William James (1842–1910) simplified and popularized pragmatic thought like no other thinker. “The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and to me, at definite times of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one,” he said. What “difference” beliefs made was more obvious — and in some ways more important — than whether those beliefs are true. James was especially concerned with all of philosophy's “open” questions. This included the issues of morality, God's existence, free will and determinism, and immortality. He answered all of these in a pragmatic and personal way. He may not have answered them for everyone, but he answered them for himself in a manner that other found profitable.

Life

Williams James earned his medical degree from Harvard at the age of twenty-seven. But medicine's loss would become philosophy's gain. When he published Principles of Psychology in 1890, the field was still in its infancy. He made philosophy his full-time occupation and taught with Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and C. S. Pierce. “Pierce wrote as a logician and James as a humanist,” Dewey said. James looked at the value of philosophy in terms of its contribution to his life. For James, the consequences of a belief were to be understood in terms of the personal and practical impact it has in the life of an individual.

Of belief in God, he wrote: “On pragmatist principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is ‘true.’”

Similar to Dewey, truth for James is not correspondence, but involves asking, “What concrete difference will it make in anyone's actual life?” James says that true beliefs have the characteristic that “they pay” or have practical “cash value.” He defines truth in terms of “what works,” or “gives satisfaction,” or the “practical consequences” of a person's beliefs. “The true is whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief” and “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.”

In response to his critics that his view is too subjective, he tries to provide criteria for truth: “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those we cannot.…. In addition, as humans are constituted in point of fact, we find that to believe in other men's minds, in independent physical realities, in past events, in eternal logical relations, is satisfactory.”

Options

When you wonder what side of an important issue to take we have options. Options are of several kinds: (1) they are living or dead, (2) forced or avoidable, and (3) momentous or trivial. An option is genuine when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.

• Living or Dead: A living option is only when both options are in play. If someone says to you, “Be a Tory or a member of the Green Party,” at least one of these is dead (there are no Tories anymore) and the other is near dead, since more than 99 percent of the population are not members of the Green Party. If he says, “Be a believer in God or a nonbeliever,” then this is a living option, since both choices are open.

• Forced or Avoidable: If someone says, “Choose between buying a Cadillac or buying a Chrysler,” she doesn't offer you a genuine option for it is not forced. You might ride a motorcycle and not buy a car at all or you may buy a Chevrolet or a Ford. Also, if she says “Love me or hate me,” or “Call my theory true or false,” you have avoidable options in both cases, since you may decline loving her or hating her and may make no judgment about her theory. But if she says, “Either believe in a supreme being or don't believe,” that is a forced option, for there is no standing outside the alternatives (agnosticism, which lies between belief and nonbelief, is a choice). “Either believe in free will or determinism” is another metaphysical dilemma. Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this forced kind.

• Momentous or Trivial: The beliefs about God and free will are momentous. Similarly, if you are a scientist and someone from the Centers for Disease Control says, “You have an opportunity to work on this cure for AIDS,” your decision about what to do is momentous, not trivial. It is more momentous if the chance will not come along again.

As a further illustration of his pragmatic idea of options being live, forced, and momentous, James considers Pascal and his celebrated “Wager” argument. As stated in Chapter 18, Pascal said you cannot know but you must either believe or not believe that God is. Which will you do? Your human reason cannot say for sure. So you weigh what your gains and losses would be if you wager all you have on God's existence. If you win the wager, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at all. James agreed: Pascal's choice was forced, living, and momentous, and that belief or disbelief was not merely a matter for debate. Rather, how you choose makes a profound difference in our lives.

In general, James argued that you have a right to believe what is subjectively and pragmatically appealing concerning a genuine option when the evidence is insufficient. Religious beliefs are forced, living, and momentous and our “passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option which cannot be decided on intellectual grounds.”

Free Will and Morality

Likewise, William James said that you could not rationally prove that human will is either free or determined. To solve the problem, according to James, you simply ask the pragmatic question, “What does a deterministic world imply?” That is, what kind of universe are you are living in if all events without exception are rigorously determined from the beginning of time so that they could not have happened in any other way? We could only answer that such a universe is like a machine, where each part fits tightly and all the other gears are interlocked. But James thinks that you are different from gears in a machine.

What sets us apart is consciousness. For one thing, you are capable of judgments of regret. For instance, you might regret your treatment of another person or regret your shabby effort in school or on a job. But could you have had such regrets if events in the universe were as rigidly fixed as the determinist says and could not have been otherwise?

Besides judgments of regret, you can also make judgments of moral approval and disapproval. You judge people and yourself to be wrong on certain occasions. When people steal or kill, you judge them, but you would probably not make such judgments if you thought that determinism was true, since determinism says all such actions are determined or inevitable. From the standpoint of free will, however, you believe the agents could have done otherwise. In conclusion, James says the problem is a very “personal” one and that he cannot personally conceive of the universe as a place where murder must happen. Instead, it is a place where murder can happen and ought not.

So for James the free will option is pragmatically truer because it better accommodates judgments of regret and morality. In Meaning and Truth (1909), he says, “Of two competing views of the universe which in all other respects are equal, but of which the first denies some vital human need while the second satisfies it, the second will be favored by sane men for the simple reason that it makes the world seem more rational.”