system of the period: a set of prima facie duties each of which is self-evidently obligating, with actual duty in any situation determined by the balance of prima facie duties in play.
The fall. A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) applied the verificationist criterion of meaning to moral claims and declared them meaningless as genuine propositions. C.L. Stevenson developed emotivism; R.M. Hare developed prescriptivism. John Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) pressed the “queerness” argument: objective moral facts of the intuitionist kind would be metaphysically unprecedented, and the faculty required to perceive them correspondingly mysterious.
The contemporary opposition. Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism and Allan Gibbard’s norm expressivism are the most philosophically sophisticated anti-realist positions. Mark Schroeder defends a Humean theory of reasons. Sharon Street’s evolutionary debunking argument (2006) is the most significant contemporary challenge: natural selection shaped evaluative attitudes to track reproductive fitness, not moral truth; if moral facts are mind-independent, there is no reason to expect evolution-produced attitudes to track them.
Arguments for the commitment. The companions-in-guilt argument: if moral intuitions are unreliable because non-empirical, then mathematical and logical intuitions face the same problem, but no one abandons mathematics. The indispensability argument: moral reasoning cannot begin without some non-inferential moral premises; intuitionism makes this dependence explicit. The self-defeat argument: every alternative epistemology of morals either relies on intuitions covertly or collapses into skepticism.
Part C — Pressure Points and Open Questions
The evolutionary debunking challenge is the most sustained contemporary pressure. Street’s argument forces a dilemma: either our evaluative attitudes were shaped to track moral truth (requiring a mysterious explanatory connection) or they were not (massively deflating confidence in moral intuitions). The selection problem is an internal pressure: if not all intuitions are reliable, which ones are, and by what criterion? The supervenience problem remains open: moral properties supervene on natural properties, but if moral properties are non-natural, what explains this dependence?
Part D — Historical Development
The cultural displacement of intuitionism was rapid and almost total. In the 1920s, intuitionism was the dominant position in British moral philosophy. By the 1950s, the verificationist weapon had redrawn the map of what counted as a philosophically serious position, and intuitionism fell from the new map not through philosophical defeat but through a change in standards. The verificationist criterion later collapsed — it failed to satisfy its own standard of meaning — but the collapse of the weapon did not automatically restore the position it had displaced. The inertia of the new professional consensus was itself the continuing mechanism of marginalization.
Self-Audit — Step 2: Field Synthesis carried forward from prior run. Independence confirmed. Minority status of intuitionism represented accurately. No verdicts on the commitment issued.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceeding to Step 3.
Step 3 — Philosopher Record Layer
Sources consulted: The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton University Press, 2004); Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (Oxford University Press, 1997); Moral Perception (Princeton University Press, 2013); The Structure of Justification (Cambridge University Press, 1993); Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (Routledge, multiple editions); “Intuition and Its Place in Ethics,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2015); “The Phenomenology of Moral Intuition,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2022); “Moderate Intuitionism and the Epistemology of Moral Judgment,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (1998); “Intuition, Inference, and Rational Disagreement in Ethics,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2008); secondary sources: Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews symposium and Rationality and the Good: Critical Essays on the Ethics and Epistemology of Robert Audi (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Coverage gap: Audi’s full book-length treatment in The Good in the Right was ranged through secondary sources and the critical essays volume rather than directly in full. Individual chapter-level arguments may not be fully captured.
Mapping:
Convergence — The Rossian framework as foundation. The Field Synthesis identifies W.D. Ross’s The Right and the Good as the most influential intuitionist system of the classical period. Audi’s primary project in The Good in the Right is explicitly framed as updating and strengthening Rossian intuitionism for the contemporary debate. He retains Ross’s structure of prima facie duties, self-evidence, and the claim that moral judgments can be non-inferentially justified, while extending, refining, and partially revising the framework. The convergence with the Field Synthesis’s historical account is direct: Audi is explicitly working within and from the same classical tradition the Field Synthesis identifies as the foundation of the contemporary revival.
Convergence — Self-evidence as the epistemological core. The Field Synthesis maps self-evidence as the central epistemological claim of classical intuitionism: moral principles are self-evident to careful reflection. Audi’s documented treatment of self-evidence converges with the field’s mapping of this concept while adding significant precision: he distinguishes different grades or levels of self-evidence, argues that self-evident propositions need not be immediately obvious to everyone, and holds that self-evidence is a property that reveals itself only under appropriate reflection. This is convergence with elaboration, not simple repetition.
Convergence — Foundationalism as the structural account of moral knowledge. The Field Synthesis maps foundationalism as the epistemological architecture within which non-inferential moral knowledge functions. Audi’s documented record is one of the most sustained defenses of foundationalism in contemporary analytic epistemology, developed independently of his intuitionism in The Structure of Justification and his epistemology textbook. His foundationalism is explicitly “moderate” and “fallibilistic”: basic beliefs need not be infallible or incorrigible; they are foundational in the structural sense that they are not inferentially derived from other beliefs, while remaining open to revision by coherence considerations and defeaters. He holds that foundationalism is the only tenable response to the epistemic regress problem. The convergence between his epistemological foundationalism and his ethical intuitionism is itself an architecturally significant finding: in Audi’s record, C3 (Ethical Intuitionism) and C4 (Foundationalism) are not independently held commitments but a unified epistemological system.
Divergence — The Kantian integration. The Field Synthesis does not map a Kantian-intuitionist synthesis as a recognized position within the contemporary revival. Audi develops precisely this: a “Kantian intuitionism” that preserves the Rossian structure of prima facie duties and self-evident moral principles while integrating a Kantian account of the basis of moral obligation. Critics in the Rationality and the Good volume note that Kant and Audi differ fundamentally concerning the place of principles in their accounts. The divergence is not between Audi and the Field Synthesis on intuitionism specifically but between Audi’s hybrid project and the field’s standard understanding of what the intuitionist position requires. Audi is working at the boundary of two traditions the field has typically kept separate.
Divergence — Epistemological strategy. The Field Synthesis maps two broad epistemological strategies within the contemporary intuitionist revival: defending moral intuition on terms specific to ethics (the mainstream Rossian approach), and grounding it in a general epistemological principle applicable to all appearances (Huemer’s Phenomenal Conservatism). Audi’s documented record firmly occupies the first strategy. He defends moral intuition on terms internal to ethics: self-evidence, prima facie duties, the structure of moral perception, the phenomenology of moral seemings. He does not ground the case for moral intuition in a general thesis about appearances. This divergence from Huemer’s approach within the same commitment is a significant finding for the Juxtaposition.
Addition — Moral perception as a distinct cognitive category. The Field Synthesis did not map moral perception as a specific cognitive capacity with its own epistemological analysis. Audi’s Moral Perception (2013) develops this as a book-length contribution: a defense of the claim that we can perceive moral properties in situations in a way that is analogous to, but distinct from, sensory perception and intellectual intuition. The book argues that moral perception is both rational and non-inferential, and develops its phenomenology, its epistemological status, and its relation to moral intuition across a comprehensive framework. This is the first book-length treatment of the topic in the contemporary literature, and it constitutes a genuine addition to what the Field Synthesis independently mapped.
Addition — The phenomenology of moral intuition developed in fine grain. The Field Synthesis maps moral intuition as a category without detailed phenomenological analysis. Audi’s 2022 paper in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice distinguishes multiple kinds of intuition — particularly episodic kinds called “seemings” — and examines four dimensions along which moral intuitions and moral judgments differ: content, basis, epistemic authority, and phenomenology. He compares moral intuition with moral perception as distinct cognitive types. This level of phenomenological precision was not anticipated by the Field Synthesis and constitutes a genuine contribution to the intuitionist research program.
Addition — The integration of moral epistemology with moral psychology. Audi’s documented record develops the connection between moral epistemology and moral psychology — the relation between intuition, motivation, and moral judgment — in ways the Field Synthesis did not map as a named contribution of the contemporary revival. His Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character explores the relation between reason and motivation, constructs a theory of intrinsic value and its place in moral obligation, and extends the foundationalist epistemological account to non-doxastic states including desires and intentions. A mental state is rational, on his account, if it is “well-grounded” in a source of justification — a formulation that extends foundationalism beyond belief to the full range of mental states relevant to moral action.
Extension — The modesty of “moderate” intuitionism. Audi consistently describes his position as “moderate” intuitionism, distinguishing it from stronger classical claims. His foundationalism is explicitly fallibilistic: basic beliefs can be revised. His account of self-evidence allows that self-evident propositions may not be immediately obvious. His integration of Kantian elements and his acknowledgment of coherence as a potential defeater all reflect a deliberate hedging of the classical intuitionist claims. Whether this modesty strengthens or weakens the intuitionist position — whether it represents a philosophically sound calibration or a concession to opponents that undermines the core claim — is a judgment the instrument does not issue.
Self-Audit — Step 3: All claims traceable to Audi’s documented public record with sources identified. Field Subordination has not occurred. Addition findings identified honestly. Coverage gap declared. Scope Drift has not occurred.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceeding to Step 4.
Step 4 — Juxtaposition
Part A — What the Field Shows
The contemporary field on ethical intuitionism is a debate conducted largely against intuitionism, by a well-resourced majority whose anti-realist and naturalist positions occupy the professional mainstream. The intuitionist minority is real and philosophically serious, but it is building uphill. The weight of sophisticated opposition — the evolutionary debunking challenge, the naturalist research program, the anti-realist tradition from emotivism through quasi-realism — creates a professional atmosphere in which defending direct, non-inferential moral knowledge requires sustained argument at multiple levels simultaneously: metaphysical (are there objective moral facts?), epistemological (can we access them non-inferentially?), and genealogical (can we account for our intuitions without invoking evolutionary debunking?).
The minority reviving intuitionism has made genuine philosophical progress since the 1990s. But the revival has not produced a single unified approach. It includes philosophers who ground intuitionism in general epistemological principles applicable across domains, philosophers who defend it on terms specific to ethics, philosophers who integrate it with Kantian elements, and philosophers who develop it through moral perception and phenomenological analysis. The field map shows a revival that is philosophically alive but internally diverse.
Part B — What Audi Shows Within the Field
Audi’s distinctive contribution within the field becomes visible against this background.
His first and most fundamental strategic choice is to stay within the ethical domain. Where Huemer grounds the case for moral intuition in a general epistemological principle — Phenomenal Conservatism, the thesis that appearing-true generates prima facie justification for any class of beliefs — Audi defends moral intuition on terms internal to ethics: self-evidence, prima facie duties, the phenomenology of moral seemings, the structure of moral perception. He does not outsource the defense to a general epistemological thesis. The advantage of this approach is that it keeps the defense of moral intuition from depending on the success of a contested general epistemological claim. The cost is that it must win the epistemological case on ethics-specific grounds, where the pressure from the evolutionary debunking challenge and the selection problem falls most directly.
His second distinctive move is the development of moral perception as an independent cognitive category. The classical intuitionist tradition distinguished moral intuition from sensory perception — intuition is rational and non-empirical, perception is sensory and empirical. Audi’s Moral Perception complicates this division by arguing that we can perceive moral properties in situations in a way that is analogous to sensory perception in structure while remaining non-empirical in character. This is philosophically significant: if moral perception is a genuine cognitive capacity, the mystery about how we access moral facts is reduced. We access them the way we access many other facts — by attending to the situation carefully. The book’s careful phenomenological analysis of what moral perceiving involves, distinguished from both sensory experience and intellectual intuition, is a major contribution the field had not previously produced at book length.
His third move is the Kantian integration. Rossian intuitionism and Kantian deontology have typically been treated as rival frameworks within the broader non-consequentialist tradition. Audi’s “Kantian intuitionism” attempts to show that the two traditions are more compatible than their standard opposition suggests. The intuitionist claim — that we have direct non-inferential access to prima facie moral duties — is integrated with a Kantian account of why those duties have the authority they do. Critics have questioned whether the integration is philosophically stable: Kant’s account of moral obligation is systematic and rationalist in a way that sits uneasily with the intuitionist’s commitment to an irreducible plurality of self-evident principles. But the attempt itself is an Addition to the field that was not anticipated by the Field Synthesis.
The fine-grained phenomenological work of the later career — the 2022 paper on the phenomenology of moral intuition, the detailed taxonomy of seemings and their epistemic dimensions — reflects a deliberate effort to make the intuitionist position more precise rather than simply more defended. Audi is not only arguing that moral intuition is epistemically legitimate; he is developing an account of what moral intuition actually is in sufficient detail that the account can be tested against philosophical and empirical challenges.
Part C — What the Juxtaposition Reveals
The SFI has now been run on two contemporary philosophers defending the same commitment: Michael Huemer and Robert Audi. The most significant finding of the juxtaposition is not what either philosopher reveals about intuitionism individually, but what the comparison between them reveals about the commitment itself.
Huemer and Audi are both active proponents of ethical intuitionism. Both are philosophically serious. Both engage the same field. And yet their argumentative strategies diverge at nearly every methodological choice.
Huemer grounds intuitionism in a general epistemological principle (Phenomenal Conservatism) that applies across all domains. Audi grounds it in ethics-specific concepts (self-evidence, prima facie duties, moral perception). Huemer’s strategy makes the case for moral intuition as strong as the case for any appearance-based belief; Audi’s strategy makes the case for moral intuition stand on its own merits within the moral domain. These are not minor tactical differences — they reflect fundamentally different views about where the weight of the argument should fall and what kind of philosophical move is most defensible.
Huemer uses moral intuition to defeat alternative epistemologies through a negative program of elimination. Audi builds a positive phenomenological and structural account of what moral intuition is and how it functions. Again, not minor differences: one approach tries to show that the alternatives all fail; the other tries to show that intuition itself has a richer structure than its critics acknowledge.
For the non-professional reader, the comparison reveals something important about philosophical commitments generally. A commitment is not a fixed position that all its defenders arrive at from the same direction. It is a claim that multiple independent philosophical approaches can reach from different starting points, using different methods, with different emphases. The fact that Huemer and Audi are both defending ethical intuitionism, while making quite different methodological choices, is evidence that the commitment has genuine philosophical depth — enough to sustain multiple serious approaches without collapsing into one. A commitment that can only be defended in one way is fragile; a commitment that multiple serious philosophers defend from independent directions is more robust.
The juxtaposition also makes visible something about what AI can and cannot contribute. The Field Synthesis mapped the contemporary landscape accurately. But it could not predict which argumentative strategies within the landscape two specific philosophers would choose, how they would diverge from each other, or what each would contribute that the field map did not independently contain. Those choices — Huemer’s Phenomenal Conservatism, Audi’s moral perception, Audi’s Kantian integration — are the product of philosophical judgment the field map cannot generate. The gap between the field and the philosophers is where the philosophical work happens.
Self-Audit — Step 4: Juxtaposition addressed to the non-professional reader. No verdicts on whether intuitionism is correct have been issued. Conclusions made available rather than imposed. Addition findings appear in Part B as evidence of the human judgment layer. Reader Condescension has not occurred.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceeding to Step 5.
Step 5 — Expert Validation Gap Declaration
Most consequential gap — Argumentative gap on the Kantian integration. Whether Audi’s integration of Kantian and intuitionist elements is philosophically stable is the most significant contested claim in his record that this instrument cannot evaluate. Critics in the Rationality and the Good volume argue that Kant and Audi differ fundamentally concerning the place of principles in their accounts, and that the integration may not survive close scrutiny. Whether Audi’s responses to those critics succeed requires philosophical judgment about both Kantian ethics and Rossian intuitionism that the instrument cannot supply.
Second gap — Argumentative gap on moral perception. Audi’s defense of moral perception as a genuine cognitive capacity analogous to sensory perception is a philosophically contested claim. Whether the analogy holds, whether moral perception is genuinely distinct from intellectual intuition, and whether the account successfully addresses the evolutionary debunking challenge — since moral perception faces the same genealogical pressure as moral intuition — are questions that require expert philosophical judgment. The instrument maps Audi’s position; it does not evaluate whether the position succeeds.
Third gap — Argumentative gap on moderate vs. strong intuitionism. Audi’s “moderate” and “fallibilistic” framing of intuitionism is a deliberate hedge against classical claims. Whether this modesty represents a philosophically defensible calibration or a concession that undermines the core intuitionist position is a genuine dispute within the revival. The Extension finding in Step 3 flagged this without evaluating it. Expert judgment is required to assess whether what Audi retains after the modesty qualifications is still a robust intuitionism.
Fourth gap — The Huemer-Audi comparison gap. The juxtaposition of Huemer’s and Audi’s strategies reveals that they diverge at fundamental methodological choices. The instrument has mapped those divergences but cannot evaluate which strategy is more philosophically defensible. Whether Phenomenal Conservatism or ethics-specific self-evidence provides a stronger foundation for intuitionism; whether a general or domain-specific epistemological defense is more robust against the evolutionary debunking challenge — these are questions requiring philosophical judgment neither the Field Synthesis nor the Philosopher Record Layer can settle.
Fifth gap — Coverage gap. The Good in the Right was ranged through secondary sources and the critical essays volume rather than directly in full. Chapter-level arguments may not be fully captured in the Philosopher Record Layer.
The reader should hold the juxtaposition of field, Huemer, and Audi as a structured map of the contemporary intuitionist landscape, not a settled account of it. What the two SFI runs together show is that defending a philosophical commitment is a matter of choosing among real methodological alternatives, each with costs and advantages, none of them obvious in advance. The map makes those choices visible. The reader evaluates what they find there.
Self-Audit — Step 5: Gaps are specific rather than generic. Most consequential gap (Kantian integration) identified and declared first. Declaration addressed to the reader. Gap Minimization has not occurred. Gap Inflation has not occurred.
Self-Audit Complete. SFI run complete.
Scholar Field Instrument (SFI) v1.0. Subject: Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame. Target commitment: Ethical Intuitionism. Instrument architecture: Dave Kelly. Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling’s corpus. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.