Hortatory ethics

James’s ethics is among the most intricate facets of his work. It thus hardly comes as a surprise that scholars, both inside and outside pragmatism, have been disagreeing not only over the details of James’s moral philosophy but also over its most general shape. Not only, in fact, there have been several contrasting accounts of his writings and their overall coherence – or lack thereof –, but also conflicting narratives of their very scope and goals. The recent, renewed interest in this thorny side of James reinvigorated old exegetical feuds and created new ones: his work as a moral philosopher has been variously presented as an eclectic ethical theory, a fine experiment in pragmatist moralization, and a promising yet tuneless ensemble of moral notes. Despite working with a fairly classical conception of philosophical ethics as the reflective inquiry into the good life, the way in which James cashed out the intellectual desiderata of this project hardly resembles more well-trodden paths, giving a hard time to those scholars who tried to translate his work in terms more familiar to contemporary Western moral philosophy as well as to those willing to follow him in his offbeat route and yet unsure about how to take his instructions in and put them to work. In what follows, after a survey of James’s philosophical incursions into ethics and their main interpretative strategies, I offer a radical picture of his moral thought as an effort in hortatory ethics hinged on his distinctive – yet often overlooked – pragmatist metaphilosophy.