Richard Hare left behind at his death a long essay titled “APhilosophical Autobiography”, which was published after hisdeath. Its opening is striking:

I had a strange dream, or half-waking vision, not long ago. I foundmyself at the top of a mountain in the mist, feeling very pleased withmyself, not just for having climbed the mountain, but for havingachieved my life’s ambition, to find a way of answering moralquestions rationally. But as I was preening myself on thisachievement, the mist began to clear, and I saw that I was surroundedon the mountain top by the graves of all those other philosophers,great and small, who had had the same ambition, and thought they hadachieved it. And I have come to see, reflecting on my dream, that,ever since, the hard-working philosophical worms have been nibblingaway at their systems and showing that the achievement was anillusion. (2002: 269)

Yet his imagination could also be less modest: a gaggle of moralphilosophers is trapped beneath the earth in a smoke-filled chamber;they talk at cross purposes, and refuse to take the way out into theopen air that he alone has discovered. It was his ambition to haveunited elements from Aristotle, Kant, and Mill in a logically cogentway that solved the fundamental problems of ethics (though leavingunfinished business), and he usually believed himself to have achievedthis. For much of his career, his “prescriptivism” formedan important part of the curriculum, certainly in Britain. Hisdisappointment was not to have persuaded others (an occasional“we prescriptivists” was always uncertain of reference),and to have left no disciples; he once told John Lucas that this madehis life a failure. Yet he leaves behind generations of pupilsgrateful for the transmission not of a doctrine but of a discipline;and posterity, while unlikely to ratify the logical validity of histheory, will have reason to admire it for its uniting of apparentopposites, freedom and reason, tradition and rationalism, eclecticismand rigor.

• 1. The Life and the Man
• 2. The Language of Morals
• 3. The Logic of Imperatives
• 4. Decisions of Principle
• 5. Attending to Preferences
• 6. Possible People
• 7. Levels of Moral Thinking
• 8. Traces of Positivism in Religion and Metaethics
• 9. Afterword
  • Supplementary Document:Hare’s “An Essay in Monism”
• Bibliography
  • Primary Literature
  • Secondary and Other Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. The Life and the Man

Richard Mervyn Hare was born at Backwell Down, outside Bristol, on 21March 1919. He was to be known professionally as R.M. Hare, andpersonally as Dick Hare. His father, Charles Francis Aubone Hare, wasdirector of a firm, John Hare & Co., making paint and floor-cloth;his mother was Louise Kathleen Simonds, of a brewing and bankingfamily. His parents died while he was still young. He was then caredfor chiefly by guardians and relatives on his mother’s side, beingsent to school first at Copthorne in Sussex, and then, from 1932 to1937, as a classical scholar at Rugby. He was awarded a scholarship toBalliol College in 1937, where he read two years of Greats before theoutbreak of war.

Despite a largely classical education, Hare’s mind was already turningtowards moral philosophy. He ascribed this to two things, the need todefine an attitude towards fighting, and a feeling of guilt at livingin moderate comfort. He spent much time while still at Rugby workingwith the unemployed, and finally decided not to be a pacifist, but tojoin the OTC. When war broke out, he volunteered for service in theRoyal Artillery, and circumvented the results of a medical test inorder to be permitted active service overseas. He was eventually puton a ship for India in autumn 1940. He had a year training Punjabisoldiers, and enjoying some adventures (twice finding his own way backthrough the jungle, once after losing his guns to the Japanese). Hewas finally taken prisoner when Singapore fell in February 1942. Hethen suffered a long march up the River Kwai to near the Three PagodasPass, with a group of officers whose task was to work as cooliesbuilding the railway from Siam into Burma. So he knew too well the“violent untiring labours” that Aristotle associates withvirtue in an ode to a dead friend that was dear to Hare’s heart. Hewrites in his autobiography, “I prefer to pass over oursufferings during the eight months we were there” (2002: 283);he rarely mentioned them (except when more fortunate critics of hisviews rashly imputed to him the exemption from a wider experience oflife that can be the privilege of an Oxford fellowship). He waseventually imprisoned with fellow officers in Singapore, whence he wasreleased after exactly three and a half years when the War ended.

After the war, Hare returned to Balliol to complete the four years ofGreats. Even before he sat Finals, he was offered a lectureship atBalliol, which almost immediately became a fellowship. Hare alwaysclaimed to have learnt a lot from his pupils, and his early years atBalliol granted him outstanding ones—four of whom, BernardWilliams, David Pears, Richard Wollheim, and John Lucas, were to joinhim both as professional philosophers, and as Fellows of the BritishAcademy. Lucas narrates how he and his contemporaries would plan aday’s campaigning, with a succession of tutees concerting, through theday, objections to some settled opinion of Hare’s, and replies to hisreplies—with Williams sent in last to deliver thecoup degrâce that was never, in the event, fatal. No one who neverexperienced Hare’s impromptu fielding of objections can reallyunderstand the resilience of even his less plausible convictions. Andyet, despite some impressions, he was quite capable of admitting theforce of fair counter-arguments. He had a faith that apparentdisagreements can usually be resolved once confusions are removed(whence the over-sanguine title of his last book,Sorting OutEthics, 1997a). This went with a presumption that objections tohis views rested on confusion, one that could lead to a degree ofasperity. He recognized that the brusquely economical format of his“Comments” withinHare and Critics (which heseriously wanted to be titled, after a pub-name familiar in England,“Hare and Hounds”) might be taken amiss (1988a: 201):

In case anybody thinks that I have been discourteous tomy critics in writing notes instead of essays, I must point out thatthis is what we commonly do to Plato and Aristotle (as in theClarendon series of commentaries), taking their arguments one by oneand treating them briskly but seriously.

There could be a complaint that Hare was most interested in his ownideas. John Lucas had from Tom Braun a Balliol rhyme (of which hecites a variant version in Lucas 2002: 31) dating from soon after thepublication ofThe Language of Morals (1952):

My pupils I have always taught
You cannot get an “is”from “ought”.
This is the burden of my song:
“It’s in my book, or else it’s wrong.”

It is true that Hare was most appreciative of points helpful to hisown reconsiderations; he could then be depended upon to beover-generous. He always disparaged his own scholarship, though from ademanding point of view. (Few writers of long books on Plato can havefirst re-read the whole of Plato in Greek, as Hare did before writinghis very short one, 1982.) Yet his interests were wider in range thanhis publications, and extended through Frege, Chomsky, Davidson, and afair range of contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Though hewas keen to claim ancestry (in a late encyclopedia article he countsSocrates and Aristotle as, in part, the first prescriptivists; 1998:20), his love of philosophy did not reduce at all to a love of his ownphilosophy.

His most amiable aspects were apparent to the undergraduates (bypreference) whom, from early on, he invited to one of hisreading-parties, first at Plas Rhoscolyn in Anglesey, and later alsoat Saffron House in Ewelme, beneath the Chilterns. It was there aboveall that he vividly communicated a sense of how worthwhile andenjoyable it is not just to read but todo philosophy. He wasthus, however exacting his standards, a most positive figure as amentor, giving of himself in discussion in a manner that could beopinionated but was also self-forgetful. He was a Puritan of thetraditional kind who shared Dr Johnson’s approval of “harmlesspleasures”. He was concerned about the case against eating meat;but his eventual virtual vegetarianism was rather caused, he said, bygardening than by argument. Some of his dislikes were distinctive: themusic of Beethoven (which he came to find superficial), wearing socks(which he ascribed to commercialism), drinking coffee (which he saidaffected his temper), travelling by train (which caused him anxiety),giving and receiving presents (when the recipient best knows what hewants). Ved Mehta (1962) recalls his working, for freedom frominterruption, in a caravan on the front lawn of his house inOxford. He had the courage, though not the extravagance, to be aneccentric.

It was initially at reading parties that his pupils encountered a partof his life equally important to him as philosophy, his wife andchildren. What he describes as “a night of mostly baddreams”, starting with his mother’s death in 1935, ended withhis marriage in 1947 to Catherine Verney, which he calls “thebest thing I ever did, and a source of lasting happiness” (2002:272 & 292). They shared a love of traditional Anglicanism (thoughher beliefs were more orthodox than his), and of music (especiallychoral anda cappella). A Hare reading party at Ewelme wasalways in part a music camp, with (for all those able to join in) apiano to play and madrigals to sing. Everything equally involvedtheir four children, John (who has published about his father, 2007:184–248), and three daughters. Without them, he would have feltincomplete even as a moral philosopher; for Aristotle’s question“What sort of person should I be?” gave way, for him, tothe question “What sort of person should I bring up my childrento be?”

Hare remained a tutor at Balliol for twenty years, and always feltattached to that institution above all others (whence the bequest ofhisNachlass). It was still during his time there, in 1964,that he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. However,ineluctable promotion eventually removed him, in 1966, to the White’sChair of Moral Philosophy at Corpus Christi. There he took on aresponsibility for the supervision of research students. (Balliol andCorpus Greats pupils still had the benefit of his reading parties,which for a time, while John was at Balliol, became biennial.) Healso took his turn as chairman of the Philosophy Panel, which admitsand oversees graduates, and chairman of the Faculty Board.Administration, it may be said, was a task with which he copedadmirably, but, also admirably, refused to identify.

He recalls that most of his cousins on his mother’s side wereAmericans; and two of his children emigrated to America and marriedAmericans. Like all distinguished Oxford philosophers, he receivedmany invitations there (of which the most welcome was to the Centerfor Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where hewrote bothMoral Thinking, 1981, and his littlebookPlato, 1982). All this made less improbable his earlyretirement from Oxford in 1983, and his appointment as GraduateResearch Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida atGainesville. One desire was to escape from faculty politics atOxford. A contributing factor was the publication ofMoralThinking, which left him immediately, he confessed, nothing newto say in his staple lectures. Yet his main motive was the prospectof helping to set up a Center for Applied Philosophy.

The very phrase “applied ethics”, now so familiar (andyet, one may think, tendentious), presupposes a tradition of ethicaltheories, such as his, that invite practical applications. In fact, hepublished his first paper in practical ethics, titled “Ethicsand Politics”, in theListener (1955). (Part of it iscollected, under the title “Can I be Blamed for ObeyingOrders?”, in Hare 1972a; there it is followed by three papersoriginally published in the 1950s, and more from the 1960s.) Betterknown is the last chapter ofFreedom and Reason (1963), whichaddressed the issue, then (it seemed) wholly recalcitrant, ofapartheid. And much else followed, with a stream of papers, andmemberships of various advisory bodies (Hare 2002: 294–5). Hewas engaged especially by urban planning, where he favored radial overring roads, and biomedical ethics, in which he labored to be logicaland not justbien pensant. When a Society for AppliedPhilosophy was formed, he became its first President. So he lookedforward to a profitable refocusing of his energies; and this, to anextent, occurred, even when the Center partly disappointed. As henotes, three out of four volumes of essays published between 1989 and1993 fall within practical ethics (Hare 1989b, 1992a, 1993a).

His time in Gainesville was disturbed by the first, and slightest, ofhis strokes. When he fully returned with Catherine to Ewelme in 1994,further attacks cheated him of his hopes of continuing to combat“the usual misunderstandings” (2002: 304–5). He gavehis last paper, appropriately, to an undergraduate audience at King’sCollege London. He was still able to put togetherSorting OutEthics (1997a), deriving from the Axel Hägerström Lectures thathe had given at Uppsala University in 1991 (when he also received anhonorary doctorate—his first doctorate—from the Universityof Lund). His eightieth birthday was marked by the publication of afinal collection of papers,Objective Prescriptions and otheressays (1999). He died suddenly but peacefully on 29 January2002.

2. The Language of Morals

Philosophically, Hare came under two influences that together led himto views that he could always retain. One was emotivism. He followedthis in accepting a broadly empiricist view of facts that excludedmoral facts in any unetiolated sense of “fact”. However,he never adopted the verification principle of meaning in anythorough-going way. He also recoiled from any causal account of“emotive meaning” that reduced moral discourse toemotional manipulation. It became a recurrent theme that emotivismwent wrong by connecting the meaning of moral language with itsperlocutionary, rather than its illocutionary, force (1997a:112–14), that is, with what we dobyorthrough using it, rather than what we doin usingit.

The other influence was Kantian. From H.J. Paton’s lectures on Kant,and articles by Reginald Jackson, he learnt that imperatives fallwithin the realm of reason. This led him into a study of imperativelogic, a topic already being explored in Scandinavia (especially byAlf Ross), but unfamiliar in Britain. In his first published article,“Imperative Sentences” (1949), in his essay“Practical Reason” entered for the T.H. Green MoralPhilosophy prize in 1950, and in his first book,The Language ofMorals (1952), he explored the possibilities of inferringimperative conclusions from imperative, or a combination of imperativeand indicative, premises.

The Language of Morals introduced a distinction betweenprescriptive and descriptive meaning. Prescriptive meaning is definedin relation to imperatives: a statement is prescriptive if it entails,if necessary in conjunction with purely factual statements, at leastone imperative; and to assent to an imperative is to prescribe action.Descriptive meaning is defined in relation to truth-conditions: astatement is descriptive to the extent that factual conditions for itscorrect application define its meaning. It is taken for granted, inthe tradition of Hume, that the factual is only contingentlymotivating: desire is no part of sincere assent to a purely factualstatement. A moral statement has prescriptive meaning, but may also bepartly descriptive. Thus “A [a person] oughtto φ” entails the imperative“LetA φ”, so that to assent to it sincerelyis to have an overriding desire (which in application to oneself willamount, if its satisfaction appears practicable, to an intention)thatA φ. If there are agreed reasons for φ-ingwithin a linguistic community, say that it is enjoyable,“A ought to φ” may take on the descriptiveimplication of “φ-ing isenjoyable”. “X is a goodF”prescribes choice within a certain range (e.g., for someone who ischoosing anF); it takes on a descriptive connotation ifthere are agreed standards for assessingFs.

Hare never said that ethical statementsare imperatives;however, it is striking that non-descriptive or evaluative meaning isdefined in terms of imperatives. This at once gave a clear sense tohis endorsement of Hume’s denial that one can derive an“ought” from an “is”. It also coincided, atleast in appearance, with Kant, and was to become essential for laterdevelopments that brought results comparable to Kant’s. However, aHumean who lacked Kant’s belief in a purely rational will might preferto make ethical statements more loosely expressive of wish or desire,or even aspiration; and this could avoid what is everyone’s firstobjection to prescriptivism, that, intuitively, “I oughtto φ” does not entail “I will φ”(expressing intention). Hare took courage from the fact that Socratesand Aristotle incur much the same objection; as he liked to urge,Socrates wasn’t simply making a mistake. His initial reply was thatcases of failing to try to do what one admits one ought to do mayinvolve psychological incapacity, or an off-color use of“ought” that sheds its full prescriptive meaning. He wasto return more fully to the issue in a chapter of his secondbook,Freedom and Reason (1963), and again in a lateencyclopedia article, “Weakness of the Will” (1992). Inthis last piece he acknowledges that different things go wrong indifferent cases. At times, the true story may even involve somethinglike Plato’s partition of the soul (which was designed to accommodateconscious self-contradiction).

3. The Logic of Imperatives

Hare’s attempt to ground a logic of imperatives was innovative, butproblematic. One uncertainty is about its field. He supposes thatthere is a genus oftellings to that extends over commands,orders, instructions, givings of advice, and even—when theimperative is self-addressed—forming desires andintentions. These belong together in sharing adirection offit oronus of match that contrasts themwithtellings that which convey information and expressstates of belief or of knowledge. Crudely, if I tell youthatp, andp is false, then, if anything, it is myutterance that is out of order; if I tell you to doX, and youdon’t doX, then, if anything, it is your action that is out oforder. The general idea is that, just as, if I tell youthatp, I am implicitly telling you thatq, if it iscommon knowledge between us thatp entailsq, so, ifI tell you to doX, I am implicitly telling you to doY,if we know that—well, this is what has to be determined.

It is arguable that the notion ofimplicitly prescribingfails to determine any logic of imperatives (Price 2004b: §4).Later papers of Hare’s focused upon various problem cases. I shallconsider three of these here, all of which admit possible solutionseither proposed, or proposable, by Hare.

(1) The simplest examples involve only imperative sentences. These mayinvite the simple thought that one imperative entails another if thefirst cannot be satisfied without the second being satisfied also(Hare identifies this as a “logic of satisfaction”, 1971a:63). This may seem plausible in the following case:

• (A)DoX andY.
  So, doX.

Less plausible, however, may appear to be this:

• (B) DoX.
  So, doX orY.

(Hare discusses the following instance, “Post the letter; sopost the letter or burn it”, 1967: 25–34). And yet it isequally true with (B) as with (A) that the premise cannot be satisfiedwithout the conclusion being satisfied. Moreover, (B) can be derivedfrom (A) by contraposition and substitution. If (A) is valid, soshould (C) be:

• (C) Don’t doX.
  So, don’t (doX andY).
  So, do notX or notY.
  

Then we have only to replace “don’t” by “do”,and we have (B).

Williams (1962/3) judged (B) to be invalid, on the ground that itsconclusion carried a “permissive presupposition” that thehearer may doX or doY. Hare defended it on the groundthat the permission is a conversational implicature that is cancelledin the context defined by the premise“DoX”. However, even (A) may be less plausiblethan it looks. Take this example (which comes from Bob Hale):

• (D) Light the fuse and step back three paces.
  So, light the fuse.

It is certainly true that the conclusion reiteratespart ofwhat was prescribed in the premise. And yet I may hesitate to tellsomeone to light the fuse, even when I am happy to tell him to lightthe fuse and step back, if I know that, given his tendency to becarried away, he is most likely, if he lights the fuse,notto remember to step back. (As we might put the point in terms ofpossible worlds, I won’t tell him to light the fuse if the closestworld to this one in which he lights the fuse is one where he forgetsto step back; indeed, one solution is to require, for the inference togo through, the addition of a factual premise to the effect that if helights the fuse, hewill remember to step back.) And how canI be telling someone implicitly to do a thing that I would beunwilling to tell him to do explicitly?

Again, however, Hare would presumably say that any suggestion,implicit in the entailed “Light the fuse”, that the hearershould focus upon lighting the fuse is corrected in context by theinitial instruction that he then step back.

(2) New problems arise when we have mixed inferences, involvingindicative as well as imperative premises. The simplest way ofextending a logic of satisfaction to these is by the following rule: aset of premises entails a conclusion if the premises cannot be true(if indicative) or satisfied (if imperative) without the conclusionbeing true or satisfied also. However, we also need restrictive rulesof which an example (already stated in 1952: 28) would be that noimperative conclusion can be drawn from purely indicativepremises—but that is doubtless too simple. Take an example fromAristotle’sDe Motu Animalium (7, 701a19–22). Itinvolves reasoning from one intention to another. Given Hare’swillingness to represent intentions as self-addressed imperatives, wecan rewrite it as follows:

• (E) Let me make a cloak.
  If I make a cloak, I must do such-and-such.
  So, let me do such-and-such.

Here, if the second premise is true, the first premise cannot besatisfied without the conclusion’s being satisfied also; so theinference goes through on a logic of satisfaction.

Now this evidently needs to be restricted. Take the following:

• (F) Let me get drunk.
  Whoever gets drunk is bound to have a hangover.
  So, let me have a hangover.

It is true that, if I advise someone “Get drunk”, he mightrespond “Are you telling me to have a hangover?” Yet thisinference is not acceptable as leading from one intention to another;for predicted side-effects of realizing one’s intentions are notthereby intended, even if (in another case) they arewelcome. Inferences that may take one from one intention to anotherneed rather to relate, as Aristotle intended (E) (though its wording is actually ambiguous), to means towards, or ways of,achieving a given goal.

Yet further problems arise. Suppose that I intend to achieve someunforgettable end, and recognize that it will require, in due course,a presently forgettable means. (Suppose that I am already set onmaking a cloak, an end which already looms large in my mind; but somesubsidiary means that I know to be necessary in due course can onlybecome salient when the time approaches—I cannot now form anintention to realize the means since I know that I would at onceforget it until my intention to realize the end reminded me of them atan opportune moment.) I then already intend the end,butcannot as yet seriously intend the means; for it isplausibly part of having a present intention to do something that oneexpects one’s intention to play a role in a causal sequenceculminating in one’s doing it.

What would Hare say to all this? He can reply that while aself-addressed imperative may express an intention, it can also failto do so, and that this puts no limits on a logic of prescriptions. IfI tell someone to get drunk, knowing that this will produce ahangover, I amtelling him to have a hangover, evenwithoutintending this. Further, it was already a conditionon a prescription’s expressing an intention that its realizationappears to the subject to be practicable; it can now be added that Ican only form an intention now if I expect it to contribute to thesatisfaction of the prescription. This then becomes a refinement, andnot an objection.

(3) A problem that we all face is how to reconcile the following twoconditional imperatives. (I take my example from Price 2008: 60; butit is of a kind that Hare was long conscious of, and discusses in Hare1968.)

• (a)If you want to get drunk every evening, you should work in a bar.
• (b)If you want to get drunk every evening, you shouldn’t work in a bar.

These look contradictory, but need not be in any way inconsistent: (a)may be true in that working in a bar is the only way through which youcan manage to get drunk every evening; (b) may be true in that, giventhat you are a potential alcoholic with a weak will, not working in abar is a necessary condition of your maintaining your health (whichyou eitherare much concerned about, orought tobe). We can distinguish (a) and (b) most clearly by asking how todetach the consequent. This seems straightforward in the case of (b):one can detach “You shouldn’t work in a bar” from (b) byasserting “You (do) want to get drunk every evening”. Buthow, if at all, can we detach the consequent of (a)?

One answer might be that one can’t. Another might be that one can, and by asserting “You (do) want to get drunk every evening”, but only by deriving the consequent “You should work in a bar”in a heavily qualified and contextualized sense: working in a barmayfit getting drunk every evening as a necessary means;hence one might say “You should work in bar”, but only ifit is implicit that the fittingness that “should” connotesexists onlyin relation to the goal in question. (So, ofcourse, norecommendation of working in a bar follows.)Hare, however, permits himself a bold solution. He takes the clause“you want to get drunk every evening” to be have differentmeanings in (a) and (b). In (b), it is an embedded indicative,ascribing a desire to you—which is why the consequent can bedetached byasserting “You want to get drunk everyevening”. In (a), it is an embedded imperative, which wouldserve on its own for advising you to get drunk every evening;therefore the consequent can be detached, but onlybyprescribing “Get drunk every evening”.

The logic is then essentially the same as that of (E) above (but with a disambiguation of its second premise):

Get drunk every evening.
To get drunk every evening, you mustwork in a bar.
So, work in a bar.

This then invites rewriting, by what Hare takes to be an analogue of a licit logical manoeuvre, asfollows:

To get drunk every evening, you must work in a bar.
So, if getdrunk every evening, work in a bar.

However, since grammar excludes following “if” by animperative, it is replaced in the antecedent by a special use of“you want”.

This might be thought no less problematic than convenient for Hare:doesn’t it break the simple—if too simple—rule that noimperative conclusion can be derived from premises that contain noimperative? However, that simple rule lacks application here; for theoperator with widest scope in the conclusion is “if”, andnot an imperative.

Of course, this proposal by Hare makes salient what has always beenthe gravest objection to a prescriptivist analysis of practical“ought”s (and “must”s): moral judgments cannotentail imperatives; for the content of a moral judgment can occur,whereas an imperative cannot occur,embedded in variouscontexts, such as an “if”-clause (forming a conditionalantecedent), or a “that”-clause (giving the content of abelief or assertion). The objection was made strongly by Peter Geachin an article (1965) citing Gottlob Frege; so it has come to be knownas the “Frege-Geach” objection. Hare’s response is to befound in Hare (1970). His solution to the problem as it arises withconditionals derives from Gilbert Ryle’s notion of “inferencetickets” (1950). The role of the quasi-English “If getdrunk every evening, work in a bar” is to yield an implicitprescription to work in a bar out of any prescription to get drunkevery evening. To press the utterer of (a) onwhat he ishypothesizing, and what might make it true, is therefore out ofplace. What looks like a truth-apt proposition with a complexstructure is really playing a quite different role: it is not aproposition, but a kind of rule.

Hare (1989c) further hoped to reduce the paradox of an embeddedimperative by making a distinction between two elements within theexpression of a speech act: when a speaker says“DoX”, thereby telling a hearer to doX, heboth issues a sentence in the imperative mood, fit for thecommunication of a command, and indicates that he intends so to beusing it. He calls a sign of the first atropic, or sign ofmood; this is to be distinguished from aneustic, or sign ofsubscription (like Frege’s assertion-sign). When“DoX” is embedded within a conditional antecedent,as can be expressed in English by “If you want todoX”, the tropic remains though the neustic disappears.This is why it is the imperative “DoX”, and notthe indicative “You are about to doX”, thatreleases the consequent.

Many attempts have been made since to solve what is essentially thesame problem, which arises with any view of moral judgments thatdenies that they are truth–apt in the substantive sense ofdescribing things, or presenting possible contents of belief about theway things are. Indeed, the topic has come fully to life again duringthe past ten years or so. Of recent treatments, that which owes themost to Hare, both actually and explicitly, is that of John Eriksson(2009); cf. also Eriksson (2015), and for discussion Eggers(2016). Take the following example (which is more straightforward thanEriksson’s):

1. It would be bad of you to lie to me.
2. If it would be bad of you to lie to me, it would be bad of me tolie to you. Therefore,
3. It would be bad of me to lie to you.

We may call the speaker “S”, and the addressee“A”. Eriksson’s proposal is that the validity ofthe reasoning depends upon the descriptive meaning of“bad” (one that it has in general, or, more likely, onethat it takes on in this context). Suppose thatSjudgesA’s lying to him to be bad. This must be because, inhis view, it has some general bad–making characteristic (or setof characteristics)B*; this lies behind Premise 1. Then, ina simple case (which should suffice for making the present point),what lies behind Premise 2. will be the equal but conditionalascription ofB* toA’s lying to him. Premise1. becomes the antecedent that discharges the consequent of Premise2., and we have the conclusion stated in 3.

Hare was aware that such an inference goes through unproblematically(and uninterestingly) once we limit ourselves to the descriptivemeaning of “bad” that is spelled out inB*; but,of course, we want to have an inference to a prescriptive, and notjust a descriptive, conclusion. Eriksson now draws on a point that isalready recurrent in Hare: in virtue of universalizability,Sfaces a problem if he wishes to mean 1. prescriptively while refusingto mean 3. prescriptively. If he is to forbidA’s lying tohim, but not his lying toA, he will need to identify somerelevant alternative toB* that fitsA’s lying tohim, but not his lying toA; this is where descriptivemeaning becomes crucial. What here defines “relevance”? Amere difference of identity betweenS andA isexcluded from counting as relevant by universalizability. Yet nodoubtS is also distinguishable fromA by variousgeneral features, and any of these might serve to make a permissibledistinction between the two cases. Here we need to appeal to the fullforce of the Golden Rule Argument that we shall come to in the nextsection: what is likely to exclude the speaker from making someartificial distinction that permits him to lie toA, butnotA to lie to him, will be his inability sincerely andprudently to select his prescriptions in accordance with it.

There can be no doubt that Hare would have welcomed this solution. Twoobvious objections to it arise from problems that anyway attach to hisconception of “descriptive meaning”:

1. S may have only a vague notion of the content ofB*.
2. Even ifS has a clear (or sufficiently clear) notion ofB*,A may well have a different notion himself,and/or no clear understanding ofS’s notion.

Evidently, Hare needed to give further thought, within a philosophy ofthought and language, to what must be a concept of speaker’smeaning. (At reading parties and in informal discussion, he took akeen interest in the work of H.P. Grice; yet, perhaps out of anawareness of its complications, he never engaged with it in print, orin this connection.) A local reply, which keeps away from any suchgeneral philosophy, must have to be on the lines of thefollowing. Evidently, it wasn’t material to the validity of theinference as I presented it how we choose tospecifyB*. HenceS andA can share a graspof the validity of the inference even if they both lack, or fail toshare, any suitable conception ofB*. All that Erikssonoffers, and that I have presented, is a schematic grounding of theinference; and, for the reasons given, we can grasp, before we areable to spell out the details in a way that can reliablyunderpinS andA’s reasoning together to an ethicalconclusion, how the schema confirms the validity of the inference. Andone real possibility that may ease the situation is this:SandA may agree that there is no relevant generalcharacteristic that distinguishesS’s lying toAfromA’s lying toS, though they disagree – orare each unclear – about what characteristic makes bothwrong.

Discussion has focused upon the special problems that arise overembeddings within the antecedents of conditionals. With the occurrenceof moral predicates within indirect speech Hare faced separatedifficulties, and ones to which he offers no explicitsolution. However, if there is to be any hope of a solution, hemayneed, in this case, to exploit his notion of descriptivemeaning. Take as an example, “S believes that lying iswrong”, or alternatively (and indifferently) “Sholds lying to be wrong.” A direct analysis of what he believesin believing this is hardly going to be available. Yet one may be ableto specify, taking Hare’s analysis of “Lying is wrong” asa hypothesis, what has to be true ifS is to count asbelieving that lying is wrong.S needs to have a conceptionof some feature that characterizes lying in virtue of which, once heis prescribing universally, he forbids it. (Or else,S may beunable to say what it is about lying that makes it wrong to lie, yetwithout doubting that lying has some feature that does this.) Whatthen gives intelligibility and determinacy to the content of his“belief” is not a set of truth-conditions, but an act ofwill that rests upon a factual basis, and does not simply reiteratewhat his nanny has taught him to will. He holds what isstraightforwardly a factual belief about lying (though he may bevariably able to articulate it), and forbids lying in the light ofthat.

4. Decisions of Principle

The two features of prescriptivity and universalizability remained thetwin pillars of Hare’s theory ever afterwards. The term“universalisability” was to become the title of a slightlylater paper (1954/5) which also sorted out a confusion that causesreal trouble in Aristotle andKant. “General”terms (such as “man”or “Greek”) contrast with “singular” ones(such as “Socrates”). However, in the caseofmaxims, one needs to keep two distinctions apart: a maximmay be “universal”, rather than “singular” or(ambiguously) “particular”, in referring to no individuals(unless within the scope of a preposition such as “like”which converts the name of an individual into the vague specificationof a kind); a maxim may also be “general”, rather than“specific”, in identifying awide class of agentor act—a difference that is one of degree (so that the universalrule “Always give true evidence” is more specific than“Always tell the truth”, and more general than“Always give true evidence on oath”). Any discussion ofthe practicality and acceptability of “general principles”needs to keep these distinctions apart. Hare’s clarity on the matteris his most important non-disputable contribution to philosophy.

In his essay “Practical Reason” (1950), he had alreadyargued that many decisions are decisions of principle not in derivingfrom a principle, but in establishing one. As he remarked there,

It is not easier, but more difficult, to decide toaccept a very general command like “Never tell lies” thanit is to decide not to tell this particular lie … If we cannotdecide even whether to tell this lie, we cannot,a fortiori,decide whether to tell lies in innumerable circumstances whose detailsare totally unknown to us.

What, then, is to guide decision? In the second part of his essay,he attempted to find a secure basis for moral reasoning in suchconcepts as “friend”; but he discarded that approachbefore trying it out in print. His paper“Universalisability” (1954/5) stressed one’s personalresponsibility in making decisions that are also decisions ofprinciple. The next important development came in a secondbook,Freedom and Reason (1963), in which the formal featuresof prescriptivity and universalizability generate a “GoldenRule” form of argument (as stated in Luke 6:31 (KJV), this ran,“And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to themlikewise”). Hare offers a simple scenario (1963: 90–1):suppose thatA owes money toB, who owes moneytoC, and that the law allows creditors to exact their debts byputting their debtors into prison. IfB simply decides “Iwill putA into prison”, there may be nothing to say tohim. But can he say “I ought to putA into prison”?If he does, he commits himself to a principle such as “If thisis the only way to exact the debt, the creditor should imprison thedebtor”.B is unlikely to be willing to prescribe alikely implication of this, “LetC put me intoprison”, since that would frustrate his own interests. Hareargues that the form of argument retains its force even if, infact,B is not himself a debtor; for the judgment “Iought to putA into prison”, and the principle that itinvokes, will still entail conditionals, such as “Let me be putinto prison if I am ever inA’s situation”, towhichB is unlikely to be able honestly to subscribe.

InFreedom and Reason, Hare allows the argument to be evadedby the “fanatic” who is so committed to some impersonalideal (say that debtors deserve a hard time) that he is willing todisregard his own personal interests (including the interests that hehas himself as a debtor, or would have if he were a debtor). A latertightening of the argument (first set out fully in 1972c), hoped toclose off this possibility. In their practical force, ideals areequivalent to universal preferences that differ from personalpreferences in their content, but owe their moral weight to theprevalence and intensity of whatever preferences their realizationwould satisfy. ThatB would really rather go to prison himselfthan have debtors be treated leniently is possible, but improbable. Amore likely fanatic is guilty of a kind of imprudence in failing togive due weight to his own interests, actual or counter-factual. Theemergent ethical theory is a distinctive variety of utilitarianism,one that identifies the moral good with the maximization not of somesubjective state such as happiness, but of the satisfaction ofpreferences.

The argument excited almost as much skepticism as attention. It seemedimplausible that the very activity of prescribing universally shouldcommit a speaker to a substantive ethical position, let alone one sodistinctive. However, the logic of Hare’s position became perspicuousin his third book,Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, andPoint (1981). It is there set out as follows. In wonderingwhether he should assent to the statement “A oughtto φ”, the speaker has to reflect whether he canprescribe that everyone should act in the same way, whatever his ownsituation. “I” connotes no essence (e.g., human): each ofusmight be anything, and so has, when prescribing for allsituations, actual or possible, to be concerned on behalfofeverybody. There is further a prescriptive aspect to themeaning of “I”: to take a role to be possiblyone’sown, and to prescribe for that possible situation, is to giveweight to the preferences of the occupant of that role as if they wereactually one’s own. Hence, the speaker can rationally assent to aparticular “ought”-statement only if it is derivable fromsome universal principle that he will accept if he gives impartial andpositive weight to all preferences whose satisfaction would beaffected by its observance. Thus moral reflection generates auniversalized prudence. Moral ideals register within this frameworksimply as universal preferences; to allow one’s own ideals to overridemore intense or prevalent desires or ideals of others is a kind ofegoism, and so excluded. Human decision remains free, however rationaland informed, because anyone can avoid the constraints of morality bydeclining to moralize; for this reason, it remains true that no“is” entails an “ought”.

This is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily bold, intellectualconstruction, which invites debate at many points. Zeno Vendler (1988:181) urged that we keep apart the semantic thesis (which may be trueor nearly true) that “I” is a pure indexical, from anymetaphysical claim (which may baffle us) that it denotes a puresubject which can take onany state or role. In his reply,Hare clearly shies away from adopting a metaphysical position strangerthan Vendler’s own (which rejects Cartesian egos but does admit atranscendental ego). Yet he still supposes it to be true that “Imight be Napoleon”, and that “the world in which I wasNapoleon would be a different world than this, though not in itsuniversal properties” (1988a: 285). He even supposes that I canconsider situations in which I am a stove, a mountain, or atree—although, since I cannot care what happens to me if Ibecome such a thing, the consideration isidle (1988a:283). Hare seems here to have entered rather unexpected territory. Itwould have suited his usual common sense to permit me to imaginenotthat I am Napoleon, butbeing Napoleon, i.e.,what it was like to be Napoleon; and that can suffice to incline oneto ambivalence about the outcome of Waterloo. But he requires there tobe a possible situation in which I am, at any rate,relevantlyjust like Napoleon if he is to maintain thatprescribing, say, “All men like Napoleon should receive theircome-uppance” applies evento oneself, and so may beimprudent.

A danger remained of deriving a kind of imperative from anindicative. No doubt Napoleon very much wanted to win the battle. Doesawareness of that fact commit me to prescribing, on thecounter-factual supposition that I am Napoleon, that Napoleon bevictorious? Here Hare makes further use of his thesis that the meaningof “I” is partly prescriptive: to hypothesize “if Iwere Napoleon” isalready to “identify with hisprescriptions”, in the sense of prescribing that, other thingsbeing equal, they be satisfied within the scope of the hypothesis(1981: 96–9).

The solution is equally elegant and audacious. It may confirm doubtswhether the situation of my being Napoleon is asituation atall. (For if itwere a possible situation, of thesamekind as an actual situation, how could Ibelogically—as opposed to humanly—constrained inwhat attitude I adopted towards it?) It also throws open questionsabout what identifying with Napoleon’s prescriptions comes to. Onemight think that, if “I” isfully prescriptive, Icannot prescribe that Napoleon be defeated in the situation in which Iam Napoleon, since that is certainly not what he wanted or would everhave wanted; if so, I cannot honestly prescribe that all men likeNapoleon be defeated, since, for one case (that in which I amNapoleon), I donot want that. What Hare requires is a weakeridentification: given that I am moralizing, and hence prescribing forall situations of a given general kind, I must givesomeweight to the preferences that are mine in the situation in which I amNapoleon, but notmore weight than that which I give to the preferencesthat are mine in any of the other situations; hence, in deciding whatto prescribe universally, I must weigh all relevant preferencesequally (relative to their prevalence and intensity). This is exactlywhere Hare intends to lead us; but he invites the question how he canprove that one istaken that way by the logic of“ought” and “I”.

5. Attending to Preferences

A related query (whichMoral Thinking leaves as“unfinished business”; 1981: 105, cf. 1997) arises aboutthe range of preferences that prescribing universally commits one totaking on board. If “I” is fully prescriptive, it mayfurther follow that to suppose that I am some person is to take onboardall his preferences, including “external”ones about matters (say his neighbors’ sexual or dietarypractices) that may never impinge upon his consciousness. Yetsometimes Hare only demands impartiality between interests, which isnarrower. To accommodate precisely that, we might distinguish asympathetic “I”: to suppose that I am some person might beto give full weight to his preferences regarding his ownexperiences. This would still leave open whether I should take intoaccount his prudential preferences (now-for-then) for his future, oronly his synchronic preferences (now-for-now) regarding his presentstate. Alternatively, we might admit an egocentric “I”:this would let us give weight to Cheops’ desire thathereceive a big funeral after his death, but not to external desiresthat do not essentially refer to their possessor. Yet such optionsembarrass if the aim was to derive a precise ethical theory from thevery logic of the concepts.

As Hare notes (1981: 103), restrictions upon the relevant range ofpreferences may have the effect of bringing together a utilitarianismthat aims to maximize pleasure or happiness, and one that aims tomaximize the satisfaction of preference. Yet to have any hope ofachieving this we would need a double restriction: the onlypreferences to be considered must be now-for-now or then-for-then, andthey must be fully internal in relating only to conscious states ofthe subject—indeed, more precisely, to features of those statesof which the agent is conscious, or, for short,what it islike to be in those states. However, this position is doublyinsecure. First, when discussing the treatment of now-for-thenpreferences, Hare takes over from Richard Brandt the idea thatrational agents seek to maximize the satisfaction of their presentpreferences after they have been adjusted in the light of fullexposure to logic and the facts (1981: 101–5,214–16). This makes the practical question for the agent not“What do I now prefer?”, but “What would I preferafter full exposure to logic and the facts?” The same issuearises even with now-for-now preferences. Hare discusses, though in adifferent context (1981: 142–4), the pleasure machine imaginedby J.J.C. Smart (Smart & Williams 1983: 18) that maximizes thepleasures of a subject through generating a stream of illusory butenjoyable experiences. He sees it as an advantage of his variety ofutilitarianism that, not being “formulated in terms ofpleasure”, it can give weight to whether“weprefer a life for ourselves plugged into themachines to one devoted to pursuits now considered normal andenjoyable” (1981: 143). That suggests that we should give weightto now-for-now preferences whose objects arenot restrictedto conscious features of current mental states. Further, if we followBrandt, we should ask not what now-for-now preferences anagentactually has, but which hewould have aftersubjection to Brandt’s “cognitive psycho-therapy”. Yetthis implication may trouble us, not only because of the indefinitescope it offers to paternalism, but because it would seemundeterminable what an agentwould want if indefinitelyinformed.

The other source of insecurity is doubts about whether, within Hare’sframework, we are justified in restricting the relevant range ofpreferences. If, in deciding what ought to be done, I am rationallybound to identify with the agents whose preferences, internal orexternal, bear on it, how can I fail to take on the widest range ofactual preferences, now-for-then as well as now-for-now andthen-for-then, external as well as internal, and uninformed as well asinformed? Hare inclines this way, writing “It is still my beliefthat a full account of the matter would assign weight toallpreferences” (1981: 103–4). However, how might this bestbe done? Let us take them in turn.

1. Now-for-then preferences. Hare is clear that we takeinto accounthow much an agent prefers one thing to another,also tohow many agents prefer it. This suggests that weshould also attend tohow long an agent has a preference; forit would seem arbitrary to count a preference twice if two men haveit, if only for a day, but only once if one man has it for twodays. We might assimilate the questionshow long andhowmany by dividing people into time-slices within which theirrelevant preferences are stable, and askinghow manyperson-slices shared some given preference. Yet the effect iscurious. Within the life of an individual, a preference may becomeoverriding because he has entertained it for a long time, even if ithas been replaced by conflicting preferences at the time ofaction. (And the theory would not allow one to give precedence to thepreferences of the person-slice who acts on the grounds of agentialautonomy; for agents enjoy no such privilege.)
2. External preferences. One difficulty here is in assessingthe intensity of an external preference that is idle, but perhapsbecause the agent can do nothing towards satisfying it. Apparentintensity may be deceptive: it is the mark of a sentimental attitudethat it may be warmly felt, and yet at the same time inactive andinsincere. However, the same problem arises elsewhere; it is notpeculiar to external preferences.
3. Uninformed preferences. It is hard to see how Hare’sframework itself justifies disregarding these. However, subjects mayhave a higher-level preference that, where they hold or lack alower-level preference only out of ignorance, its presence or absenceshould be discounted—thought perhaps only so long as this doesnot give rise to a denial of autonomy within spheres where each of usexpects to be free to act at will according to his own judgment.

There is further unclarity in the notion of apreference.Hare had long distinguished being inpain, to which one maybe indifferent (if the pain is slight, or if one has undergoneprefrontal lobotomy), andsuffering, which entails having adesire (not necessarily overriding) to escape it. Now it is plausibleto suppose that, of any variety of suffering, there is such a thingaswhat it is like to be subject to it. (So Hare can write ofa group of sufferers, “I shall not know what it will be like forthem … unless I know what it is like to suffer likethat”; 1981: 92.) This applies so long as the desire that is anaspect of suffering is of a kind that is bound to befelt.Yet we all are subject to an indefinite range of desires that aredispositional; and even occurrent desires may be manifest in how wethink or act without being felt. Hare appears to overlook suchvariations when he writes of preferences in general, “If I donot feel the preference with the intensity which the person in thesituation feels it, I have not fully represented his situation tomyself” (Seanor & Fotion 1988: 288). And yet, when heconsiders failures to act as one prescribes (e.g., 1981: 21–2),he shows an awareness that how one chooses and acts can be equallyindicative as anything one feels of what one prefers. No doubt thiscould be sorted out, and precisely by recognizing (as Hare doubtlesscould have, though the language is not his) that thecriteriaof preference are multiple. However, this would have for him twodrawbacks. First, it multiplies the possible ways in which one mightcount as “identifying with” another. Hare has written,“In identifying myself with some person either actually orhypothetically, I identify with his prescriptions” (1981:96–7). Yet another way might be imagining what it is like to behim at some time or in some situation—which is different, thoughit may (to the extent that his preferences come to his mind as objectsof attention) be overlapping. Secondly, it confirms a doubt that oneis likely to have anyway about the comparability of preferences. If Ifeel like doing something but, for no compelling reason, fail to doit, whereas you do it without any prior or accompanying consciousnessof the preference, who has the stronger preference to do it? Thequestion is liable to be unanswerable.

6. Possible People

OutsideMoral Thinking itself, a striking application ofHare’s framework was to possible people, that is, to people who mayexist, with preferences and interests to be satisfied, if we choose tobring them into existence. Ought we to do so, so long as this willincrease the total satisfaction of preference? A positive answer hasimplications—though not, Hare argued, very radicalones—for population policy, and the morality of such practicesas abortion and IVF. Hare reasons that, if I am glad that I exist, Itenselessly prescribe,ceteris paribus, that my parents bringme into existence; universalizing the prescription, I mustprescribe,ceteris paribus, the bringing into existence ofothers relevantly like me (1975, 1988b, 1988c).

This is intriguing, though not unproblematic. We may be struck by itsinvocation, in effect, of past imperatives (such as Gerald ManleyHopkins’s “Have fair fallen, O fair, fair havefallen”, addressed to Henry Purcell, which Hopkins explained, ina letter to Bridges on Feb. 3 1883, as ‘the singular imperative(or optative if you like) of the past, a thing possible and actualboth in logic and grammar, but naturally a rare one’). Not thatthis is new: Hare had had already to defend them in prescriptivistanalysis of “I ought to have done that”. A furtherquestion is whether Hare has correctly isolated the initialattitude. If what I am glad of is the kind of life I experience, inpreference to there simply being less life of this kind in the world(cf. 1988c: 173–4), then, if universalization generates agolden-rule argument, it should indeed lead me toprescribe,ceteris paribus, creating other similar lives(unless it is the uniqueness of the life that I value). But Hare alsosupposes that what Jane Doe is grateful for is thatshe, JaneDoe, exist and not someone else, even equally privileged, in her place(1988b: 87–8). Yet it is less clear that we can expect her tohave that attitude, let alone its analogue, within Hare’sframework, of being specially glad that Dick Hare (or someone with allhis universal qualities) exists—supposing that he is glad toexist—in that possible world in which she is (or has all theuniversal qualities of) Dick Hare.

7. Levels of Moral Thinking

A different feature of his theory, first presented (in differentterminology) in “Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism”(1976), and fully explored inMoral Thinking (1981), is adistinction between a “critical” level of thinking,conducted by “archangels” with the use of “GoldenRule” arguments, and an “intuitive” level, conductedby “proles” with the use of simple principles (oftenarticulating emotional responses) whose acceptance can be justified atthe critical level. These two levels define not two social castes, buttwo roles between which each of us learns to alternate as appropriate.The complication is actually inevitable within consequentialism, whichhas to separate the questionhow one should act from thequestionhow one should think about how to act—for waysof thinking have consequences no less than ways of acting (andthinking that one should act in a certain way entails no success in soacting, nor even any attempt). A utilitarian assessment of practicalprinciples has to consider not only theirobservance utility(OU), which is what good will come of enacting them, but alsotheiracceptance utility (AU), which is (roughly) what goodwill come of intending to enact them. (Note that intending to act in acertain way is itself amental act. There is no ground hereto shift to a differentform of utilitarianism,“rule” rather than “act”, or“indirect” rather than “direct”; rather, sofar we are simply extending act-utilitarianism to a wider range ofacts, mental as well as physical.) A broad generalization that Harefavored is that the highest OU is likely to attach to highly specificprinciples, though a higher AU may attach to some fairly general ones.This comes of human ignorance and self-deception. A principle, say,permitting adultery when a marriage is breaking up anyway might have ahigher OU than one simply forbidding adultery; but, if there arepotential Don Juan’s around with a talent for false rationalization,its AU may be lower.

This complication was both convenient, and problematic. Hare had longbeen wearied by familiar objections citing concrete cases whereutilitarian theory appears to conflict with moral intuition, as whenan American sheriff might judicially execute one suspect in order toprevent a mass lynching of others. He could now hope to accommodatethese at the “intuitive” level of thinking. An inabilityever to countenance judicial murder may be recommendablebycriticalto intuitive thinking as a constraint upon practicalreflection in an emergency. And given that the attitude is approved,if not reasserted, by critical thinking as Hare conceives it, how canit in itself tell against his conception of critical thinking? (Itwould be a case, so to speak, of biting the hand that fed one.)

However, there is a difficulty. It is one thing tomake dowith intuitive ways of solving problems that are the best availablewithin limits of time and information, while leaving them subject tocorrection at leisure or in retrospect; it is another to accept atheory that approves one’s actuallyassenting to certainprinciples whose contents it cannot endorse. And yet a rule that is amere “rule of thumb” is a paper shield against temptation.All is well if the theory can be self-effacing, so that the agentdiscards it as and when he adopts an intuitive viewpoint; but, inHare’s scenario, in which the agent has internalized both critical andintuitive ways of thinking, how is he to keep out of mind, as he testshis practical commitment to some intuitive principle, that it issimply not of a kind (being absolute, and yet evidently equivalent tono principle of utility) to be critically endorsable?

This objection was to be raised both by Williams (1988) and by J.L.Mackie (1985: 110–11) (cf. also, though not explicitly aboutHare, Hunt 1999: §5). Hare anticipated it as follows:

To say that it is impossible to keep critical and intuitivethinking going in the same thought-process is like saying that in abattle a commander cannot at the same time be thinking of the detailsof tactics, the overall aim of victory, and the principles (economy offorce, concentration of force, offensive action, etc.) which he haslearnt when learning his trade. (1981: 52; cf. 1988a:289–90)

This is evidently true of what he had called“rules of thumb”, which an agent applies just so long asthis remains the best way in context of achieving his goals. However,Hare came to deprecate that phrase (1981: 38), and to emphasize thatthe “prima facie principles” he prefers to speak of havethe power to producecompunction even where their neglect,since well grounded, cannot produceremorse (1981: 30). Yethow is this to work? No doubt it is possible to combine beingconvinced both that one has to doX in some difficult situation(say when only lying will save my father), and that doingXremains in some significant waybad. Yet this thoughtrequires the possession of a distinctive concept ofbeing badwhose application, on occasion, though lacking the power to determinean ethical decision, remains obstinately significant andinexpungible. Without such a concept, talk of“compunction” is out of place. Hare makes room for thiswhen he concedes that moral concepts may suffer a sea-change when theyare applied at the intuitive and non-critical level. The onlyparticular proposal he makes is that “ought” becomesoverridable; yet he should surely be willing to concede that quite newconcepts may come into being—all, of course, under the archingguidance of critical thinking. And one such concept might be expressedby a use of “morally bad” of a kind associated with moralphilosophies that Hare would otherwise reject.

However, it must remain a problem that, precisely to the extent thatintuitive thinking can draw upon conceptions of its own, a clear-eyedintuitive thinking that does not occlude the judgments of criticalthinking must be as problematic for Hare as a clear-eyed acrasia thatunites conscious and voluntary infringement of a prescription withcontinued acceptance of it. Force still attaches to an objection byWilliams (1988: 190):

The theory ignores the fact that the responses are not merely ablack-box mechanism to generate what is probably the best outcomeunder confusing conditions. Rather, they constitute a way of seeingthe situation; and you cannot combine seeing the situation in thatway,from the point of view of those dispositions, with seeing itin the archangel’s way, in which all that is important is maximumpreference satisfaction, and the dispositions themselves are merely ameans to that.

8. Traces of Positivism in Religion and Metaethics

Hare did not suppose that the modern thinking man could long remainwhat he called a “simple believer”; so he welcomedattempts by R.B. Braithwaite and others to empty religion of dogmaticcontent. He called himself a “Christian empiricist”, butthought the question whether he was really aChristianterminological. What he retained for himself was what he once calleda “blik”, an attitude to the world which somehow gave himconfidence to live and think morally, trusting (as he put it)“in my own continued well-being (in some sense of that worldthat I may not now fully understand) if I continue to do what is rightaccording to my lights”, as also “in the generallikelihood of people like Hitler coming to a bad end” (1950/1:38). John Hare (2002: 307) connects the inhibitions that held hisfather back from belief not just with modern skepticism, but with“a philosophical doctrine about meaning which he inherited fromCarnap and the logical positivists”; for “He thought hecould not make meaningful assertions about subjects, like God, whichlay beyond the limits of possible sense experience”. Thus hedenied that the transcendental has anything to do with prayer, asking“What is the difference between there being a transcendental Godwho listens to the prayer and directs events accordingly, and it justbeing the case that the events take place?”, and answering“None at all” (1973: 27). The upshot is fatal to theorthodoxies of belief as of unbelief:

Where the transcendental is concerned, there is nodifference between a true story and a myth; it is therefore wrong tospeak of the person who prays having anillusion that thereis somebody that he is praying to. (ibid.)

Simple belief, it turns out, lacks even a content.

Also traceable to positivism was a recurrent tendency to doubt thesubstantiality of philosophical disagreement. Presumably Plato wasmaking a mistake of a kind when, as Hare diagnosed it, he

interpreted the experience whichwe call“having a particular mental image of a square” as“having, on a particular occasion, a mental look at theSquare”. (1964: 67)

Within meta-ethics, however, Hare was inclined to suppose that suchvariations fail to be more than verbal. This suspicion was firstexpressed in an unpublished paper “Moral Objectivity”(1949–50). Here Hare imagines a White (an objectivist) who calls“a moral intuition” what a Black (a subjectivist) calls“a feeling of approval”, and wonders about the point atissue:

Now we may well ask, seeing that we are all agreedthat thereis this experience, no matter what you call it,what on earth is the point of having long philosophical argumentsabout what you do call it.

Take a case of disagreement about pacifism:

The Whites describe this situation by saying thatthere is a difference of opinion between us as to whether fightingdoes or does not possess the quality right; the Blacks, on the otherhand, describe it by saying that we have different feelings aboutfighting. But the situation which they are both trying to describe isprecisely the same, and they know it … They are disagreeingmerely about words.

Hare pursued this skepticism in two publishedpapers, “Nothing Matters” (1959), and “Ontology inEthics” (1985). Here he suspects of vacuity certain terms thatget overworked, “true”, “fact”,“world”, “objective”, “realist”,“cognitivist”; hence he thinks it much harder than manyhave done to define a position that is distinctively objectivist. (Itis certainly not enough to reassert “Murder is wrong” in apeculiar and, as it were, metaethical tone of voice, firm and yetunemotive.) What I have traced back to a verificationism that may nowseem dated becomes well-grounded when applied to abstractions that, asappropriated by philosophers, await a clear sense.

9. Afterword

Hare’s unpublished paper “Moral Objectivity” contains astriking passage, unparalleled elsewhere, that confirms Lucas’ssupposition (2002: 31) of a connection between his war experience anda vein of existentialism. He imagines being an interpreter in aJapanese prisoner-of-war camp who is trying to persuade the Japanesecommander not to send sick people out to work on the railway:

I ask him to visualise, not certain non-natural properties, but thevery natural, real properties of the situations that the alternativecourses of action will bring about … It is not by any appeal tointuition that I can conduct my argument; … it is by revealingto him the nature of his choice, and showing him what it involves,what in fact he is choosing. And when I have done all this, I can onlyleave him to choose; for it is after all his choice, not mine …At any rate I have myself chosen, so far as in me lies, my own way oflife, my own standard of values, my own principle of choice. In theend we all have to choose for ourselves; and no one can do it foranyone else.

What makes Hare arguably unique, though at the same time closer inapproach to Kant than to the utilitarians whose ally he became, wasthat he combined this insistence upon the ineluctability of individualchoice with an optimistic view of the possibilities of making choicesrationally. (Indeed, he played with the idea that Kant could have beena utilitarian, 1993b.) What reconciles these two features of moralthinking, in his view, is nothing other than the logic of thepractical “ought”. That this is crucial and central wasalready a claim within his early and unpublished monograph “AnEssay in Monism”. There, criticizing “materialists”(among whom he counts utilitarians) for letting “the word‘ought’ slip out of their vocabulary”, he remarks,

Both the Greeks of the Fourth Century B.C. and wein our own times have seen how quickly people like Thrasymachus springup, and with what dire results, once men have forgotten the meaning of“ought”. (ch. 19, p. 62)

This may already seem curious in two ways. First, one might supposethat language is rather our servant than our master, and that therationality of reasoning in the ways he recommends needs to beestablished on general grounds, and not made to depend upon thesesabout the connotations of a word. Secondly, one of the theses inquestion—that practical “ought”s entailimperatives—is hardly obviously true; one might rather expect anOxford philosopher, in the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, tobe sensitive to the objection that the modal “You ought todoX” no more entails the imperative“DoX” than the modal “He ought to have gothome by now” entails the indicative “He has got home bynow”. (Think how much more plausible it is to infer the secondfrom “He must have got home by now”.)

Hare had replies to both objections, which he sets out brieflyinMoral Thinking (1981). He insists that we need our wordsto mean what they do mean if we are to answer the questions that wewant to ask:

If we were to alter the meaning of our words, weshould be altering the questions we were asking, and perhapsanswering, in terms of them … If we go trying toanswerthose questions, we are stuck withthoseconcepts. (1981: 18)

And yet, at the same time, he asserts no morethan that the practical “ought” is a “nearneighbour” to the deontic “must” (1981: 7),acknowledging

It is much odder to say “I must” atthe moment at which one is backsliding (i.e. doing what one says onemust not do) than it is to do this with “ought”. (1981:24)

Here he may seem to vacillate between two different roles, that ofdescribing our language as it is, and that of tightening it in orderto make it more rigorous. Perhaps one may reconcile these throughmaking much of the following qualification:

But “ought” aspires to the status of“must”, and … in rigorous, critical moral reasoninghas to be used like it. (1981: 24)

In Hare’s view, it is human weakness that isserved better by “ought” than by “must”, andwe reveal our commitment to the logic of “must” in uses of“ought” that fall short of that logic, and yet constantlyaspire to live up to it. “Intuitive” thinking may be asnecessary as “critical”, and yet it is never such as toenjoy a secure resting-place in our hearts and minds.

At the heart of Hare’s ethical theory, therefore, lies a vision ofhuman beings as unable to live up to a way of thinking towards whichthey are nonetheless ineluctably drawn. He perceives there to be adrama inherent in the human condition to which no fully integrated andunified system could do justice. His philosophy is currently somewhatout of fashion, in part through a reversion to various forms ofcognitivism in ethics, in part through changes in the style ofphilosophy, which now pursues the clarity that he desired through anew complexity and professionalization. At least in the short term, itis probable, and in accord with the “strange dream” fromwhich we started, that his thinking will come to be viewed from adistance, as playing a once important role within the non-cognitiviststrain in ethics that was dominant through much of the 20^thcentury. And yet it may yet come to hold the attention of a newaudience through its recognition of the tensions inherent in anypractical thinking that responds without complacency to theaspirations of our ethical ideals, and the limitations of our moralcapacities.

Supplementary Document:Hare’s “An Essay on Monism”

Bibliography

Primary Literature

(For a complete listing of publications, see Hare 1997a: 167–82,updated in 2000 reprint.)

• unpublished (early 1940s), “An Essay in Monism”,Balliol College Archive. (I quote from the typescript, within whichchs 1–12 are numbered in type pp. 1–120, after which a newpagination starts in pencil.)
• unpublished (1949–50), “Moral Objectivity”,Balliol College Archive.
• unpublished (1950), “Practical Reason”, BalliolCollege Archive.
• 1949, “Imperative Sentences”,Mind, 58:21–39; reprinted in Hare 1971a: 1–21.
• 1950/1, “Theology andFalsification”,University, 1 (Winter); reprinted in1992a: 37–9 (page-reference in text to reprint).
• 1952,The Language of Morals, Oxford: ClarendonPress.
• 1954/5, “Universalizability”,Proceedings of theAristotelian Society, 55: 295–312; reprinted in Hare 1972b:13–28.
• 1955, “Ethics and Politics”,The Listener, 54(13 October): 593–4; 55 (20 October): 651–2; the firstinstallment was reprinted as “Can I Be Blamed for ObeyingOrders?”, Hare 1972a: 1–8.
• 1957, “Geach: Good and Evil”,Analysis, 18:103–12.
• 1959, “Nothing Matters”, published in French inLaPhilosophie Analytique, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit; reprintedin English in 1972a: 32–47.
• 1963,Freedom and Reason, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1964, “A Question about Plato’s Theory of Ideas”, inM. Bunge (ed.),The Critical Approach, Essays in Honor of KarlPopper, Glencoe IL: Free Press of Glencoe; reprinted in 1971b:54–79 (page-reference in text to reprint).
• 1967, “Some Alleged Differences between Indicatives andImperatives”,Mind, 76: 309–26; reprinted in Hare1971a: 25–43 (page-reference in text to reprint).
• 1968, “Wanting, Some Pitfalls”, in R. Binkley(ed.),Agent, Action and Reason (Proceedings of theUniversity of Western Ontario Colloquium); reprinted in Hare 1971a:44–58.
• 1969, “Practical Inferences”, in V. Kruse(ed.),Festskrift til Alf Ross, Copenhagen: JuristvorbundetsVorlag; reprinted in Hare 1971a: 59–73 (page-reference in textto reprint).
• 1970, “Meaning and Speech Acts”,PhilosophicalReview, 79: 3–24; reprinted in Hare 1971a:74–93.
• 1971a,Practical Inferences, London: Macmillan.
• 1971b,Essays on Philosophical Method, London:Macmillan.
• 1972a,Applications of Moral Philosophy, London:Macmillan.
• 1972b,Essays on the Moral Concepts, London:Macmillan.
• 1972c, “Wrongness and Harm”, in 1972b:92–109.
• 1973, “The Simple Believer”, in G. Outka & J.P.Reeder (eds),Religion and Morality, New York: Anchor Press;reprinted in 1992a: 1–36 (page-reference in text toreprint).
• 1975, “Abortion and the Golden Rule”,Philosophyand Public Affairs, 4: 201–22; reprinted in 1993a:147–67.
• 1976, “Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism”, inH.D. Lewis (ed.),Contemporary British Philosophy 4^thSeries, London: Allen & Unwin; reprinted in 1989a:212–30.
• 1978, “Relevance”, in A.I. Goldman & J. Kim(eds),Values and Morals, Dordrecht: Reidel; reprinted (withsecond thoughts) in Hare 1989a: 191–211.
• 1981,Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point,Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1982,Plato, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 1985, “Ontology in Ethics”, in T. Honderich (ed.),Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J.L. Mackie, London:Routledge; reprinted in 1989a: 82–98.
• 1988a, “Comments”, in Seanor & Fotion (eds) 1988:199–293.
• 1988b, “When does PotentialityCount?”,Bioethics, 2: 214–26; reprinted in Hare1993a: 84–97.
• 1988c, “A Kantian Approach to Abortion”, in M. Bayles& K. Henley (eds),Right Conduct, New York: Random House;reprinted in Hare 1993a: 168–84.
• 1989a,Essays in Ethical Theory, Oxford: ClarendonPress.
• 1989b,Essays on Political Morality, Oxford: ClarendonPress.
• 1989c, “Some Sub-Atomic Particles ofLogic”,Mind, 98: 23–37; reprinted in Hare 1999:28–42.
• 1992a,Essays on Religion and Education, Oxford:Clarendon Press.
• 1992b, “Weakness of the Will”, in L. Becker(ed.),Encyclopedia of Ethics, New York: Garland; reprintedin Hare 1999: 109–14.
• 1993a,Essays on Bioethics, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1993b, “Could Kant have been aUtilitarian?”,Utilitas, 5: 1–16; revised in1997a: 147–65.
• 1997a,Sorting Out Ethics, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1997b, “Preferences of Possible People”, in C. Fehige& U. Wessels (eds),Preferences, Berlin: De Gruyter;reprinted in Hare 1999: 126–31.
• 1998, “Prescriptivism”, in E. Craig (ed.)The RoutledgeEncyclopedia of Philosophy,London: Routledge; reprinted in Hare1999: 19–27 (page-reference in text to reprint).
• 1999,Objective Prescriptions and Other Essays, Oxford:Clarendon Press.
• 2002, “A PhilosophicalAutobiography”,Utilitas, 14: 269–305.

Secondary and Other Literature

• Adu-Amankwah, P.A., 1997,The Moral Philosophy of R.M. Hare: AVindication of Utilitarianism?, New York: Peter Lang.
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• Brandt, R.B., 1979,A Theory of the Good and the Right,Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Eggers, D., 2016, “Nothing New in Ecumenia? Hare, HybridExpressivism and de Dicto Beliefs”,Ethical Theory and MoralPractice, 19: 831–47.
• Eriksson J., 2009, “Homage to Hare: Ecumenism and theFrege-Geach Problem”,Ethics, 120: 8–35.
• –––, 2015, “Hybrid Expressivism”, inM. Ridge & G. Fletcher eds,Having it Both Ways: HybridTheories and Modern Metaethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press,149–70.
• Fehige, C. & U. Wessels (eds), 1998,Preferences,Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Foot, P., 1978,Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in MoralPhilosophy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell; reprinted in 2002, Oxford:Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2001,Natural Goodness, Oxford:Clarendon Press.
• Forschler, S., 2013, “Kantian and Consequentialist Ethics:The Gap Can Be Bridged”,Metaphilosophy, 44:88–104.
• Geach, P.T., 1956, “Good and Evil”,Analysis,17: 33–42.
• –––, 1965,“Assertion”,Philosophical Review, 74:449–65; reprinted in hisLogic Matters, Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1972: 254–69.
• Hallich, O., 2000,Richard Hares Moralphilosophie,Freiburg/München: Alber Verlag.
• Hare, J.E., 2002, “A MemorialAddress”,Utilitas, 14: 306–8.
• –––, 2007,God and Morality, Oxford:Blackwell.
• Hudson, W.D., 1983,Modern Moral Philosophy,2^nd edn, London: Macmillan.
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• Wym, K.D., 2005,Crucible of Reason: Intentional Action,Practical Rationality, and Weakness of Will, Lanham MD: Rowman& Littlefield.

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Acknowledgments

With the kind permission of the British Academy, this present pieceabbreviates the biographical, and extends the philosophical, parts ofPrice 2004a. I am grateful to John Hare for permission to use and copyunpublished material from the Balliol College Archive.