Angela Smith Distinguished Fellow

smitha@wlu.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Professor Smith joined the W&L Department of Philosophy in 2009 as an Associate Professor of Philosophy after teaching for ten years at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 2013 she was appointed to be the first Roger Mudd Professor of Ethics and the Founding Director of the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics, a position she held until 2018.  She teaches a variety of courses in moral and political philosophy as well as ancient philosophy.

Professor Smith’s research interests concern the connections between morality, moral agency, and moral responsibility. She is co-editor of the Oxford University Press book The Nature of Moral Responsibility (2015), and has published numerous articles exploring whether, and if so in what way, we are morally responsible for our attitudes – for our desires, emotions, beliefs, and other intentional mental states. In 2013 she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct summer research, as well as a Laurence S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellowship to spend the 2013-2014 school year at the Princeton University Center for Human Values.

Education

Ph.D. Philosophy, Harvard University (1999)

B.A. Philosophy and Political Science, Willamette University (1992)

Research

Moral responsibility, Moral Psychology, Ethical Theory, Political Philosophy, Applied Ethics

Teaching

Introduction to Ethics, Contemporary Moral Problems, Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Ethics of War, Metaethics, Virtue Ethics, Ethics of Globalization, Plato

Selected Publications

1. "Who's Afraid of a Little Resentment?" in Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol. 6, ed. D. Shoemaker (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2019).
2. "Implicit Bias, Moral Agency, and Moral Responsibility," in The Norton Introduction to Philosophy, 2nd ed., ed. G. Rosen, Alex Byrne, J. Cohen, E. Harman, S. Shiffrin (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2018): 772-780.
3. "Unconscious Omissions, Reasonable Expectations, and Responsibility," in The Ethics and Law of Omissions, ed. D. Nelkin and S. Rickless (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): 36-60.
4. “Attitudes, Tracing, and Control,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 32:2 (May 2015): 115-132.
5. “Responsibility as Answerability,” Inquiry 58:2 (January 2015): 99-126.
6. “Moral Blame and Moral Protest,”in Blame: Its Nature and Norms, ed.Justin Coates and Neal Tognazinni (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): 27-48.
7. “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: In Defense of a Unified Account,” Ethics 122 (April 2012): 575-589.
8. “The Trouble with Tolerance,” in Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar, and Samuel Freeman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): 179-199.
9. “Guilty Thoughts,” in Morality and the Emotions, ed. Carla Bagnoli (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): 235-256.
10. “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment,” Philosophical Studies 138:3 (April 2008): 367-392.
11. “Character, Blameworthiness, and Blame: Comments on George Sher’s In Praise of Blame,” Philosophical Studies 137:1 (January 2008): 31-39.
12. “On Being Responsible and Holding Responsible,” Journal of Ethics 11:4 (December 2007): 465-484.
13. “Making a Difference, Making a Statement, and Making Conversation,” in a Symposium on John Martin Fischer’s My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility, Philosophical Books 47:3 (July 2006): 213-221.
14. “Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life,” Ethics 115:2 (January 2005): 236-271.
15. “Conflicting Attitudes, Moral Agency, and Conceptions of the Self,” Philosophical Topics Vol. 32, Nos. 1 & 2 (Spring & Fall 2004): 331-352.
16. “Identification and Responsibility,” in Moral Responsibility and Ontology, ed. A. van den Beld (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000): 233-246.
17. “Knowledge and Expertise in the Early Platonic Dialogues,” Archiv für Geschichte Der Philosophie, Band 80,Heft 2 (1998): 129-161.