Ethics and the A Priori

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.

• Influential essays by a pre-eminent philosopher of the mind • Essays collected together for the first time in a single volume

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.