Todd Lekan

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.

Jim Campbell's new book Experiencing William James: Belief in a Pluralistic World is one of the best philosophical examinations of all areas of William James' work through a close sympathetic attention to the James texts themselves. Campbell writes well and demonstrates a deep familiarity with James' corpus. Moreover, Campbell has a good command of the writings of James' interlocutors and venerable commentators. I recommend keeping a bookmark on the endnotes. They constitute an entire bonus text, reminding me of James' own approach in Varieties of Religious Experience. They serve as a stage for diverse voices to state reactions and raise questions about the topics Campbell explores.To be sure, there are a...

Recently, some philosophers working in applied moral philosophy have concluded that the received rule-based normative theories are inadequate guides for deliberation about concrete moral problems for at least two reasons. First, such problems seem to involve heterogeneous considerations whose normative import can only be assessed in light of attention to the particular circumstances that occasion moral doubt and conflict. Second, moral norms seem to be subject to re-interpretation and modification as a result of reflection on moral problems. Thus, some argue that the concern in moral deliberation should be with interpreting the relevant particulars of cases, not attempting to deduce judgments from some fixed principle or procedure. One might think that focus on particular cases is tantamount to the rejection of normative theory. Resisting that conclusion, this dissertation develops a theory of moral norms and judgment that accounts for the primacy of the interpretive nature of moral judgment and the mutability of moral norms. The core idea of the theory is that we should conceive of moral norms as concrete socio-psychological entities. Like other kinds of practical knowledge, moral norms arise out of problem-solving events and are modifiable during the course of their use. ;The argument strategy of the dissertation is to first set out a general account of practical knowledge and value that undermines some fundamental assumptions about practical reason held by consequentialist theories and provides the groundwork for a theory of justification. Then I turn to the critical task of arguing against neo-Kantian attempts to consign interpretation to the level of "applying" moral norms, holding that the justification of moral norms must be accounted for by some fixed, formal testing procedure. My analysis shows that interpretation bears on the concept of moral justification in addition to moral deliberation. It also reveals the inadequacy of paradigms of moral reasoning modeled on the non-problematic cases of deliberation. I then offer my positive interpretive account of moral argument and justification. Finally, I work out implications of my view of moral argument for the special case of the practice of social criticism.

many of william james's ethical writings celebrate appreciation and respect for diverse ways of life. For example, in the essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings", James argues that it is a worthy endeavor to strive to overcome blindness to alien values in order to appreciate their rich diversity. In the essay "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life", he defends an inclusivity principle enjoining us to create a world that allows for the greatest diversity of ideals and demand satisfaction. James writes: Since everything which is demanded is by that fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy (since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in...

This paper defends a broadly Aristotelean account of character friendship that maintains that the impersonal value of acquiring a virtuous character is the ultimate basis for our reasons for caring about friends. This view of friendship appears to conflict with the entrenched intuition that viewing our connections to particular friends as merely contingent occasions for the cultivation of virtue is alienating and undesirable. I argue that far from being an alienating feature of character friendships, a focused appreciation of the contingent nature of friendships represents a morally sound attitude of honest self-acceptance. On my account, honest selfacceptance is an impersonal value—an ideal that anyone has a reason to cultivate. Although the ideal is impersonal, its content specifi es that we appreciatively acknowledge the particular contributions that friends make to the development of virtue.

Stuart Rosenbaum’s book Recovering Integrity: Moral Thought in American Pragmatism is a creative and daring exploration of a pragmatist account of integrity as a central moral value. Rosenbaum offers an expansive treatment of integrity connecting it to wide-ranging topics: racism, religious intolerance, suicide, environmental values, the problem of induction, and contemporary quantum mechanics. Given this diversity, I confine my remarks to what I regard as central insights of the book as well as a few disagreements that I have with Rosenbaum. Nevertheless, I do want to stress that there are many creative insights in this book. If they do not get mention, it is not due to lack of merit but to the limitations...

abstract In this paper I argue that the standoff between justice and care approaches to animal ethics presents us with a false dilemma. We should take justice's focus on reasoning from principles, and care's use of sympathetic awareness, as two integrated deliberative capacities necessary for the consideration of arguments for extending moral concern to animals. Such an integrated approach rests on a plausible account of the psychology of moral deliberation. I develop my argument as follows. Section I summarizes the nature of the debate between justice and care approaches to animal ethics, focusing on Brian Luke's arguments against justice approaches. Section II provides pro‐justice rebuttals to Luke's objections. These rebuttals, while largely successful against Luke's objections, do not account for the intuition that sympathy does play a central epistemological role in animal ethics. Section III explains how sympathy cognitively simulates the perspective of the other, and thus can play an epistemological role in animal ethics. I argue that the abilities to simulate the perspective of the other and to reason from moral principles can complement each other. In section IV, I argue that though it may not be desirable to use both sympathy and reasoning from principles in all moral deliberation, it is a desirable aim when offering, and considering, moral arguments for what I will term the “extensionist project” of extending over moral concern to animals. I make this idea plausible by elucidating the claim that arguments for this project are best thought of as second‐order deliberations about our first‐order deliberative life.

In this paper I seek to make sense of James's account of strenuous moral living, and the role that theological belief plays in the strenuous life. I will show that some of his arguments for the moral necessity of belief in the "theological postulate" are not tenable, and that his case is stronger if his conclusion is weakened to the claim that theological belief may be necessary for some, but not all serious moral agents. I suggest that by drawing on the rich insights about ethical attention in works such as James's Talks to Teachers, we can make better sense of the theological postulate as strategy for attending to one's agency in a way that unleashes strenuous moral action

In the title of the essay by the same name, James gives this answer to the question “What Makes a Life Significant:” “The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing—the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.—And, whatever or wherever that life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.”1 Significant lives, therefore, are comprised of two married components: they are based on consciously chosen ideals, which are energetically pursued with a devoted discipline. James’ metaphor of “marriage” richly indicates the relationship between ideals and...

It does seem that beliefs and desires slip back into such “externalist” accounts of reasons precisely when we ask the question of why something is a reason for a person. That the threatening tornado is a reason for you to speed is plausibly tied to your desire not to die and your belief that speeding is the best way to avoid dying in this situation. Bittner agrees that people are “reason selectors,” meaning that a state becomes a reason for an agent because of features of the agent. However, he insists that the reason is normally not a feature of the agent.