Abstract:
This thesis explores a neglected facet of Michael Smith’s meta-ethics in The Moral Problem. Although Smith claims to be a naturalist, he thinks that some popular accounts of a defensible naturalism in ethics fail. Thus he argues that a network analysis and reduction in the manner of Frank Jackson’s moral functionalism is vulnerable to a permutation problem and should be rejected. He also argues that a natural kind treatment of ethical terms forces the inappropriate categorisation of some possibilities as acceptable examples of moral relativism when they are not. By identifying and reconstructing the crucial role played in Smith’s argument by the notion of desiderative unity, the thesis argues that Smith’s own summary-style analysis and reduction of ethical terms either faces the collapse of his rationalist meta-ethical naturalism into a version of Jackson’s moral functionalism or requires that he treat ethical kinds as natural kinds, despite his arguments against such a possibility.