Michael Smith - Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics

Ethics and the A Priori

Over the last fifteen years, Michael Smith has written a series of essays about the nature of belief and desire, the status of normative judgement, and the relevance of the views we take on both these topics to the accounts we give of our nature as free and responsible agents.

This long-awaited collection comprises some of the most influential of Smith's essays. Among the topics covered are: the Humean theory ofmotivating reasons, the nature ofnormative reasons, Williams and Korsgaard on internal and external reasons, the nature of self-control, weakness of will, compulsion, freedom, responsibility, the analysis of our rational capacities, moral realism, the dispositional theory of value, the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative, the error theory, rationalist treatments of moral judgement, the practicality requirement on moral judgement, and cognitivist versus non-cognitivist accounts of moral judgement.

Collected for the first time in a single volume, the essays will be of interest to students in philosophy and psychology.

Michael Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

General editor ERNEST SOSA (Brown University)

Advisory editors:

JONATHAN DANCY (University of Reading)

JOHN HALDANE (University of St. Andrews)

GILBERT HARMAN (Princeton University)

FRANK JACKSON (Australian National University)

WILLIAM G. LYCAN (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

SYDNEY SHOEMAKER (Cornell University)

JUDITH J. THOMSON (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Recent Titles:

ANDRE GALLOIS The World Without the Mind Within

FRED FELDMAN Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert

LAURENCE BONJOUR In Defense (?f Pure Reason

DAVID LEWIS Papers in Philosophical Logic

WAYNE DAVIS Implicature

DAVID COCKBURN Other Times

DAVID LEWIS Papers on Metaphysics and Epistemology

RAYMOND MARTIN Se f Concern

ANNETTE BARNES Seeing Through Sef Deception

MICHAEL BRATMAN Faces (f Intention

AMIE THOMASSON Fiction and Metaphysics

DAVID LEWIS Papers on Ethics and Social Philosophy

FRED DRETSKE Perception, Knowledge, and Belief

LYNNE RUDDER BAKER Persons and Bodies

JOHN GRECO Putting Skeptics in Their Place

RUTH GARRETT MILLIKAN On Clear and Confused Ideas

DERK PEREBOOM Living without Free Will

BRIAN ELLIS Scientific Essentialism

ALAN H. GOLDMAN Practical Rules

CHRISTOPHER HILL Thought and World

ANDREW NEWMAN The Correspondence Theory of Truth

ISHTIYAQUE HAJI Deontic Morality and Control

WAYNE A. DAVIS Meaning, Expression and Thought

PETER RAILTON Facts, Values, and Norms

JANE HEAL Mind, Reason and Imagination

JONATHAN L. KVANVIG The Value (f Knowledge and the Pursuit f Understanding

ANDREW MELNYK A Physicalist Manifesto

WILLIAM S. ROBINSON Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness

For Jeremy, Julian, and Samuel

Ethics and the A Priori

SELECTED ESSAYS ON MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
AND META-ETHICS

MICHAEL SMITH

Princeton University