Background
Hare, R was born in 1919 in Backwell, near Bristol.
Hare, R was born in 1919 in Backwell, near Bristol.
University of Oxford, 1945-1947.
Fellow of Balliol U°llcgc_ Oxford. 1947-1966; White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford, and Fellow of Corpus phristi College. 1966 83; Graduate Research rofessor.
University of Florida at Gainesville, r°m 1983. Fellow of the British Academy. 1964.
t'flain publications:
0952) The Language of Morals, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
(1963) Freedom and Reason, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
(1971) Practical Inferences.
London: Macmillan.
’71) Essays on Philosophical Method, London:
Macmillan.
(1972) Essays on the Moral Concepts, London: Macmillan.
(1972) Applications of Moral Philosophy, London: Macmillan.
(1981) Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
(1982) Plato, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1989) Essays in Ethical Theory, Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
(1989) Essays on Political Morality, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
(1992) Essays on Religion and Education, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
(1993) Essays on Bioethics, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hare’s first published work, The Language of Morals (1952), has been one of the most influential works of moral philosophy in the English-speaking world since the Second World War. He argued that moral judgements, though fundamentally imperative in form, could none the less be rational. His later works elaborated these themes and, especially in Moral Thinking (1981), developed the claim that a certain sort of utilitarianism must be the correct ethical theory. He has also published a considerable amount of work in practical ethics, increasingly so in the latter half of his career. When Hare started working on ethics, the emotivism of philosophers such as A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson was in the ascendant. Hare's view was that emotivism was right to deny that moral judgements were factual, or descriptive, statements of any kind, but wrong to hold that they were merely expressions of emotion or attempts to influence the emotions of others. In particular, it went wrong in not distinguishing clearly the claim that moral utterances are attempts to influence the actions of others from the view that moral utterances are an attempt to tell people what to do. And this rendered emotivism unable to give a satisfactory account of how ethics could be a rational endeavour. So Hare wished to propound a theory which would be ‘a rationalist kind of non-descriptivism’. According to Hare, moral judgements were fundamentally imperative in their logical form. which is why any form of naturalism must be incorrect: it would involve the attempt to derive imperative conclusions from factual, and therefore non-imperative, premises. And this was the fault which G. E. Moore, although not properly diagnosing it, had labelled the Naturalistic Fallacy. Moral judgements are not usually, of course, imperative in their grammatical form. The nub of Hare’s claim that they were logically imperative was this: it is a conceptual truth that sincerely accepting a moral judgement commits the speaker to acting upon it on appropriate occasions if it is within his power. Thus, if someone does not act upon a moral judgement on the appropriate occasions, then we may logically conclude that either that he could not do so or that he did not accept the moral judgement. This view of ethical judgements came to be known as prescriptivism. Hare was at pains, however, to show that imperatives are subject to logical constraints, just as factual assertions are, and this is part of what brings morality within the domain of reason. Hare’s second major claim is that a genuine moral judgement, such as that I ought not, for instance, to have my pregnancy aborted, must be based upon some principles. Hare's claim is that it is a conceptual truth that moral principles are universal in form. This does not mean that they need be wide generalizations: indeed they may be very specific. But they must not contain references to particular individuals. And this in turn generates the thesis of the Universalizability of Moral Judgements. To accept a particular moral judgement, as a moral judgement, involves accepting it also as a universal principle. If I really think that it would be morally wrong for me to have an abortion then I must think that it would be morally wrong for anyone relevantly like me, in relevantly similar circumstances, to have an abortion. Hare’s theory thus came to be known as Universal Prescriptivism. The practical force of the marriage of prescriptivism and universalizability became clearer in Freedom and Reason! 1963) and. in particular. Moral Thinking (1981). In these works, Hare developed a form of utilitarianism. Like most modern utilitarians, he thought of the individual good as consisting in one’s desires being fulfilled, rather than in happiness, a conception known as preference utilitarianism. Desires, which he claimed were the subject matter of morality, could be ordered according to their strength, and independently of whose desires they were or what they were desires for. He then argued that a sympathetic identification with the desires of others would make us come to identify with those desires as we identify with our own. We should thus come to want the satisfaction of desires generally, ranked according to their strength, and with no concern for whose desires they were nor what they were desires for; and. Hare argued, this would lead us to desire the maximum satisfaction of desires generally. In Moral Thinking Hare worked more concentratedly towards a theory that combined the advantages of both act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. Although, at the level of what he called critical thinking—the level of the utterly impartial, rational and knowledgeable agent—an individual act is right if and only if it maximizes the satisfaction of desire, he argued that in making moral decisions we should not usually consider the consequences of each individual act. Doing so would not in fact produce the desired result, since our judgements would often go wrong. Rather, we should generally follow those rules that have been tried and tested,—for example, rules against lying, cheating, stealing and so forth. We should rest content with what Hare calls our intuitive judgements. Indeed we should try to mould our sentiments, and those of our children, to make it psychologically difficult for us to act against them save in exceptional circumstances. So Hare does not suggest that utilitarian thinking should replace an adherence to many of our ordinary, intuitive moral principles. Indeed the fact that a general adherence to these principles maximizes utility explains, in his view, why they have grown up. Hare’s work has been the subject of continuous discussion, and virtually every aspect of it has been criticized. It has been argued, f°r instance, that the diversity of moral utterances cannot be reduced satisfactorily to the imperative model. Many have argued that there is no fact—value distinction of the sort that is central to his work. Others, again, have held that moral judgements are not essentially universalizable. And many philosophers have thought that his recent work commits Hare to a sort of naturalism which his theory was supposed to reject. Allan Gibbard remarks: ‘Perhaps no philosopher since Kant has developed a theory of moral judgement and moral reasoning so ingenious and so carefully worked through as R. M. Hare’.