In the first two chapters we saw how James's “will to believe” or “right to believe” doctrine informs his account of religious faith. More importantly, we saw that James's doctrine is not unreasonable once we have taken care to distinguish and clarify the psychological and epistemological aspects of his position. The next two chapters examine two additional arguments that James makes for religious faith, the first of which is compatible with his will to believe doctrine and the second of which builds upon it. Both are practical arguments, because they assert that there are certain practical goods which can be obtained or realized only through religious faith. More specifically they are moral arguments, since James understands the goods in question as essential to complete moral agency and human flourishing.

The first argument, which is the subject of the present chapter, appears in the concluding section of “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (1891). Here, as we shall see, James argues that both moral philosophy and our attempts to lead “morally strenuous” lives are incomplete apart from belief in God. The basic idea underlying this argument is that while morality can exist in its essential features in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, we nevertheless cannot provide a plausible account of moral objectivity on purely humanistic and intersubjective grounds, nor fully awaken our moral capacities without measuring our moral values and ideals against an infinite standard (WB, 147–50; 159–62).