ABSTRACT
Classical pragmatism is committed to the thought that philosophy must be relevant to ordinary life. This commitment is frequently deployed critically. To show that some idea is irrelevant to ordinary life is to prove it to be expendable. The appeals to James's moral philosophy among neoclassicalists tend to exploit the halo effect of the words pluralism and meliorism. This chapter explains four objections to James's moral philosophy and offers a modified view, one that is arguably still Jamesian, though not a view that James himself endorsed. Meliorism may suggest that James is some variety of utilitarian. James is not a utilitarian in virtue of the facts that he rejects monism about value and also rejects the thesis that all goods are commensurable. To put the matter in a slightly different way, James adopts a view of value called pluralism.
