Conclusion: The Seeds of a Revolution in Moral Philosophy

Abstract

In this work I have offered a selective and perspectival — yet hopefully broad and sufficiently resourceful — reconstruction of James’s moral thought, along two main directions: the critique of ethics — understood as the advancement of prescriptive requirements on the moral life under the form of moral theories; and the companion presentation of an alternative way of framing its strategies and goals — which I have characterized, after James himself, as hortatory, sketching some of the ramified consequences and applications. These two synchronized moments, or movements, can be thought of as respectively the pars destruens and the pars construens of James’s ethics, which, as I have suggested, are at work in his moral writings and in a series of other texts (on psychology, truth, and the politics of the self) that are of ethical significance or relevance. Through the articulation of the interplay of these two registers and of their respective subtexts, I have traced an internal path in his work on ethics, showing its philosophical short-circuits with other areas of discourse. In particular, I have argued how the anti-theoretical theme intertwines with the most positive one of re-thinking the very shape and stakes of a philosophical reflection on ethics, showing how this critical stance is best understood against the background of a therapeutic and transformational register informing James’s metaphilosophy. Once rid of the allure and craving for systems of morality, and having denounced their many dangers and pitfalls, James sketches a novel, more promising path for ethics to explore and experiment with in the course of one’s ordinary life. This, I have contended, represents the gist of James’s work in moral philosophy and of his work as a moral philosopher.