A Defense of William James on Moral Truth

摘要

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 interpret ing his view of moral truth is to highlight his key points of pragmatism and pluralism.