Abstract

According to a received understanding of classical pragmatism, William James was not a moral and political philosopher. It has been assumed that he wrote only one article on ethics, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”. In a sense this assumption is true; there is no book by him on ethics analogous to his major works addressing topics in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophical psychology, philosophy of religion, and theory of truth – or analogous to other classical pragmatists’, such as John Dewey’s, books on ethics. However, James scholars have increasingly, and in my view...