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

This long awaited collection comprises some of the most influential of Michael Smith's essays.

Michael Smith (Author)

9780521007733, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 6 September 2004

402 pages
22.9 x 16.1 x 2.1 cm, 0.55 kg

Michael Smith has written a series of seminal essays about the nature of belief and desire, the status of normative judgment, 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 of motivating reasons, the nature of normative 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 judgment, the practicality requirement on moral judgment and non-cognivist. This collection will be of interest to students in philosophy and psychology.

Introduction
Part I. Moral Psychology: 1. Internal reasons
2. The incoherence argument: reply to Schafer-Landau
3. Philosophy and commonsense: the case of weakness of will
4. Frog and toad lose control
5. A theory of freedom and responsibility
6. Rational capacities
7(i) On Humeans, anti-humeans and motivation: a reply to Pettit
7(ii) Humeanism, psychologism, and the normative story
8. The possibility of philosophy of action
Part II. Meta-Ethics: 9. Moral realism
10. Objectivity and moral realism: on the significance of the phenomenology of moral experience
11. In defence of The Moral Problem: a reply to Brink, Copp and Sayre-McCord
12. Exploring the implications of the dispositional theory of value
13. Does the evaluative supervene on the natural?
14. Internalism's wheel
15. Evaluation, uncertainty, and motivation
16. Ethics and the a priori: a modern parable.

Subject Areas: Psychology [JM], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ], Philosophy of mind [HPM], Analytical philosophy & Logical Positivism [HPCF5]