In thinking about William James, it helps to remember that James not only dedicated Pragmatism to John Stuart Mill, but reiterated some of Mill's most controversial claims. In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” James says that “The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired” (WB, 149). This echo of the most ridiculed sentence in Mill's Utilitarianism is, I suspect, deliberate. One of James's most heartfelt convictions was that to know whether a claim should be met, we need only ask which other claims - “claims actually made by some concrete person” - it runs athwart. We need not also ask whether it is a “valid” claim. He deplored the fact that philosophers still followed Kant rather than Mill, still thought of validity as raining down upon a claim “from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens” (WB, 148).

The view that there is no source of obligation save the claims of individual sentient beings entails that we have no responsibility to anything other than such beings. Most of the relevant sentient individuals are our fellow humans. So talk about our responsibility to truth, or to reason, must be replaced by talk about our responsibility to our fellow human beings. James's account of truth and knowledge is a utilitarian ethics of belief designed to facilitate such replacement. Its point of departure is Peirce's treatment of a belief as a habit of action, rather than as a representation. A utilitarian philosophy of religion must treat being religious as a habit of action.