1st Edition
William James and the Moral Life Responsible Self-Fashioning
This book offers a compelling new interpretation of James’ moral philosophy: an "ethics of responsible self-fashioning." James’ performative writing style articulates this conception by showing how moral inquiry serves both social and personal transformation.
James the social moral philosopher seeks to create an inclusive moral order through expansion of sympathetic concern among those committed to different ideals. James the existential moral philosopher defends the right to adopt hope-grounding metaphysical beliefs which encourage strenuous moral action in the face of evil and suffering. The power of James’ ethics is demonstrated by its application to current discussions about the status of marginalized nonhuman animals and that of the cognitively disabled.
William James and the Moral Life is of interest to a wide variety of ethicists and has special appeal to scholars and advanced students in moral philosophy, social philosophy, pragmatism, and American philosophy.
Introduction: Why William James and Ethics?
Chapter One: Pragmatist Moral Philosophy and Moral Life: Embracing the Tensions
Chapter Two: Ideals and Significant Lives
Chapter Three: The Sources of Moral Agency
Chapter Four: Existential Deliberation
Chapter Five: Moving Marginal Subjects Into Focus
Conclusion
Biography
Todd Lekan is Associate Dean and Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina Lancaster, USA.
The literature on James’s ethics has expanded significantly over the past decade, but Lekan’s book is undoubtably the best treatment we have seen of this important topic yet. Rather than merely glossing over the tensions between the theoretical ethics James presents in "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" and the more ‘existential’ themes that run through the rest of James’s corpus, Lekan’s account of ‘responsible self-fashioning’ does a remarkable job of showing how these two strands in James’s ethical thought can be harmonized. It’s an impressive achievement that is sure to anchor future work on the subject for years to come.
—Henry Jackman, York University
Many scholars have acknowledged the ethical insights of William James, but few have appreciated the depth and breadth of his moral philosophy. In this work Todd Lekan successfully argues that taking an expansive view of James’s work—not just essays like "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" or "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" but works like Pragmatism, Varieties of Religious Experience, and "The Will to Believe" (among others)—demonstrates a robust and cohesive pragmatic ethical theory. As such, this book speaks not only to those interested in American philosophy but scholars studying comprehensive and practical moral thought, writ-large, and places both Lekan (as a contemporary scholar) and James (as historically important philosopher) squarely into any vital conversation on ethics and ethically challenging situations.
—D. Micah Hester, PhD, chair/professor of Medical Humanities & Bioethics at UAMS and co-author of On James (2004)
