Chapter 1

 

THE ETHICS OF PROMETHEANISM

            James's promethean pragmatism attempts to show us a way to have it all, or at least as much of it as we mortals can realistically hope to have. Having it all requires that all of our many selves have their desires satisfied. The underlying assumption of this grand promethean quest is that the ultimate good is to have one's desires satisfied. Not surprisingly, James developed an ethical theory whose ultimate normative principle is that

1. We are always morally obligated to act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction over desire-dissatisfaction.

This chapter will give an in-depth exposition of how James arrived at and defended this maximizing ethical principle. Chapter 2 will show that the upshot of James's analysis of belief is the highly promethean doctrine that

2. Belief is an action.

in the sense of something that is done intentionally or at will. Chapter 3 will present James's analysis of freedom of action and therefore belief, given that belief is an action; and Chapter 4 will give his will to believe justification for believing that we have this sort of freedom of action, thereby rendering belief fair game for moral permissions and prohibitions.  

            From propositions 1 and 2 it follows that

3. We are always morally obligated to believe in a manner that maximizes desire-satisfaction over desire-dissatisfaction.

            This attempt to give an ethical criterion for belief acceptance challenges the intellectualist tradition of Western Philosophy from Parmenides to the logical positivists. Chapters 5 and 6 will show that it wasn't just belief acceptance but also meaning, reference, and truth that James attempted to ground in ethics. This attempt to base epistemology in general on ethical principles, even if it should not ultimately prove to be fully defensible, is one of the most bold and original contributions to philosophy of all time and secures a permanent place for James in the Philosophical Hall of Fame.             

           

            James's only published effort to develop an ethical theory is in his 1891 essay on "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," which was reprinted six years later in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. That James never felt the need to publish anything further on ethical theory either before or after 1891 is good evidence that he accepted its position throughout, especially since there is nothing in his unpublished writings that indicates any doubts or reservations, only further corroboration of the 1891 essay. The word "theory" is italicized so as to emphasize the contrast with the moralizing espousal of normative propositions, something that James did in profusion throughout his career. John Dewey failed to make this distinction when he said that "William James did not need to write a separate treatise on ethics, because in its larger sense he was everywhere and always the moralist." (MW, 6, 92) It will be seen that some of his moralizing had a distinctively deontological tone that clashed with his maximizing ethical theory.

            His essay addresses in turn three different questions concerning the origin of our ethical intuitions, the meaning and status of ethical terms, and the casuistic rule for determining our moral duty in specific cases. His answer to the first question is that our moral intuitions, along with our esthetic ones, are determined by innate structures of our brain that resulted from chance mutations in the distant past that proved beneficial and took hold. This evolutionary account is identical with the one he gave in the final chapter of The Principles of Psychology of the origin of our stock of necessary truths. The moral intuitionists, therefore, were right in claiming that moral intuitions and sentiments were innate but wrong, as will be seen, for holding them to be a reading off of objective moral truths in some Platonic heaven.

            James gives as an example of a brain-born moral intuition our gut feeling that it is morally wrong to use one person as a mere means to promote the pleasure or happiness of the majority, which intuition underlies the typical counter-examples to utilitarianism.

If the hypothesis were offered to us of a world in which...millions [are] kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain. (WB 144)

This "lost soul" example will come back to haunt James's own ethical theory.

            The second question is called the "metaphysical" one because it has to do with the being and meaning of ethical terms. The meaning part of the question seems to fall outside metaphysics, since it concerns what we mean by various ethical predicates, a study that was later to be called "metaethics." James tries to determine the ontological status of ethical states by analyzing the meaning of ethical terms, and this he does through an analysis of our experiential reasons for predicating them. This is in accordance with James's general empirical practice of determining both what we mean by "X," as well as what it is to be X, from a genetic account of the experiences that lead us to say of something that it is X. Later it will be seen how he does this for the concepts of actuality, negation, truth, and self-identity. Among the experiential reasons that lead us to say something is X can be the way in which our idea that it is X works in our subsequent experience. The outcome of his genetic analysis is that we mean by "good" whatever satisfies a desire, demand, or claim, for we take something to be good only when it does so. His unannounced shifting around among these three terms will be considered at the end of the chapter, and for the time being I will follow James in sloshing back and forth between them. Given that the good is what satisfies a desire, etc., and that we have an obligation to promote goodness, it follows that we have an obligation to see to it that any desire gets satisfied, unless doing so would result in the denial of a greater quantity of other desires. The obligation is a prima facie one that can be canceled only if the satisfaction of this one desire requires that a greater quantity of other desires go unsatisfied. This is what James means by his remark that "all demands as such are prima facie respectable." (WB 153) It is important to note that the obligation-creating power of a desire is completely independent of whose desire it is. When we factor in desires so as to determine what our moral duty is we must do so behind a veil of ignorance in which we do not know, or at least disregard, whose desires they are.    

            From this definition of "good" he draws the anti-platonic conclusion that prior to the desiring or demanding by sentient beings nothing is good or obligatory. No conscious beings, no normative situations, for "betterness is not a physical relation."

Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic "nature of things" can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply. (WB 145) 

There is no "abstract moral 'nature of things' existing antecedently to the concrete thinkers themselves with their ideals." (WB 147)

            To better understand James's intuition that there is no moral goodness or obligation and, in general, no normative state of affairs, in a world devoid of conscious beings, it is helpful to contrast it with the rival intuition of a G. E. Moore. Given two worlds, both devoid of conscious beings, one consisting of a motel room that looks as if a heavy metal rock band and their groupies had just finished a night of debauchery in it, and the other of elegant formal gardens, the latter, according to Moore's intuitions, is the better world because it is in itself more beautiful. James claims that someone who has such moral and aesthetic intuitions is not faithfully performing the thought experiment because she is illicitly smuggling in an observer, namely herself, whose esthetic sensitivities are offended by the trashed room and pleased by the gardens. But if we properly perform the thought experiment, making sure to exclude all observers, it becomes plain that there is no more value or beauty to the one world than the other. To be sure, a tree falling in a forest unobserved makes a loud noise, unless it falls in a snow bank or pile of leaves, for it is just a physical fact; but its falling cannot possess any normative feature, such as being desirable or beautiful, unless there are conscious beings around who have appropriate desires. 

            This way of dismissing objective moral truths -- moral truths that exist independently of the desires and demands of conscious being -- is too quick, for it fails to make the crucial distinction between concrete states of goodness and obligation, on the one hand, and general moral truths, on the other. What James's thought experiment shows is that, at best, there are no concrete instances of value and obligation in the world devoid of conscious beings, but this does not establish that there are no general moral truths that hold in this world, such as the hypothetical proposition that if there were to exist a conscious being who had a desire, then there would be the prima facie obligation to see to it that it gets satisfied. Plato's metaphorical description of the idea of the good floating about in a non--spatio-temporal realm like a bigger-than-life balloon in a Thanksgiving-day parade really amounts to the claim that there are such objective moral truths.

            We know from James's remark that "the moral law [cannot] swing in vacuo" that he rejected these sort of abstract moral truths. But why? For there to be such an abstract moral truth there must be something that serves as the bearer or subject of this truth, and traditionally that has been an abstract proposition. But, in this essay, as well as in his writings on truth,  James rejects abstract propositions as absurd.[1] An abstract proposition is a nonempirical entity, since it is not locatable in space or time. The reason for this is that it is the denotatum of a noun "that"-clause, such as "that Mary is baking pies," and it makes no sense to ask where or when is that Mary is baking pies. Abstract propositions are theoretical entities that are introduced for the purpose of explaining how one can believe falsely, disbelieve what was formerly believed, believe the same as does someone else, as well as how two sentences can mean the same thing. Furthermore, the adage that there are many things better left unsaid seems committed to there being language- and mind-independent propositions to serve as the bearers of truth-values. James's nominalistic inclinations prevented him from taking seriously abstract propositions as the meanings of sentences, intentional accusatives, and truth-value bearers.[2] But he should have; for even though they are not themselves empirical entities, they might help to explain these empirical phenomena. James's empiricism, as will be seen in his treatment of the self, was sufficiently liberal as to permit the countenancing of nonempirical entities, provided they played a useful explanatory role.

            James's "arguments" against abstract propositions consisted in nothing more than the heaping of rhetorical scorn on them, which is surprising since he knew the works of some able defenders of the theory of abstract propositions, among whom were Bolzano, Brentano (see PP 916-7), the early Moore and Russell, but not Frege, who was the leading proponent of the theory. In language that prefigured Wittgenstein's mocking account of propositions as queer "shadows of a fact," James says that they are "a sort of spiritual double or ghost of them [the facts]." (MT 156) When we believe falsely we believe something, but it cannot be a fact and thus must be a shadow of a fact. Wittgenstein mockingly paraphrases this claim as being like the assertion that it isn't Mr. Smith who hangs in the gallery but only his picture. (BBB 31) In each case it is implied that there is a relation between numerically distinct independent entities. These "ghosts" are so outre as to be beneath contempt. The problem of propositions will figure prominently in the discussion of truth in Chapters 5 and 6.

            James makes the surprising claim that there would be concrete values and obligations, understood in the concrete sense, if there were a single, isolated desirer, which sets him apart from his fellow pragmatists Mead and Dewey, who gave a socialized account of everything that pertained to the normative. This is one among many instances of James's Robinson Crusoe approach to philosophical topics; it will be seen that he thinks an isolated individual can even have her own private concepts and language. That he so committed himself finds partial textual support in his speaking of the world of the single desirer as "a moral solitude" and a world containing two desirers as having "twice as much of the ethical qualities in it as our moral solitude." (WB 146) The two desirer world cannot have twice as much of the ethical qualities of the moral solitude world unless the latter has ethical qualities. The following quotation, however, really settles the matter: "Ethical relations...exist even in what we called a moral solitude if the thinker had various ideals which took hold of him in turn." (WB 159)

            Before considering James's answer to the casuistic question, it is necessary to address a question concerning the status of James's claim that "the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand" (WB 153) Is this intended as a definition of what we ordinarily mean by "good"? If so, it falls victim to G. E. Moore's open question challenge, as do all naturalistic definitions of ethical terms in terms of sensible properties. For it does not seem redundantly pointless to ask, "Yes, action A satisfies demand, but is it good?"; and for this reason it is not contradictory to say, "Action A satisfies demand but it isn't good." But if "good" meant satisfies demand, it would be contradictory. Plainly, if James's definition or analysis is intended to be description of ordinary language, it is a miserable failure.

            James is not going to be crushed by this departure from ordinary usage or common sense. In general, James has no compunctions against challenging them when there is good reason to do so. As will emerge in subsequent chapters, he knowingly gives revisionary analyses of truth, reference, the self, and material substances that challenge common sense. Whereas there is good textual evidence that he intended the latter to be revisionary analyses (and on this you must, as my late colleague Wilfrid Sellars would say, accept a promissory note, only this one will actually get cashed!), it is thin in the case of his analysis of good. He never comes out and explicitly says that he is revising ordinary usage, but there are several good reasons for taking him to being doing just this. That many of his analyses are admittedly revisionary gives us some reason to think that he might be doing so here. And if there should be, as will now be shown, good reasons of both a philosophical and internal consistency sort for this analysis to be taken as revisionary, that gives the interpreter good reason to so take it.

            The first reason based on internal consistency. If James's definition of "good" is a description of ordinary usage, he would be committed to holding  that a normative proposition is entailed by a purely descriptive one, one that describes only the empirical properties of an act, in this case that it satisfies a desire or demand. He would be required to say that the proposition that act A satisfies a demand or desire logically entails that act A is so far morally good. But we know that James would not accept this entailment. In his "Notes for Philosophy 4: Ethics--Recent English Contributions to Theistic Ethics (1888-1889)," he says in effect that no normative proposition is entailed by purely descriptive ones. "Things are either immediately admitted to be good, without discussion, or there is discussion. To prove a thing good, we must conceive it as belonging to a genus already admitted good. Every ethical proof therefore involves as its major premise an ethical proposition; every argument must end in some such proposition, admitted without proof." (ML 182) "The scientific and the Ethical judgment are logically distinct in nature." (MEN 301) That A satisfies a demand would entail that A is good only if we were to add the additional normative premise that whatever satisfies a demand is so far good.

            Even though James's definition of "good" is not a description of ordinary usage, it nevertheless recognizes as an ultimate objective moral truth that whatever satisfies a desire or demand is so far good. This clashes with his earlier attack on platonism, for it would seem that there is for him at least this one abstract moral truth. This is the first instance of the making-discovering aporia, which will run throughout his philosophy. Initially, he strikes the promethean making theme: We make things good by desiring them, yet that it is good that desires gets satisfied seems to be something that is not made true by us but instead discovered. I am at a loss to extricate James from this aporia, about which a lot more will be said in later chapters.

            Because James's revisionary analysis of "good" is prescriptive rather than descriptive, it does not follow that it cannot be motivated and justified. Various doctrines of James can be marshalled to support its acceptance. All of his admittedly revisionary analyses are motivated, at least in part, by his career-long commitment to empiricism. He will be found to object to our common sense concepts of truth, knowledge, and reference because they involve a mysterious, non-empirical saltatory relation, and he will replace them with concepts based on a genetic analysis of the experiential conditions under which we apply these concepts. By replacing non-empirical concepts with empirically-based ones, we put our conceptual house in order so that we can make a more effective use of our intelligence in gaining mastery over our world.

            Something similar justifies his revisionary analysis of good. In our attempts to analyze the meaning of good or the ground of obligation

there is an inevitable tendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when they are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad. They imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides; and each tries to prove that this pre-existing order is more accurately reflected in his own ideas than in those of his adversary. It is because one disputant is backed by this over-arching order that we think the other should submit. (WB 148. my italics)

The evils which are occasioned by these intuitive appeals to what is written down in the platonic heaven, in addition to being based on a mistaken view of the ontological status of moral truths and obligations, are that they lead to pointless, intractable disputes, which are a waste of time. This is the poverty of intuitionism.

            This appeal to empiricism, however, hardly is sufficient to justify James's particular empirical account of good over numerous rival empirical accounts, such as utilitarianism. James's chief reason for preferring his particular empirical account over these rivals is based on a Darwinian view of human beings as determined by their biological nature to be always intent on satisfying some felt need or desire, even if the need or desire is not itself directly determined by biological states or processes.  Since this is our nature, it seems reasonable to make the attainment of this our moral ideal. For what other end could we have? Given the scientific account, the normative conclusion appears to be the only practically viable alternative open to us human beings. Unlike natural law theorists, James would not claim that the scientific account of man's nature logically entails any normative proposition. Nevertheless, to ask whether it really is good for us to act in accordance with our nature is to raise an idle question.

            I believe that there was another motivation for James's revisionary account of good in terms of desire satisfaction based on his inveterate hipsterism, which was discussed in the Introduction. He was an experience junkie intent on having as many tingles and thrills as possible. This is the object of his quest to have it all. Since we have these tingles and thrills when our desires get satisfied, his absolute normative principle should be to satisfy desire, the more the better. James recognized that there is wide diversity among people in their psychological makeup, for example, in what their sense of rationality is. No doubt, he would acknowledge wide diversity regarding what they take the good life to be. Nevertheless, he assumed that most people were, like himself, out to have it all.      

            The answer that James will give to the casuistic question should be obvious by now: We are morally obligated "to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can. That act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole, in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions." (WB 155) It should be noted that James shifts from a maximizing of desire-satisfaction to a minimizing of desire-dissatisfaction formulation. Maybe he thought they came to the same thing. There are, however, possible cases in which they require different acts. Imagine a deity who has a choice between creating  desirers who will have some but not all of their desires satisfied or creating no desirers at all. The former choice is required by the desire-satisfaction maximizing rule and the latter by the desire-dissatisfaction minimizing rule. Probably what James had in mind was a net principle like that of the utilitarians to the effect that

1'. We are always morally obligated to act in a manner that maximizes desire-satisfaction over desire-dissatisfaction among the actions available to us.

For the sake of brevity, in the future the "over desire-dissatisfaction" qualification will be dropped, but it must be understood as applying. In the 1881 "Reflex Action and Theism," he wrote that "The only possible duty there can be in the matter is the duty of getting the richest results that the material given will allow" -- hints of his hipsterism. (WB 103) The "richest result" would seem to be one in which the maximum number of desires get satisfied. Something akin to this casuistic rule is given expression in a letter James wrote at the age of 16: "It is then the duty of everyone to do as much good as possible." (CWJ 12) It is amazing how much of James's philosophy is there from the very beginning, almost as if it were innate in him in the manner envisioned by his brain-born theory.

            It is an empirical question, and a very difficult one at that, as to what course of action will maximize desire-satisfaction in any given situation. The sciences, especially the social sciences, will have to serve as our guide in determining which action, among those open to us, will best maximize desire-satisfaction. This union of ethics with science, not surprisingly, brought strong praise from John Dewey in a letter he wrote James just after the appearance of "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in 1891. “The article rejoiced me greatly,” Dewey wrote. (quoted from the Introduction to WB, xxxii) James deserves great credit for being the first to try to make ethics into an empirical or experiential science.

            There are a number of questions about James's maximizing casuistic rule that must be addressed. How similar is it to the different versions of utilitarianism? To begin with, there is the distinction between act and rule utilitarianism, the former holding that on every occasion we should act so as to maximize utility, the latter that we should choose general rules of conduct on the basis of maximizing utility but that once the rules are in place we must follow them, even if doing so on some occasion does not maximize utility.

            James clearly recognizes the value of having general rules of conduct when there is good inductive evidence that following them for the most part maximizes desire-satisfaction, a matter about which science must guide us. "The presumption in cases of conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good. The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of his casuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customs of the community on top." (WB 156) Supposedly, "the customs of the community" are to be accorded this pride of place because of their established track record in maximizing desire-satisfaction in the past. But in spite of this conservative endorsement of following conventional rules of conduct, James is not a rule desire-satisfaction maximizer, since he permits us to make exceptions to an established rule when we have good evidence that doing so on some occasion will maximize desire-satisfaction, which was another ground of Dewey's lavish praise. Quoting T. H. Green's claim that "Rules are made for man, not man for rules," he urges us to experiment with new rules and procedures for maximizing good. (WB 156-7) Because James accords such an important instrumental role to conventional rules, but does not give them the exceptionless status that modern day rule utilitarians do, his theory of desire-satisfaction maximization is of the rule-instrumental sort; rules have only an instrumental status as guiding principles subject and are subject to exceptions. It will be seen in Chapter 5 that James's criterion for belief-acceptance based on maximizing desire-satisfaction also is complemented with a type of rule-instrumentalism; past experience teaches us that we are well advised, for the most part, to give pride of place to the conventional rule of basing one's beliefs upon the best available empirical evidence.      

            Obviously, James's maximizing rule differs from Bentham's in regard to what is to be maximized, it being pleasure over pain for Bentham and desire-satisfaction for James. This is important because James thought that we desired things other than pleasure and the avoidance of pain, such as to heroically struggle for our ideals. Some desires are manifestations of instinct and emotional expression that have absolutely nothing to do with pleasure and pain. "Who smiles for the pleasure of the smiling, or frowns for the pleasure of the frown?" (PP 1156) In an incredibly funny footnote he takes Bain to task for his attempt to explain our sociability and parental love by the desire for pleasure, in particular that of touch. He concludes that for most us it cannot possibly "be that all our social virtue springs from an appetite for the sensual pleasure of having our hand shaken, or being slapped on the back." (PP1158) Bain is unable to explain why we would not derive just as much pleasure from touching "a satin cushion kept at about 98 degrees F" as we do from touching a baby's face. As Ellen Suckiel has stressed to me in correspondence, "desire-satisfaction," for James, must not be understood as it typically is in terms of the satisfaction of the individual's physical and psychological wants and needs.

            The most striking counter-examples to the principle that the only things we desire are pleasure and the avoidance of pain are found in James's own deontological desires to do his moral duty as a free agent. It was the worry that he was not a free, morally responsible agent that triggered his emotional crisis of 1870. James did not desire just that certain desirable states of affairs be realized but that they be realized as a result of his own free agency. Herein James recognizes an intrinsic, deontological value to being a free agent who causes in the right way the realization of desirable ends. There is a serious problem whether James can be committed consistently to both his casuistic rule and his deontological values. This is exactly the same problem faced by the utilitarian who says both that we always must choose that alternative that maximizes utility and that we always must act from considerations of virtue. This gives us inconsistent motivations, since the latter recognizes an intrinsic, deontological value to acting from considerations of virtue that the former does not. If James is to follow his casuistic rule consistently, he must factor in deontological desires on all fours with every other sort of desire.            

            Although James's casuistic rule differs from classical utilitarianism in regard to what we are to maximize, does it resemble the latter in being purely quantitative? The text speaks unambiguously in favor of the quantitative interpretation.[3] His formulation of the rule clearly is quantitative: "There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly...so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see." (WB 158. my italics) The 1888-89 "Notes for Philosophy 4..." formulates a precursor to the casuistic rule of the 1891 essay that clearly is quantitative. "Consider every good as a real good, and keep as many as we can. That act is the best act, which makes for the best whole, the best whole being that which prevails at least cost, in which vanquished goods are least completely annulled." (ML 185) Herein we see James seeming to side with a desire-dissatisfaction minimizing version of the casuistic rule, though it still is a quantitative rule.

            Saying that James's casuistic rule is quantitative does not go far enough, for there are three different ways in which it can be quantitative. Our duty could be to satisfy the desires of the greatest number of people, the greatest number of desires, or the greatest quantity of desires in which the amount or intensity of a desire is factored in. The same ambiguity attaches to a net version of the casuistic rule that requires us to maximize desire-satisfaction over desire-dissatisfaction. Edward Madden interprets James as saying that "Our moral obligation is to maximize the satisfaction of needs for as many people as possible." (Introduction to WB xxxi) Andrew Reck, on the other hand, seems to side with the second interpretation: "On James's account the moral universe is inveterately democratic. Each demand has an equal claim with every other demand for satisfaction." (WJ 81)

            Both interpretations are wrong, for the text of "The Moral Philosopher and Moral Life" clearly favors the third sense. To begin with he says that "Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount." (WB 149. my italics) What really nails down the case for this interpretation is the manner in which he brings in God's desires and demands. God's demands "carry the most obligation simply because they are the greatest in amount." (WB 149. my italics) God is the biggest kid on the block, and although he is not infinite for James, his desires and demands are of such a magnitude as to outweigh the collective desires of men, and thus should be obeyed. Imagine in this connection an incredibly huge man: When he desires to eat he REALLY DESIRES to eat, and when he desires to breathe he REALLY DESIRES to breathe. Thus, although all people count equally, not all desires do. In other of his writings, James conceives of God as a supremely good being and thus the one person whose judgment of us we should care about most, but in "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" he does not make use of the deontological goodness of God but only the immensity of his desires.

            Herein James runs smack into the question of Plato's Euthyphro: is an act pious (morally obligatory) because it is loved (demanded) by the gods or is it loved (demanded by) the gods because it is pious (morally obligatory). Suppose that not God but Descartes's evil demon exists. Would James still hold that the demands of the de facto biggest kid on the block are to carry the day? Obviously James, being one of the nicest human beings of all time, would not continue to adhere to his greatest-in-amount version of the casuistic rule, but then he would be smuggling in deontological considerations to the effect that the reason why we should obey God but not the evil demon is because God is morally good and the demon is not.

            We do not have to bring in infinite or near infinite beings to find counter-examples to the greatest-in-amount version. Suppose there are available six units of food and that our incredibly huge man desires, REALLY DESIRES, to eat six units of food and there are five other persons who have mild desires to eat one unit of food. If the fat man's desire outweighs the sum of the latter five mild desires, it follows that we have a moral obligation to see to it that the former desire is satisfied to the exclusion of the latter five desires. But this violates our democratic sensitivities. It is not fair that one should get to eat and five be denied. One should not get more than their fair share because they are unusually lustful. Horniness should not serve as a mark of distinction. This result would not follow if the casuistic rule was interpreted as requiring that we act so as to minimize desire-dissatisfaction.

            Although James actually went with the maximizing of the quantity of desires that are to be satisfied, maybe he could have escaped this unfairness objection if he had instead opted for one of the other two senses of quantity -- the greatest number of people or the greatest number of desires that are to be satisfied? Unfortunately, both versions are vulnerable to the same objection. A good counter-example to both versions is James's own example of the "lost soul" who is endlessly tortured so that millions can have all of their desires satisfied. Here it is both the greatest number of people and the greatest number of desires that get satisfied. James, of course, thought that we would not allow the torture of one person so as to satisfy the desires of the multitude because he thought we had brain-born moral intuitions of a Kantian sort. But if we were not to have such a deontological desires, then we would be required to use the lost soul as a mere means to promote the maximization of desire-satisfaction over desire-dissatisfaction.

            How might James meet this counter-example and a slew of similar ones? His initial response was that we have a brain-born moral intuition that would not allow us to use one person as a mere means to promote the happiness of others. In other words, we have a Kantian-type desire that one person not be used as a mere means for promoting the interests of others. But this intuition or desire is a deontological one that is incompatible, for the reason just given, with maximizing ethical theories, whether of a utilitarian or desire-satisfaction maximizing sort.

            Maybe James should bite the bullet, as would an ardent act utilitarian, and say that the lost soul counter-example is not a counter-example because we should accept the offer to have  millions be happy at at the cost of one lost soul who gets tortured endlessly. The manner in which James defends vivisection in an 1875 article in the Nation seems to commit him to this response.

A dog strapped on a board and howling at his executioners, or, still worse, poisoned by curara, which leaves him paralyzed but sentient, is, to his own consciousness, literally in a sort of hell. He sees no redeeming ray in the whole business. Nevertheless, in a world beyond the ken of his poor, benighted brain, his sufferings are having their effect--truth, and perhaps future human ease, are being brought by them. He is performing a function infinitely superior to any which prosperous canine life admits of, and, if his dark mind could be enlightened, and if he were a heroic dog, he would religiously acquiesce in his own sacrifice. (ECR 11-12)

            Why shouldn't what is true for this dog also be true for the lost soul? Plainly, James cannot say that we are not morally permitted to do to the lost soul what we are permitted to a dog, because the former is a person, due to its being a free rational agent, and thus the subject of certain rights, such as the Kantian one never to be used as a mere means, and the dog is not. For this appeals to deontological considerations that are incompatible with his exclusively maximizing of desire-satisfaction ethical theory. That a dog's pain  might not be as intense as a human's pain does not justify using it as a mere means to promote human interests. James says that the dog would willingly sacrifice itself "if he were a heroic dog," and thus could say that the lost soul also would willingly sacrifice himself if were a heroic individual. This way out faces the objection that not all dogs or individuals are in fact willing to be heroic martyrs, and that in cases in which they do not voluntarily step forward to sacrifice themselves we have a moral duty to see to it that they are sacrificed so as to maximize desire satisfaction, be it in any one of the three senses of quantity. James's maximizing ethical theory, like utilitarianism, requires us to heroically martyr ourselves when this will maximize desire-satisfaction or utility, but we ordinarily take such an act to be supererogatory, not morally obligatory. While James, as has just been argued, is not a slave to our ordinary or common sense moral intuitions, he does accept our ordinary intuition that it would be wrong to use one individual as a means and in fact says that it is brain-born.

            Does James have some way around this and a host of similar counter-examples? One option is for him to appeal to his rule-instrumentalism. He could say that we would do a better job in the long run of maximizing desire-satisfaction if we adopted the rule, subject to exceptions of course, that each of us be willing to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of others, provided that the selection process is random. (Think of an organ lottery in which all of us are voluntary participants, agreeing to give up our life if our number comes up so that our organs can be used for transplants.) The problem is that if someone does not voluntarily accept this rule, she still is fair game for being the sacrificial lost soul. One is going to be an heroic martyr, like it or not. And this seems wrong, not only to the vast majority of people but to James as well, at least at those times when he was not intent on developing an ethical theory.

            Another strategy that is open to James is to say that his revisionary analysis of good and obligation, like all of his other revisionary analyses, is not intended to hold for every possible world but only the actual world, and thus counter-examples based on merely possible cases cut no ice. James criticized absolute idealism's attempt to give an analysis of truth that would hold "in all conceivable worlds, worlds of an empirical constitution entirely different from ours," for being "too thin, "as if the actual pecularities of the world ...were entirely irrelevant....But they cannot be irrelevant." (PU 149) No doubt, he would want to say the same about anlayses of other concepts.

            Supposedly, lost soul type counter-examples are too counterfactual. James, no doubt, would have found the challenge posed by the immoralist, based on how we would act if we were to be rendered retribution-proof, say through possessing the ring of Gyges, to be too counter-factual to be taken seriously. James, along with many of his contemporaries, believed in the essential goodness of men, that if the circumstances required, they would dutifully accept being the lost soul.

            The problem with this response is that James's revisionary analysis does not even hold for the actual world. That it does not is dramatically brought out by the doctor who says to his patient, "Mister Jones, I have good new and bad news for you. The bad news is that you will die within a month from an untreatable cancer. And the good news is that I won one million dollars in the lottery." If James were right in his estimation of human nature, it should not occasion a laugh. But it does, and thus James's revisionary analysis does not even hold for the actual world.

            John Stuart Mill faced the same problem with his own version of utilitarianism. It took the form of explaining why we should adopt a disinterested perspective, so that the patient would take the "good news" to be good news, being able to say to the doctor in all sincerity, "It really doesn't matter whether it is you or I who is the lucky guy; all that matters is that someone is." Mill tried to convince us to adopt this disinterested standpoint by one of the all-time philosophical howlers. He reasoned that since each man desires his own happiness, each man desires everyone's happiness, which is like reasoning that since each person blows his own nose, each person blows everyone's nose.

            James was not worried about how to make the transition from the self-interested to the disinterested point of view. He swept the problem under the rug because his genetic analysis loaded the dice in favor of our having the unselfish point of view. The upshot of his genetic analysis is that we take something to be good when it satisfies a desire, which gives the false appearance that we are indifferent as to whose desire gets satisfied, it making no difference whether it is ours or someone else's. Pace James, the upshot of the genetic analysis should have been that each person takes something to be good when it satisfies her desire; and thus the problem of how to go from the self-interested to the disinterested point of view is still with us.

            One commentator has given an interpretation of James that renders him invulnerable to lost soul type counter-examples, but at the great cost of making him appear to be a complete muddle-head.  According to John Wild's interpretation, James was not serious in his espousal of a maximizing ethical theory in the early sections of "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" and gave it up in the final section, Section V, in favor of an existential ethics based on the paramount value of freely leading the morally strenuous life. "The strenuous ethics comes after, and supersedes the utilitarian ethics." (RE 282) Wild fails to give a single quotation from the text to justify his interpretation, and, fortunately, none can be given. If Wild is right that James first argued for a position and then gave it up later in the very same essay without even announcing that he was, then James not only fails to qualify as a great philosopher he fails even to qualify for tenure. Furthermore, Wild's contrast between "the strenuous ethics" and "utilitarian ethics" is uninformed, for one of the major problems for utilitarianism, as well as James's variation on it, is that it is too demanding because it makes supererogatory acts obligatory. Andrew Reck has suggested in corespondence that one might interpret James as holding that the sort of desires that the strenuous mood presses us to satisfy are of a qualitatively higher sort -- the desires that we would have if we were to become our ideal self.[4] If this is the right interpretation, and it might well be, then James is guilty of inconsistently smuggling in deontological considerations.

            What, then, is James up to when he makes a contrast between "the easy-going and the strenuous mood" in Section V of “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”? James's concern here is with the existential, as opposed to the cognitive, dimension of the ethical life. It is one thing to believe or accept an ethical proposition or rule and quite another to get oneself to follow or live up to this proposition or rule. One can know the rules of the ethical language-game but not actively participate in it. In the easy-going mood we do not sufficiently exert ourselves in following the casuistic rule, often because we fail to adopt the required disinterested perspective. A person lazily follows the course of least resistance because she considers only her present desires and not the ones that she and others will have in the future. "When in the easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling consideration. The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite indifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained." (WB 159-60)

            In order to satisfy the future desires of ourselves and others, we often have to make painful sacrifices in the present, consisting in our forgoing the satisfaction of short term desires for the sake of longer term ones that take into account the desires of our future self, as well as those of future persons who do not yet exist. There is no cognitive difference, therefore, between the easy-going and strenuous persons; both accept the casuistic rule enjoining them to act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction, in which all persons count equally, including future persons, with the exception that intensity of desire must be factored in. The difference between them is that the easy-going person is lax in living up to this requirement, taking the easy route of producing short term satisfactions through satisfying her present desires. The strenuous person does a better job of fulfilling the requirements of the casuistic rule because she factors in the long term desires of herself and others, including those of future persons, and thus is ready, willing, and able to make the requisite sacrifices to satisfy this more inclusive set of desires. She does the better job of following the casuistic rule than does the easy-going person.

            The cognitive-existential distinction not only finds textual support in Section V of "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" but also accords with his "faith-ladder" formulation of his will-to-believe doctrine at the very close of each of his final two books, A Pluralistic Universe and Some Problems of Philosophy.

The following steps may be called the 'faith-ladder':

  1. There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the world being true, nothing self-contradictory.

  2. It might have been true under certain conditions;

  3. It may be true, even now;

  4. It is fit to be true;

  5. It ought to be true;

  6. It must be true;

  7. It shall be true, at any rate true for me. (SPP 113, and PU 148)

Each of the steps up until 7 is cognitive in that it involves believing of some proposition either that it is possible or that it is desirable. It is at step 7 that the existential or conative dimension enters in, for in saying that this proposition, which one's intellect has already assessed as both possible and desirable, shall be true one is forming the effective intention or will to act so as to help make it true. This is of a piece with the distinction between our believing or accepting the casuistic rule and our psyching ourselves up so that we can form an effective intention to act in accordance with what it requires.

            The major problem that James addresses in Section V is how to motivate us to muster the courage to do what we intellectually recognize to be our duty. Not surprisingly, it contains an impassioned sermon; and the sermon, as you would expect, brings in God, first in the capacity of someone who knows the answer to the casuistic question, and second as our ideal social self whom we should do our best to please. A person's social self, for James, is the recognition she receives from others. "A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind." (PP 281) But a person does not care equally about each person's opinion of her. She gives greater weight to the opinions of her peers and those whom she respects and loves. For most people, God would be their ideal social self, since he is the person they most respect and admire.

            It has been pointed out that it is very difficult for us to determine the answer to the casuistic question, since our ability to predict the future is so radically limited. The dauntingness of the task of determining which course of action among those open to us will best maximize desire-satisfaction in the long run can easily demoralize us so that we take the easy way out and do what is in the line of least resistance. Given God's omniscience, or near omniscience for James, if God were to exist, the right answer to the casuistic question would exist in his mind, even though we are not able to access his mind. By postulating the existence of God and thus the existence of the right answer to the casuistic question, we gain inspiration faithfully to pursue finding the right answer. Thus, the idea of God and his knowledge is an inspiring ideal of reason that energizes us to find the answer to the casuistic question. According to James, if God existed,

his way of subordinating the demands to one another would be the finally valid casuistic scale; his claims would be the most appealing; his ideal universe would be the most inclusive realizable whole. If he now exists, then actualized in his thought already must be that ethical philosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermore approach. In the interests of our own idea of systematically unified moral truth, therefore, we as would-be philosophers, must postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religious cause. Meanwhile, exactly what the thought of the infinite thinker may be is hidden from us even were we sure of his existence; so that our postulation of him after all serves only to let loose in us the strenuous mood. (WB 161)

            The invocation of God as an ideal of reason that benevolently energizes us is of a piece with his occasional Peirceian postulation of a future scientific millennium in which some theory is accepted by all competent scientists. "The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience." (P 106-7 and MT 143-4) Herein God is brought in not as the biggest but the knowingest kid on the block. We have seen that James waffles on the question of moral realism, initially denying the existence of timeless moral truths and then seemingly committing himself to the existence of at least one such truth -- that it is good that a desire be satisfied and therefore we have a moral obligation to maximize desire-satisfaction. The postulation of a God in whose mind there exists the answer to the ultimate casuistic question seems to be a version of scholastic conceptualism that finds a middle ground between James's nominalism and realism. Thus, James winds up coming down on all three sides of the nominalism-conceptualism-realism issue as it pertains to moral truths. At the end of this chapter an attempt shall be made to extricate James from this apparent inconsistency and also to find some way for him to accommodate the deontological moral intuitions that underlie lost soul type counter-examples.     

            The manner in which James uses God as our ideal social self is not made sufficiently clear in Section V and needs supplementation from what he said one year earlier in The Principles of Psychology. The key quotations from V are:

In a merely human world without God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life, to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but it is played in the compass of a couple of octaves, and the infinite scale of values fails to open up....When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The scale of the symphony is incalculably prolonged. The more imperative ideals now begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and to utter the penetrating, shattering, tragically challenging note of appeal. (WB 160)

            This dark passage cries out for clarification. Why should a belief in God inspire one to lead the morally strenuous life? Is it only a psychological connection? If so, James can be accused of making a hasty generalization from his own case, just as he did when he said in his 1881 "Reflex Action and Theism":

God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which, if he did exist, would form the most adequate possible object for minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the universe. My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward reality of a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible for the human mind's contemplation. (WB 93)

People's psychology varies greatly in these matters. Notoriously, there are those whose faith lulls them into quietism and passivity, since they think that God is big enough to take care of both himself and the universe at large without their help. Like the absolute idealist they can be lulled into taking occasional moral holidays.

            To understand what James is after it is necessary to look at what he says about God as our ideal social self. Each of us is in "pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion, if such a companion there be. This self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent Me which I seek. This judge is God, the Absolute Mind, the 'Great Companion'." (PP 301) Again, James might be guilty of a generalization from his own case. Not all of us have as our paramount concern to be judged favorably by God or even, as was the case with James, our own father.

            Why does James think that it matters so much to a person to have God judge her favorably? The obvious answer, which is suggested by the quotation, is that it is because God is an eminently good being. Herein James is invoking God not qua biggest or knowingest kid on the block but qua the morally best person there is or even could be. This is making a deontological use of our idea of God. Our prayerful contemplation of God inspires us to lead the morally strenuous life in virtue of our conceiving of him as unsurpassably good. This supplies James with an adequate answer to the underlying question of the Euthyphro, something which his desire-satisfaction maximizing ethics was impotent to give. The reason why we should comply with what God desires or demands is not that God is the biggest but the best desirer or demander. Thus, it is because God's demands and desires are good that we are obligated to comply with them; but, as we have seen, this deontological intuition, which James accepted in some writings (PP 301), clashes with the official position of "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," which invokes God only as the biggest kid on the block.

            It is now time to tackle the thorny problem as to why James used "desire," "demand," and "claim" interchangeably, using "desire" and "demand" each 11 times and "claim" 5; he even speaks occasionally of "likes," "preferences," and what "feels good." It is surprising that none of the many commentators have been disturbed by this, since it is obvious that, although "demand" and "claim" are roughly synonymous, "desire," being a psychological term, differs significantly from each of these quasi-legalistic terms. Because "demand" and "claim" are roughly synonymous, I will not consider "claim" in what follows.

            Certainly, we are more inclined to lend someone ten dollars who desires that we do than someone who demands that we do, assuming no threat is being made. Furthermore, there are many things that we desire that we never would demand. Every person has many desires that they would be ashamed to demand be satisfied nor would they even want to see them satisfied. It might be thought that an easy solution to James's sloshing back and forth between "desire" and "demand" is to have him use "desire" for what goes on in his moral solitude and restrict "demand" to the "ethical republic." The text does not permit this interpretation, since James holds that demands occur in the moral solitude world if the lone person's present self makes demands on her future self or vice-versa. The text does not give us any easy way to explain James's apparent confounding of desires with demands, and it is up to the commentator to follow through on his behalf, which is just what I now will do.

            The first step in my reconstruction of James is to point out that, although desire and demand are quite different, there still is an important connection between them, consisting in the fact that what a person demands usually is something that she also desires. The converse, as just indicated, is not true. The next step is to argue that we would do a better job of maximizing desire-satisfaction if we adopted as an instrumental rule that we should always act so as to maximize demand-statisfaction.

            Why is this the case? First, there are many desires that people have that ought not to be satisfied because doing so would deny satisfaction to many other desires that they and others have. By adopting the instrumental rule always to act so as to maximize demand-satisfaction, we are requiring that we in effect play the rational critic to our own desires, as is argued by Dewey in "Theory of Valuation." The immediately given urges, drives, propensities, and inclinations get reconstructed by an inquiry into their causes and consequences that converts what is desired into what is desirable. And it is what each person deems desirable after this inquiry that gets fed into the casuistic equation as a demand. A demand is what a person publicly requests after such an inquiry. Thus, by adopting as an instrumental rule that we should always act so as to maximize demand-satisfaction, subject to deontological exceptions, we do a better job in the long run of realizing the summum bonum of maximizing desire-satisfaction.

            What are the exceptions? There seem to be at least two -- desirers who are either not around to make demands or are too weak to do so. The text makes clear that James wanted us to factor into the casuistic equation the desires of yet-to-be-born persons, as well as our future selves, even though they are not around now to make demands. "There can be," he says, "no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had experience and said his say." (WB 141) In the strenuous mood we are "awakened...by those claims of remote posterity which constitute the last appeal of the religion of humanity." (WB 160. my italics) There also are people who are not around to make demands because they are spatially remote and cannot get to the "polls." If they will be affected by our decisions, then their desires also must be factored in. We shall have to speak up on their behalf.

            All of this clearly agrees with the letter and spirit of the text. However, it is less clear what James would want to say about those desirers who fail to make demands because of weakness and timidity, or even an inability to communicate. Many, maybe even most, persons would say that their desires should be factored equally into the casuistic equation, especially when they are had by those who have not yet come of age or are infirm. James, however, says that "Some desires, truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant persons, and we customarily make light of the obligation which they bring." (WB. my italics) These desires get factored in all right, but in a significantly discounted manner. There is an elitist ring to this that has the consequence that nice guys do finish last. People are deserving of respect and consideration, for example to have their desires taken seriously, only when they have the courage to demand that they be accorded this status. Only "significant" persons count, and to achieve significant personhood a person must pass the courage test by demanding that others accord her this status. An exception to this might have to be made for those who have not yet come of age, as well as sentient animals, a topic that never enters into James's discussion. It is not clear from the text just what James meant by "insignificant persons."

            Even if the desire-demand aporia has been neutralized by these considerations, there remain outstanding aporias concerning the ontological status of moral truths and the maximizing-deontological tension. Again, it is up to the commentator to follow through and do the best she can on James's behalf.

            James's waffling on the realism-nominalism question as its pertains to moral truths is only a special instance of his general waffling about the ontological status of platonic abstracta, as will be seen when an exposition is given in Chapter 11 of his account of percepts and concepts. It will emerge that his account of the latter seems to face the same aporia due to its apparent commitment to both realism and nominalism. Immediately after giving his nominalistic, concept-empiricist analysis, which holds that concepts are both abstracted from and dependent upon percepts, he goes on to balance the books by adding that "physical realities are constituted by the various concept-stuffs of which they 'partake'" (SPP 58). That James was happy to accept the realist commitment of this talk about participation in the forms is clear from his claim that the

absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space. (VRE 54. my italics)

            James gives us a hint as to how to resolve the aporia when he says that

The map which the mind frames out of them [concepts] is an object which possesses, when once it has been framed, an independent existence. It suffices all by itself for purposes of study. The 'eternal' truths it contains would have to be acknowledged even were the world of sense annihilated. (SPP 43. my italics) 

            At first glance it looks like this passage commits James to a platonic realism about concepts that clashes with his nominalism; however, the qualification "when once it has been framed" gives him a way of reconciling the two. His nominalism denies that concepts actually exist independently of empirical particulars, such as our acts of conceiving them. But, if we are to have thoughts about concepts, we must think of them as having a world-independent existence and standing in certain eternal relations to each other. In the specific case of moral truths, they do not have an eternal existence independent of our desirings but once we frame thoughts of them we must conceive of them as having such an existence. Another way of putting this is that it is a rule of the moral language-game that moral truths be accorded a platonic status by the players, but there are no actual moral truths or laws that obtain or are in effect until we choose to play the game.

            James's oft-used potentiality-actuality distinction can be utilized here. There is the possibility of there being platonic moral truths (or concepts) before we actually play the moral language-game (or conceive of them), but these possibilities become actualized only when we actually play the game (or conceive of them). This way of finding a compromise between nominalism and realism, as will be seen in later chapters, accords with the manner in which he deployed the potentiality-actuality distinction to truth and self-identity over time. Before a person actually judges or remembers that she is identical with some past self, she is only possibly identical with this self, and before a proposition is actually verified it is only possibly true. The categorical version of the law of bivalence, which holds that every proposition is true or false, accordingly is conditionalized by James so that it holds instead that every proposition is possibly true or possibly false. Once the proper verification or judgment of self-identity has occurred, the potentiality in question is actualized and we say retrospectively that the proposition was true all along and the person was identical with this past self. Present truth casts its shadow backward, but without the present truth there is no shadow to be cast over the past. Similarly, the things that we are required to say about the prior existence of moral truths by our present playing of the moral language-game or making obligation-creating demands casts its shadow backwards. Thus, the platonic heaven resembles a cheap boarding house in which there is a lot of coming and going.[5]

            This way of deploying the potentiality-actuality distinction is highly promethean. It gives us the promethean role of being the creators of actual truth, moral or otherwise, as well as concepts and our own self-identity over time, through our different actions. Our verificatory and judgmental acts, however, do not create the potentialities for there being these actualities. Thus, it isn't promethean all the way down. The realist is right, therefore, to insist on the need for some sort of a given, which James often compared with the block of marble that is given to the sculptor. A critical evaluation of this doctrine will come later when detailed expositions are given of James's analyses of truth and self-identity.

            The maximizing-deontological aporia is the more difficult of the two to neutralize. I know of no way to reconcile James's deontological intuitions, such as those that he appealed to in condemning using the lost soul (but not the dog) as a means for maximizing desire-dissatisfaction, with his casuistic rule that we are always to act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction. His writings abound in deontological sermonettes that extoll the intrinsic value of freely leading the morally strenuous life, of being the right sort of cause of the realization of one's desires. He often writes like a good Kantian who sees our highest moral duty to be that of obeying objective moral truths or duties. Echoing Carlyle, he says that we must have

the vision of certain works to be done, of certain outward changes to be wrought or resisted....No matter how we succeed in doing these outward duties, whether gladly and spontaneously, or heavily and unwillingly, do them we somehow must; for the leaving of them undone is perdition. No matter how we feel; if we are only faithful in the outward act and refuse to do wrong, the world will in so far be safe, and we quit of our debt towards it....be willing to live and die in its service--and, at a stroke, we have passed from the subjective into the objective philosophy of things. (WB 134)

He also believed that there are desires, such as sadistic ones, that ought not to be satisfied, even if doing so maximizes desire-satisfaction.

            We have already considered the attempt to reconcile the casuistic rule with these deontological intuitions by recognizing that among the desires people actually have, and which therefore must enter into the casuistic equation, are to see that justice is done and that people are never used as mere means. In addition to the consistency problem, this places too much weight on the contingent desires of people. If, as seems actually to be the case, the deontological desires of persons are outweighed by their purely self-interested ones, then we would be morally obligated to see to it that the latter desires are the ones that get fulfilled, to the disadvantage of the "lost souls" of the world. Furthermore, this attempted reconciliation gives the wrong answer to a variant on the question of the Euthyphro: Are we prima facie obligated to see to it that a desire for what is deontologically good gets satisfied because it is desired or because what is desired is good? James's casuistic rule requires us to give the former answer but the latter is required by our and James's deontological intuitions.       

            I believe that the only viable way for James to resolve this aporia is to reject his claim that "the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand," along with the desire-satisfaction maximizing casuistic rule based on it. He should recognize that there are a plurality of goods, of which desire-satisfaction is only one along with various deontological goods. A consequence of this is that the defeaters or overriders of our prima facie obligation to see to it that a desire gets satisfied will no longer be just an outweighing set of conflicting desires but deontological principles that get violated as well. James's writings abound with expressions of deontological intuitions, especially concerning the intrinsic value of being a morally responsible agent who is the right sort of free cause of her own self-realization.

            This expanded concept of the good requires that his casuistic rule

1. We are always morally obligated to act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction over the other options available to us. 

be replaced by

1''. We are always morally obligated to act so as to maximize good over the other options available to us.

This rule is too general to supply guidance in making real-life nitty-gritty ethical choices when there is a conflict between what is deontologically right and what will maximize desire-satisfaction (pleasure, happiness). Unfortunately, there is no more specific version of it that ensures that there will not be undecidable cases. For rule 1, undecidability always results from incomplete knowledge, due to not all of the ballots being in or our not being able to predict the future consequences of different courses of action; but for 1'' the undecidability is due to the rule not being specific enough.  It is a sad, even tragic, feature of our moral life that there is no acceptable casuistic rule that provides us with a clear cut decision procedure for weighting different goods, and thus we must muddle along with great trepidation when making moral choices.         

            In the remainder of the book, I will, for the sake of simplicity and closeness to James's text, work with version 1 of the casuistic rule, remembering that it is to be understood in terms of the net idea of maximizing desire-satisfaction over desire-dissatisfaction. It is my contention that almost everything that James accomplished by appeal to 1 could be accomplished equally well by the use of 1'' instead. The reason for the "almost" qualification is that by incorporating deontological values into his casuistic rule he might somewhat undercut the promethean force of his philosophy, since each self now is subject to deontological constraints that might cramp her quest for full self-realization. Whether my contention is merited will have to be decided in the light of the full range of James's philosophy, and therefore I must, at this time, issue a promissory note.