Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James

The crucial bid of Sarin Marchetti's new book on William James is summarized by the title of his introduction: ‘William James, the Moral Philosopher’. The book argues that James was through and through a moral philosopher in that his work always addresses moral matters even where we would not expect it to be doing so. Marchetti wishes to use this interpretation to help establish the viability of metaphilosophically refashioning the project of moral philosophy itself as ‘a non-foundational but at the same time critical conception of ethical and philosophical reflection’ (p. 2). The crux of the book is laid out in the Introduction and ch. 1, where Marchetti christens James’ ethics as ‘exhortative or hortatory’ in orientation (p. 18). By this I take Marchetti to mean an ethics that is primarily facilitative rather than prescriptive. On this view, ethics would be energizing, and thereby an antidote to moral detachment (Gerald Myers noted rightly that the opposite of ‘moral’ for James was not ‘immoral’ but ‘demoralized’ [1986, 51]). For Marchetti, this revisionist conception of ‘the form of moral philosophy’ is expressed in the ‘therapeutic and transformative character’ of James’ work as he reads it (p. 24).

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