Pragmatic Morality: Living life in the Breach

1. "Moral experience" as one of the irreducible components of lived experience

• world forces us to make judgements about good and evil, responsibility and forgiveness, beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice, just as much as it forces us to have a philosophy
• These are real—as real as anything

2. Rejection of determinism and the pessimism it engenders…

• Determinism: everything is already fixed by its previous causes. The future will simply unfold the way it will based on what causes exist now.
• This denies the principle of radical empiricism: The past does not entirely fix the future.
• The universal is open and pluralistic, vulnerable, liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they act wrongly.
• Therefore, the world is not necessarily good—it holds the possibility of good. There is no guarantee of good, just its possibility.
  • Naïve optimism is the optimism that believes that everything will work out, that good is guaranteed (ultimately) in the universe.
  • James calls his view "meliorism"—we can make things better, and we should try.

3. Components of the moral life

• We live in a Pluralistic universe: it is open, dynamic, resisting some "final" analysis and ultimate formulations. None of our explanations of it are complete.
  • James' view is not subjectivism: we don't make our values up. We just don't see the whole. My values can be good, and so can yours. Because both only tell part of the story (which is all each of us can tell!)
  • A morally perfect life is not possible.
• Terror: moral commitment is an inevitable part of life, but it is only partial. My moral commitments are only as good as that of others.
  • "False" remedy of philosophers: try to define the "summum bonum." This assumes we can know the whole--at least according to James.
  • Pragmatic remedy : the "strenuous mood." The strenuous mood is the constant confrontation of the question of how we ought to live.
• The Strenuous Mood
• It involves keeping the stream of moral experience open and treating others with respect
• It is sensitive to human moral predicament—that we cannot "know" the full truth about morality.
• It is a return to life/engaged with the world (pragmatic)
• It is a life of sweat and effort, a life of heroic struggle
• It involves risk and uncertainty—because there is no moral certitude
• It is "Meliorist"—views the world as changeable by human action and possibly changeable for the better. There is no moral fate laid out in advance, either moral doom (pessimism) or moral salvation (naïve optimism).
• It places responsibility for moral condition of the world on each of us

Why be meliorists?

• meiorism isn't the "true" theory—there is no true theory to ethics; cannot be adopted on intellectual grounds—appropriate passions need stimulation by experience
• must be adopted "pragmatically"—it opens us up to action
• a commitment—a heroic commitment. To life and to ourselves
• Requires "faith," = courage in practial affairs.