Experiencing William James by Campbell James;

Author:Campbell, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

CHAPTER 6

Ethics and Social Thought

This chapter considers the nature and importance of James’s moral thinking. It begins with his 1891 essay, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in which he addresses fundamental aspects of moral living. A background theme in this essay, which becomes more prominent in two 1899 essays, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes a Life Significant,” is his dual emphasis on advancing personal fulfillment and on respecting the life plans of others. His goal in all three essays is to attempt to forge a community of tolerance based on recognizing and overcoming our animal partiality. Next, a few instances of his approach to specific moral problems will be considered. Finally, in the last of his central ethical essays, “The Moral Equivalent of War” of 1910, we see him exploring the issues of violence and warfare from a social-psychological, rather than from a political, standpoint. James admits that the roots of our militarism are to be found in the inherited tendencies of human nature, but he offers a possibility for discharging these violent impulses through socially valuable struggles to modify our natural environment. A consideration of these themes makes clear the value of his ethical writings for helping us to understand more about ourselves, about our attempts at bettering human existence, and about the complex nature of morality itself.

Philosophy and the Moral Life

James begins the essay, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” with an explicit statement of its aims. “The main purpose of this paper,” he writes, “is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance.” On the contrary, he continues, by means of our ongoing contributions to “the race’s moral life” each of us helps “to determine the content of ethical philosophy.” As a result, we should anticipate no final truths in ethics “any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say” (WB 141). James then separates his larger topic into a series of three questions. The first, or psychological, question explores the origins of our opinions about right and wrong. The second, or metaphysical, question—what is now called the meta-ethical question—examines the meanings of ethical terms. Finally, the casuistic question considers how we evaluate particular actions as either right or wrong.

We can begin with the metaphysical question, and consider the meaning of ethical terms. The answer that James offers is naturalistic: morality is not a supernatural matter to be discussed in terms of such notions as “God’s will” or “sin” or “damnation.” Morality is, rather, a matter of human well-being. He rejects as “absurd” the notion that events can be right or wrong in themselves. “Can murders and treacheries,” he wonders, “considered as mere outward happenings, or motions of matter, be bad without anyone to feel their badness?” For that matter, he continues, “could paradise properly be good in the absence of a sentient principle by which the goodness was perceived?” (WB 129).

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