Abstract
Like his theory of truth, William James’s view on moral truth is also confusing. On the one hand, he declared that “there is a truth to be ascertained” (James, 1979) in ethics and the best act is the one that makes for the best whole, in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfaction. However, on the other hand, he argued that there is no final truth in ethics and a stable and systematic moral world cannot exist unless there is a divine thinker. For many scholars, these two different statements appearing seem conflict to each other. However, to my knowledge, the alleged contradiction is a misunderstanding of James’s thought. In this essay, I am going to clarify James’s view on moral truth from a pragmatic perspective and show that James’s view on moral truth is based on his understanding of pragmatic truth and his pluralistic world view, a better approach to interpreting his view of moral truth is to highlight his key points of pragmatism and pluralism.
Highlights
As one of the representatives of pragmatism, Williams James was well-known as a scientist, a psychologist, a religious believer and a public speaker; few scholars treated him as a moral philosopher
Since moral truth the empirical result of moral inquiry, unless we explore all of the moral experience, there is no way to gain the final truth
I am allowed to restate my argument with confidence: there is no inconsistency in James’s statements of moral truth; his expression of moral truth exactly shows his overall position on morality
Summary
As one of the representatives of pragmatism, Williams James was well-known as a scientist, a psychologist, a religious believer and a public speaker; few scholars treated him as a moral philosopher. For James, “a truth to be ascertained” does not equal a truth to be discovered which is made up dogmatically in advance What he expressed here is that as a moral philosopher, unlike a skeptic, believing a possibility of finding the final truth in ethics is a promise to make our hard working sensible, and a pre-assumption for us to understand and explain our moral experiences. Following this sentence, James added that “that truth cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws, or an abstract ‘moral reason’, but can only exist in act, or in the shape of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found” (James, 1979). Zhang truth fits in with his pragmatism and his overall philosophy
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