External links
- Smith's web page - at Princeton.
- The Best of Michael Smith - Constantine Sandis' review of 'Ethics and the A Priori'
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Michael A. Smith | |
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| Born | Michael Andrew Smith 23 July 1954 |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Education | Monash University (BA, MA) University of Oxford (BPhil, DPhil) |
| Awards | Centenary Medal, APA book prize, AAA&S Fellow |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
| Institutions | Princeton University |
| Thesis | Motivation and Moral Realism (1989) |
| Doctoral advisor | Simon Blackburn |
Main interests | Moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, political philosophy, moral psychology |
Michael Andrew Smith (born 23 July 1954) is an Australian philosopher who teaches at Princeton University (since September 2004). [1] He taught previously at the University of Oxford, Monash University, and was a member of the Philosophy Program at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is the author of a number of important books and articles in moral philosophy.
Smith earned his B.A. and M.A. in philosophy at Monash University, while his BPhil and DPhil were acquired at Oxford University under the direction of Simon Blackburn. [2] He has held teaching appointments at various universities, including Wadham College, Oxford (1984), Monash (1984–5; 1989–94), Princeton (1985–89; 2004–present), and the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (1995–2004). [1]
In 2000, Smith's book The Moral Problem (1994) received The American Philosophical Association's first APA Book Prize for excellence in scholarship. [3] Smith is considered to be one of the most important philosophers working in meta-ethics, and is one of the main proponents of a Neo-Humean approach to practical reason.
In The Moral Problem Smith diagnoses a longstanding tension between the apparent objectivity and practicality of moral judgments. The idea of moral objectivity is that "it is a distinctive feature of engaging in moral practice that the participants are concerned to get the answers to moral questions right." (1994 p. 5) Moral judgments are thought to be practical because they are thought to motivate those who accept them. But according to the Humean theory of motivation, a theory that Smith defends in chapter 4, it is not possible for a belief (a judgement about a matter of fact) to motivate someone without the presence of some antecedently held desire. Thus, if moral judgments are beliefs that motivate, they can only be beliefs about how to get something that we already want. But moral judgments, such as the judgment that murder is wrong, are not judgments about how to get something that we already want. Therefore, either they are not beliefs at all (and are therefore not objective) or they cannot motivate us (and are therefore not practical).
Hume famously claimed that reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passions. Humeans or Neo-Humeans do not typically hold strictly to Hume's views because, for one thing, they do not think of the passions in the same way that Hume did. Nonetheless, Humeans take their inspiration from Hume in claiming that reason alone is insufficient to motivate us to act. Often this claim is expressed in terms of beliefs and desires, and it is claimed that beliefs are mental states that are insufficient for motivation. Smith gives an analysis of action whereby in order for anything to count as an action at all, it must be explicable in terms of a belief-desire pair. He defends this account against objections by appeal to a dispositional conception of desire.
In later work, Smith gives an anti-Humean account of normative reasons. He thus claims to solve the moral problem by giving an account of moral judgments in terms of what one would desire if one were fully rational. As such, he attempts to maintain a form of moral realism while still accounting for the motivational force of moral judgments.
Smith was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1997 [4] and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. [5]
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David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist who was best known for his highly influential system of empiricism, philosophical skepticism and metaphysical naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist.
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Rationality is the quality of being guided by or based on reason. In this regard, a person acts rationally if they have a good reason for what they do, or a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence. This quality can apply to an ability, as in a rational animal, to a psychological process, like reasoning, to mental states, such as beliefs and intentions, or to persons who possess these other forms of rationality. A thing that lacks rationality is either arational, if it is outside the domain of rational evaluation, or irrational, if it belongs to this domain but does not fulfill its standards.
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Virtue ethics is an approach that treats virtue and character as the primary subjects of ethics, in contrast to other ethical systems that put consequences of voluntary acts, principles or rules of conduct, or obedience to divine authority in the primary role.
The is–ought problem, as articulated by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, arises when one makes claims about what ought to be that are based solely on statements about what is. Hume found that there seems to be a significant difference between positive statements and prescriptive or normative statements, and that it is not obvious how one can coherently transition from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones. Hume's law or Hume's guillotine is the thesis that an ethical or judgmental conclusion cannot be inferred from purely descriptive factual statements.
The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Immanuel Kant's three critiques, published in 1788. Hence, it is sometimes referred to as the "second critique". It follows on from Kant's first critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, and is one of his major works on moral philosophy. While Kant had already published one significant work in moral philosophy, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the Critique of Practical Reason was intended to develop his account of the will as determinable by the moral law alone, place his ethical views within the larger framework of his system of critical philosophy, and expand on certain themes in his moral philosophy such as the feeling of respect for the moral law and the concept of the highest good.
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Cornell realism is a view in meta-ethics, associated with the work of Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink, who earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University. There is no recognized and official statement of Cornell realism, but several theses are associated with the view.
Projectivism or projectionism in philosophy involves attributing (projecting) qualities to an object as if those qualities actually belong to it. It is a theory for how people interact with the world and has been applied in both ethics and general philosophy. It is derived from the Humean idea that all judgements about the world derive from internal experience, and that people therefore project their emotional state onto the world and interpret it through the lens of their own experience. Projectivism can conflict with moral realism, which asserts that moral judgements can be determined from empirical facts, i.e., some things are objectively right or wrong.
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Kantian ethics refers to a deontological ethical theory developed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant that is based on the notion that "I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law." It is also associated with the idea that "it is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will." The theory was developed in the context of Enlightenment rationalism. It states that an action can only be moral if it is motivated by a sense of duty, and its maxim may be rationally willed a universal, objective law.
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Moral rationalism, also called ethical rationalism, is a view in meta-ethics according to which moral principles are knowable a priori, by reason alone. Some prominent figures in the history of philosophy who have defended moral rationalism are Plato and Immanuel Kant. Perhaps the most prominent figure in the history of philosophy who has rejected moral rationalism is David Hume. Recent philosophers who have defended moral rationalism include Richard Hare, Christine Korsgaard, Alan Gewirth, and Michael Smith.
Humeanism refers to the philosophy of David Hume and to the tradition of thought inspired by him. Hume was an influential Scottish philosopher well known for his empirical approach, which he applied to various fields in philosophy. In the philosophy of science, he is notable for developing the regularity theory of causation, which in its strongest form states that causation is nothing but constant conjunction of certain types of events without any underlying forces responsible for this regularity of conjunction. This is closely connected to his metaphysical thesis that there are no necessary connections between distinct entities. The Humean theory of action defines actions as bodily behavior caused by mental states and processes without the need to refer to an agent responsible for this. The slogan of Hume's theory of practical reason is that "reason is...the slave of the passions". It restricts the sphere of practical reason to instrumental rationality concerning which means to employ to achieve a given end. But it denies reason a direct role regarding which ends to follow. Central to Hume's position in metaethics is the is-ought distinction. It states that is-statements, which concern facts about the natural world, do not imply ought-statements, which are moral or evaluative claims about what should be done or what has value. In philosophy of mind, Hume is well known for his development of the bundle theory of the self. It states that the self is to be understood as a bundle of mental states and not as a substance acting as the bearer of these states, as is the traditional conception. Many of these positions were initially motivated by Hume's empirical outlook. It emphasizes the need to ground one's theories in experience and faults opposing theories for failing to do so. But many philosophers within the Humean tradition have gone beyond these methodological restrictions and have drawn various metaphysical conclusions from Hume's ideas.
