Michael A. Smith

Michael Andrew Smith (born in Melbourne, Australia on 23 July 1954) is an Australian philosopher who teaches at Princeton University (since September 2004). 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. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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. He has held teaching appointments at various universities, including Wadham College, Oxford (1984), Monash (1984-5; 1989–94), Princeton (1985-9; 2004-present), and the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (1995-2004).

In 2000, Smith's book The Moral Problem (1994) received The American Philosophical Association's first APA Book Prize for excellence in scholarship. 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 therefore not objective) or they cannot motivate us (and therefore not practical).

...
Wikipedia