Born and raised in Australia, Michael Smith studied philosophy at Monash University (1972-1979), and then became an English and Politics teacher at Melbourne Boys High School (1980-1981). The award of a Commonwealth Overseas Scholarship enabled him to continue his studies at Oxford University (1981-1984). While at Oxford, Smith read for the BPhil and DPhil in philosophy, working closely with R. M. Hare, Jennifer Hornsby, and Simon Blackburn. Blackburn supervised his DPhil thesis, so on Philosophy Tree his heritage traces back, via Blackburn, to Casimir Lewy, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittengstein, and Bertrand Russell.

After a period as Stipendiary Lecturer at Wadham College during his final year at Oxford, Smith went on to teach philosophy at Monash University (1984-5), Princeton University (1985-9), and Monash University again (1989-94), before moving to a full-time research position in philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University (1995-2004). (The latter move occasioned his then-colleague at Monash, Richard Holton, to write some amusing doggerel for him.) Appointed initially to a Senior Fellowship in RSSS, Smith became Professor of Philosophy in 1997, and Head of the Division of Philosophy and Law at RSSS in 1998. While at ANU he was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities in 1997, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2000. In 2003, he was awarded the Centenary Medal for service to Australian society and humanities in the study of philosophy.

In 2004, Smith returned to teach at Princeton, where he was named McCosh Professor of Philosophy in 2009. You can find out a little about McCosh's own philosophical work by reading David Sanford's very funny introduction when Smith gave the Claire Miller Lecture at Chapel Hill in 2011. (Whatever you make of McCosh's own philosophical achievements, as Princeton’s eleventh president (1868-88) he was an admirably vocal critic of slavery and the Confederacy, so much so that he clashed with white southern students attending the college after the Civil War.) While at Princeton, Smith served as Chair of the Philosophy Department 2012-18; he was a member of the Executive Committee of the University Center for Human Values 2004-2024, serving as Acting Director of UCHV 2020-21; a member of the Committee for Film Studies 2014-2024, serving as Chair 2019-2021; and Associated Faculty Member in the Department of Politics 2009-2025. In 2012 he was awarded Princeton's Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award. In 2013 he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016 he received the Distinguished Alumni Award for the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, where he is currently Adjunct Professor in the Philosophy Department, a position he will occupy until the end of 2025. In 2023 Smith received Princeton's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.

Smith's current research focuses on topics in ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of action, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and aesthetics. His John Locke Lectures, given at Oxford University in 2017, span all these topics, and those lectures will appear in due course under the title A Standard of Judgement. Smith is also the author of The Moral Problem (1994) (which won the American Philosophical Association Book Prize), and Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics (2004) (which was the subject of an off-beat review by Constantine Sandis). He is also the co-author of Mind, Morality and Explanation: Selected Collaborations (2004), a collection of papers written in various combinations by Smith and his two long-time colleagues, Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit (whose collaborative work inspired David Estlund to make a morphing gif of the three of them).

Smith has been known to sing and play guitar at Philosophy Department parties, events elsewhere on the Princeton campus, and at various philosophy conferences. A video of Smith singing and playing his wife's favorite song at Princeton's Reunions long weekend in 2015 can be found here. This musical Reunions' event was organized by his colleague Robert George, with whom Smith has co-taught and played guitar for many years. Here is a video of them playing together at that same event. A video of him accompanying Nomy Arpaly at CHill Meta in 2016 can be seen here, and one of him and Kim Girman celebrating Chuck Beitz's achievements as Director of UCHV in 2016 can be seen here. In 2024 colleagues at Princeton organized and performed at Michaelfest!, and at the annual Holiday Party in that same year his colleagues in Philosophy farewelled him with a version of Woody Guthrie's “So Long, It's Been Good to Know Ya”.

For more information about Michael Smith, see the entry about him in Companion to Philosophy in Australia (2010), or the interview with him in The Antipodean Philosopher Volume 2: Interviews with Australian and New Zealand Philosophers (2012). His Philosophy Alumni Lecture, given at Princeton via Zoom in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, can be seen here. A larger format version of Smith's homepage photo can be found by clicking here.