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

by Michael Smith

• ISBN13: 9780521809870
• ISBN10: 0521809878
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-09-06
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Over the last fifteen years, 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.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Sources	xi
Introduction	1	(16)
Part One Moral Psychology
Internal Reasons	17	(26)
The Incoherence Argument: Reply to Schafer-Landau	43	(13)
Philosophy and Commonsense: The Case of Weakness of Will (co-authored with Jeanette Kennett)	56	(17)
Frog and Toad Lose Control (co-authored with Jeanette Kennett)	73	(11)
A Theory of Freedom and Responsibility	84	(30)
Rational Capacities	114	(22)
On Humeans, Anti-Humeans, and Motivation: A Reply to Pettit	136	(10)
Humeanism, Psychologism, and the Normative Story	146	(9)
The Possibility of Philosophy of Action	155	(26)
Part Two Meta-Ethics
Moral Realism	181	(27)
Does the Evaluative Supervene on the Natural?	208	(26)
Objectivity and Moral Realism: On the Significance of the Phenomenology of Moral Experience	234	(25)
In Defence of The Moral Problem: A Reply to Brink, Copp, and Sayre-McCord	259	(38)
Exploring the Implications of the Dispositional Theory of Value	297	(21)
Internalism's Wheel	318	(25)
Evaluation, Uncertainty, and Motivation	343	(16)
Ethics and the A Priori: A Modern Parable	359	(22)
Index	381