## 1. The Life and the Man




Richard Mervyn Hare was born at Backwell Down, outside Bristol, on 21
March 1919. He was to be known professionally as R.M. Hare, and
personally as Dick Hare. His father, Charles Francis Aubone Hare, was
director of a firm, John Hare & Co., making paint and floor-cloth;
his mother was Louise Kathleen Simonds, of a brewing and banking
family. His parents died while he was still young. He was then cared
for chiefly by guardians and relatives on his mother's side, being
sent to school first at Copthorne in Sussex, and then, from 1932 to
1937, as a classical scholar at Rugby. He was awarded a scholarship to
Balliol College in 1937, where he read two years of Greats before the
outbreak of war.




Despite a largely classical education, Hare's mind was already turning
towards moral philosophy. He ascribed this to two things, the need to
define an attitude towards fighting, and a feeling of guilt at living
in moderate comfort. He spent much time while still at Rugby working
with the unemployed, and finally decided not to be a pacifist, but to
join the OTC. When war broke out, he volunteered for service in the
Royal Artillery, and circumvented the results of a medical test in
order to be permitted active service overseas. He was eventually put
on a ship for India in autumn 1940. He had a year training Punjabi
soldiers, and enjoying some adventures (twice finding his own way back
through the jungle, once after losing his guns to the Japanese). He
was finally taken prisoner when Singapore fell in February 1942. He
then suffered a long march up the River Kwai to near the Three Pagodas
Pass, with a group of officers whose task was to work as coolies
building the railway from Siam into Burma. So he knew too well the
"violent untiring labours" that Aristotle associates with
virtue in an ode to a dead friend that was dear to Hare's heart. He
writes in his autobiography, "I prefer to pass over our
sufferings during the eight months we were there" (2002: 283);
he rarely mentioned them (except when more fortunate critics of his
views rashly imputed to him the exemption from a wider experience of
life that can be the privilege of an Oxford fellowship). He was
eventually imprisoned with fellow officers in Singapore, whence he was
released after exactly three and a half years when the War ended.




After the war, Hare returned to Balliol to complete the four years of
Greats. Even before he sat Finals, he was offered a lectureship at
Balliol, which almost immediately became a fellowship. Hare always
claimed to have learnt a lot from his pupils, and his early years at
Balliol granted him outstanding ones--four of whom, Bernard
Williams, David Pears, Richard Wollheim, and John Lucas, were to join
him both as professional philosophers, and as Fellows of the British
Academy. Lucas narrates how he and his contemporaries would plan a
day's campaigning, with a succession of tutees concerting, through the
day, objections to some settled opinion of Hare's, and replies to his
replies--with Williams sent in last to deliver the *coup de
grace* that was never, in the event, fatal. No one who never
experienced Hare's impromptu fielding of objections can really
understand the resilience of even his less plausible convictions. And
yet, despite some impressions, he was quite capable of admitting the
force of fair counter-arguments. He had a faith that apparent
disagreements can usually be resolved once confusions are removed
(whence the over-sanguine title of his last book, *Sorting Out
Ethics*, 1997a). This went with a presumption that objections to
his views rested on confusion, one that could lead to a degree of
asperity. He recognized that the brusquely economical format of his
"Comments" within *Hare and Critics* (which he
seriously 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 to
> my critics in writing notes instead of essays, I must point out that
> this is what we commonly do to Plato and Aristotle (as in the
> Clarendon series of commentaries), taking their arguments one by one
> and treating them briskly but seriously.
> 
> 




There could be a complaint that Hare was most interested in his own
ideas. John Lucas had from Tom Braun a Balliol rhyme (of which he
cites a variant version in Lucas 2002: 31) dating from soon after the
publication of *The 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 his
own reconsiderations; he could then be depended upon to be
over-generous. He always disparaged his own scholarship, though from a
demanding point of view. (Few writers of long books on Plato can have
first re-read the whole of Plato in Greek, as Hare did before writing
his very short one, 1982.) Yet his interests were wider in range than
his publications, and extended through Frege, Chomsky, Davidson, and a
fair range of contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Though he
was keen to claim ancestry (in a late encyclopedia article he counts
Socrates and Aristotle as, in part, the first prescriptivists; 1998:
20), his love of philosophy did not reduce at all to a love of his own
philosophy.




His most amiable aspects were apparent to the undergraduates (by
preference) whom, from early on, he invited to one of his
reading-parties, first at Plas Rhoscolyn in Anglesey, and later also
at Saffron House in Ewelme, beneath the Chilterns. It was there above
all that he vividly communicated a sense of how worthwhile and
enjoyable it is not just to read but to *do* philosophy. He was
thus, however exacting his standards, a most positive figure as a
mentor, giving of himself in discussion in a manner that could be
opinionated but was also self-forgetful. He was a Puritan of the
traditional kind who shared Dr Johnson's approval of "harmless
pleasures". He was concerned about the case against eating meat;
but his eventual virtual vegetarianism was rather caused, he said, by
gardening than by argument. Some of his dislikes were distinctive: the
music of Beethoven (which he came to find superficial), wearing socks
(which he ascribed to commercialism), drinking coffee (which he said
affected his temper), travelling by train (which caused him anxiety),
giving and receiving presents (when the recipient best knows what he
wants). Ved Mehta (1962) recalls his working, for freedom from
interruption, in a caravan on the front lawn of his house in
Oxford. He had the courage, though not the extravagance, to be an
eccentric.




It was initially at reading parties that his pupils encountered a part
of his life equally important to him as philosophy, his wife and
children. What he describes as "a night of mostly bad
dreams", starting with his mother's death in 1935, ended with
his marriage in 1947 to Catherine Verney, which he calls "the
best thing I ever did, and a source of lasting happiness" (2002:
272 & 292). They shared a love of traditional Anglicanism (though
her beliefs were more orthodox than his), and of music (especially
choral and *a cappella*). A Hare reading party at Ewelme was
always in part a music camp, with (for all those able to join in) a
piano to play and madrigals to sing. Everything equally involved
their four children, John (who has published about his father, 2007:
184-248), and three daughters. Without them, he would have felt
incomplete even as a moral philosopher; for Aristotle's question
"What sort of person should I be?" gave way, for him, to
the question "What sort of person should I bring up my children
to be?"




Hare remained a tutor at Balliol for twenty years, and always felt
attached to that institution above all others (whence the bequest of
his *Nachlass*). 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's
Chair of Moral Philosophy at Corpus Christi. There he took on a
responsibility for the supervision of research students. (Balliol and
Corpus Greats pupils still had the benefit of his reading parties,
which for a time, while John was at Balliol, became biennial.) He
also took his turn as chairman of the Philosophy Panel, which admits
and oversees graduates, and chairman of the Faculty Board.
Administration, it may be said, was a task with which he coped
admirably, but, also admirably, refused to identify.




He recalls that most of his cousins on his mother's side were
Americans; and two of his children emigrated to America and married
Americans. Like all distinguished Oxford philosophers, he received
many invitations there (of which the most welcome was to the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where he
wrote both *Moral Thinking,* 1981, and his little
book *Plato*, 1982). All this made less improbable his early
retirement from Oxford in 1983, and his appointment as Graduate
Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida at
Gainesville. One desire was to escape from faculty politics at
Oxford. A contributing factor was the publication of *Moral
Thinking*, which left him immediately, he confessed, nothing new
to say in his staple lectures. Yet his main motive was the prospect
of helping to set up a Center for Applied Philosophy.




The very phrase "applied ethics", now so familiar (and
yet, one may think, tendentious), presupposes a tradition of ethical
theories, such as his, that invite practical applications. In fact, he
published his first paper in practical ethics, titled "Ethics
and Politics", in the *Listener* (1955). (Part of it is
collected, under the title "Can I be Blamed for Obeying
Orders?", in Hare 1972a; there it is followed by three papers
originally published in the 1950s, and more from the 1960s.) Better
known is the last chapter of *Freedom and Reason* (1963), which
addressed the issue, then (it seemed) wholly recalcitrant, of
apartheid. And much else followed, with a stream of papers, and
memberships of various advisory bodies (Hare 2002: 294-5). He
was engaged especially by urban planning, where he favored radial over
ring roads, and biomedical ethics, in which he labored to be logical
and not just *bien pensant*. When a Society for Applied
Philosophy was formed, he became its first President. So he looked
forward to a profitable refocusing of his energies; and this, to an
extent, occurred, even when the Center partly disappointed. As he
notes, three out of four volumes of essays published between 1989 and
1993 fall within practical ethics (Hare 1989b, 1992a, 1993a).




His time in Gainesville was disturbed by the first, and slightest, of
his 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 gave
his last paper, appropriately, to an undergraduate audience at King's
College London. He was still able to put together *Sorting Out
Ethics* (1997a), deriving from the Axel Hagerstrom Lectures that
he had given at Uppsala University in 1991 (when he also received an
honorary doctorate--his first doctorate--from the University
of Lund). His eightieth birthday was marked by the publication of a
final collection of papers, *Objective Prescriptions and other
essays* (1999). He died suddenly but peacefully on 29 January
2002.


## 2. The Language of Morals




Philosophically, Hare came under two influences that together led him
to views that he could always retain. One was emotivism. He followed
this in accepting a broadly empiricist view of facts that excluded
moral facts in any unetiolated sense of "fact". However,
he never adopted the verification principle of meaning in any
thorough-going way. He also recoiled from any causal account of
"emotive meaning" that reduced moral discourse to
emotional manipulation. It became a recurrent theme that emotivism
went wrong by connecting the meaning of moral language with its
perlocutionary, rather than its illocutionary, force (1997a:
112-14), that is, with what we do *by*
or *through* using it, rather than what we do *in* using
it.




The other influence was Kantian. From H.J. Paton's lectures on Kant,
and articles by Reginald Jackson, he learnt that imperatives fall
within the realm of reason. This led him into a study of imperative
logic, a topic already being explored in Scandinavia (especially by
Alf Ross), but unfamiliar in Britain. In his first published article,
"Imperative Sentences" (1949), in his essay
"Practical Reason" entered for the T.H. Green Moral
Philosophy prize in 1950, and in his first book, *The Language of
Morals* (1952), he explored the possibilities of inferring
imperative conclusions from imperative, or a combination of imperative
and indicative, premises.



*The Language of Morals* introduced a distinction between
prescriptive and descriptive meaning. Prescriptive meaning is defined
in relation to imperatives: a statement is prescriptive if it entails,
if necessary in conjunction with purely factual statements, at least
one imperative; and to assent to an imperative is to prescribe action.
Descriptive meaning is defined in relation to truth-conditions: a
statement is descriptive to the extent that factual conditions for its
correct application define its meaning. It is taken for granted, in
the tradition of Hume, that the factual is only contingently
motivating: desire is no part of sincere assent to a purely factual
statement. A moral statement has prescriptive meaning, but may also be
partly descriptive. Thus "*A* [a person] ought
to ph" entails the imperative
"Let *A* ph", so that to assent to it sincerely
is to have an overriding desire (which in application to oneself will
amount, if its satisfaction appears practicable, to an intention)
that *A* ph. If there are agreed reasons for ph-ing
within a linguistic community, say that it is enjoyable,
"*A* ought to ph" may take on the descriptive
implication of "ph-ing is
enjoyable". "*X* is a good *F*"
prescribes choice within a certain range (e.g., for someone who is
choosing an *F*); it takes on a descriptive connotation if
there are agreed standards for assessing *F*s.




Hare never said that ethical statements *are* imperatives;
however, it is striking that non-descriptive or evaluative meaning is
defined in terms of imperatives. This at once gave a clear sense to
his endorsement of Hume's denial that one can derive an
"ought" from an "is". It also coincided, at
least in appearance, with Kant, and was to become essential for later
developments that brought results comparable to Kant's. However, a
Humean who lacked Kant's belief in a purely rational will might prefer
to make ethical statements more loosely expressive of wish or desire,
or even aspiration; and this could avoid what is everyone's first
objection to prescriptivism, that, intuitively, "I ought
to ph" does not entail "I will ph"
(expressing intention). Hare took courage from the fact that Socrates
and Aristotle incur much the same objection; as he liked to urge,
Socrates wasn't simply making a mistake. His initial reply was that
cases of failing to try to do what one admits one ought to do may
involve psychological incapacity, or an off-color use of
"ought" that sheds its full prescriptive meaning. He was
to return more fully to the issue in a chapter of his second
book, *Freedom and Reason* (1963), and again in a late
encyclopedia article, "Weakness of the Will" (1992). In
this last piece he acknowledges that different things go wrong in
different cases. At times, the true story may even involve something
like Plato's partition of the soul (which was designed to accommodate
conscious self-contradiction).


## 3. The Logic of Imperatives




Hare's attempt to ground a logic of imperatives was innovative, but
problematic. One uncertainty is about its field. He supposes that
there is a genus of *tellings to* that extends over commands,
orders, instructions, givings of advice, and even--when the
imperative is self-addressed--forming desires and
intentions. These belong together in sharing a *direction of
fit* or *onus of match* that contrasts them
with *tellings that* which convey information and express
states of belief or of knowledge. Crudely, if I tell you
that *p*, and *p* is false, then, if anything, it is my
utterance that is out of order; if I tell you to do *X*, and you
don't do *X*, then, if anything, it is your action that is out of
order. The general idea is that, just as, if I tell you
that *p*, I am implicitly telling you that *q*, if it is
common knowledge between us that *p* entails *q*, so, if
I tell you to do *X*, I am implicitly telling you to do *Y*,
if we know that--well, this is what has to be determined.




It is arguable that the notion of *implicitly prescribing*
fails to determine any logic of imperatives (Price 2004b: SS4).
Later papers of Hare's focused upon various problem cases. I shall
consider three of these here, all of which admit possible solutions
either proposed, or proposable, by Hare.



(1) The simplest examples involve only imperative sentences. These may
invite the simple thought that one imperative entails another if the
first 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)
Do *X* and *Y*.  
 So, do *X*.




Less plausible, however, may appear to be this:


* (B) Do *X*.  

So, do *X* or *Y*.


(Hare discusses the following instance, "Post the letter; so
post the letter or burn it", 1967: 25-34). And yet it is
equally true with (B) as with (A) that the premise cannot be satisfied
without the conclusion being satisfied. Moreover, (B) can be derived
from (A) by contraposition and substitution. If (A) is valid, so
should (C) be:


* (C)
 Don't do *X*.  

So, don't (do *X* and *Y*).  

So, do not *X* or not *Y*.



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 its
conclusion carried a "permissive presupposition" that the
hearer may do *X* or do *Y*. Hare defended it on the ground
that the permission is a conversational implicature that is cancelled
in the context defined by the premise
"Do *X*". However, even (A) may be less plausible
than 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 reiterates *part* of
what was prescribed in the premise. And yet I may hesitate to tell
someone to light the fuse, even when I am happy to tell him to light
the fuse and step back, if I know that, given his tendency to be
carried away, he is most likely, if he lights the fuse, *not*
to remember to step back. (As we might put the point in terms of
possible worlds, I won't tell him to light the fuse if the closest
world to this one in which he lights the fuse is one where he forgets
to step back; indeed, one solution is to require, for the inference to
go through, the addition of a factual premise to the effect that if he
lights the fuse, he *will* remember to step back.) And how can
I be telling someone implicitly to do a thing that I would be
unwilling to tell him to do explicitly?




Again, however, Hare would presumably say that any suggestion,
implicit in the entailed "Light the fuse", that the hearer
should focus upon lighting the fuse is corrected in context by the
initial instruction that he then step back.




(2) New problems arise when we have mixed inferences, involving
indicative as well as imperative premises. The simplest way of
extending a logic of satisfaction to these is by the following rule: a
set of premises entails a conclusion if the premises cannot be true
(if indicative) or satisfied (if imperative) without the conclusion
being true or satisfied also. However, we also need restrictive rules
of which an example (already stated in 1952: 28) would be that no
imperative conclusion can be drawn from purely indicative
premises--but that is doubtless too simple. Take an example from
Aristotle's *De Motu Animalium* (7, 701a19-22). It
involves reasoning from one intention to another. Given Hare's
willingness to represent intentions as self-addressed imperatives, we
can 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 be
satisfied without the conclusion's being satisfied also; so the
inference 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 might
respond "Are you telling me to have a hangover?" Yet this
inference is not acceptable as leading from one intention to another;
for predicted side-effects of realizing one's intentions are not
thereby intended, even if (in another case) they are
welcome. Inferences that may take one from one intention to another
need 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 some
unforgettable end, and recognize that it will require, in due course,
a presently forgettable means. (Suppose that I am already set on
making a cloak, an end which already looms large in my mind; but some
subsidiary means that I know to be necessary in due course can only
become salient when the time approaches--I cannot now form an
intention to realize the means since I know that I would at once
forget it until my intention to realize the end reminded me of them at
an opportune moment.) I then already intend the end,
but *cannot* as yet seriously intend the means; for it is
plausibly part of having a present intention to do something that one
expects one's intention to play a role in a causal sequence
culminating in one's doing it.




What would Hare say to all this? He can reply that while a
self-addressed imperative may express an intention, it can also fail
to do so, and that this puts no limits on a logic of prescriptions. If
I tell someone to get drunk, knowing that this will produce a
hangover, I am *telling* him to have a hangover, even
without *intending* this. Further, it was already a condition
on a prescription's expressing an intention that its realization
appears to the subject to be practicable; it can now be added that I
can only form an intention now if I expect it to contribute to the
satisfaction of the prescription. This then becomes a refinement, and
not an objection.




(3) A problem that we all face is how to reconcile the following two
conditional imperatives. (I take my example from Price 2008: 60; but
it is of a kind that Hare was long conscious of, and discusses in Hare
1968.)


* (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 you
can manage to get drunk every evening; (b) may be true in that, given
that you are a potential alcoholic with a weak will, not working in a
bar is a necessary condition of your maintaining your health (which
you either *are* much concerned about, or *ought* to
be). We can distinguish (a) and (b) most clearly by asking how to
detach the consequent. This seems straightforward in the case of (b):
one can detach "You shouldn't work in a bar" from (b) by
asserting "You (do) want to get drunk every evening". But
how, 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 bar
may *fit* getting drunk every evening as a necessary means;
hence one might say "You should work in bar", but only if
it is implicit that the fittingness that "should" connotes
exists only *in relation to* the goal in question. (So, of
course, no *recommendation* 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 different
meanings in (a) and (b). In (b), it is an embedded indicative,
ascribing a desire to you--which is why the consequent can be
detached by *asserting* "You want to get drunk every
evening". In (a), it is an embedded imperative, which would
serve on its own for advising you to get drunk every evening;
therefore the consequent can be detached, but only
by *prescribing* "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 must
> work 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, as
follows:



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




However, since grammar excludes following "if" by an
imperative, 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 no
imperative conclusion can be derived from premises that contain no
imperative? However, that simple rule lacks application here; for the
operator with widest scope in the conclusion is "if", and
not an imperative.




Of course, this proposal by Hare makes salient what has always been
the gravest objection to a prescriptivist analysis of practical
"ought"s (and "must"s): moral judgments cannot
entail imperatives; for the content of a moral judgment can occur,
whereas an imperative cannot occur, *embedded* in various
contexts, such as an "if"-clause (forming a conditional
antecedent), or a "that"-clause (giving the content of a
belief or assertion). The objection was made strongly by Peter Geach
in an article (1965) citing Gottlob Frege; so it has come to be known
as the "Frege-Geach" objection. Hare's response is to be
found in Hare (1970). His solution to the problem as it arises with
conditionals derives from Gilbert Ryle's notion of "inference
tickets" (1950). The role of the quasi-English "If get
drunk every evening, work in a bar" is to yield an implicit
prescription to work in a bar out of any prescription to get drunk
every evening. To press the utterer of (a) on *what* he is
hypothesizing, and what might make it true, is therefore out of
place. What looks like a truth-apt proposition with a complex
structure is really playing a quite different role: it is not a
proposition, but a kind of rule.




Hare (1989c) further hoped to reduce the paradox of an embedded
imperative by making a distinction between two elements within the
expression of a speech act: when a speaker says
"Do *X*", thereby telling a hearer to do *X*, he
both issues a sentence in the imperative mood, fit for the
communication of a command, and indicates that he intends so to be
using it. He calls a sign of the first a *tropic*, or sign of
mood; this is to be distinguished from a *neustic*, or sign of
subscription (like Frege's assertion-sign). When
"Do *X*" is embedded within a conditional antecedent,
as can be expressed in English by "If you want to
do *X*", the tropic remains though the neustic disappears.
This is why it is the imperative "Do *X*", and not
the indicative "You are about to do *X*", that
releases the consequent.




Many attempts have been made since to solve what is essentially the
same problem, which arises with any view of moral judgments that
denies that they are truth-apt in the substantive sense of
describing things, or presenting possible contents of belief about the
way things are. Indeed, the topic has come fully to life again during
the past ten years or so. Of recent treatments, that which owes the
most 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 than
Eriksson'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 to
lie 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 of
the reasoning depends upon the descriptive meaning of
"bad" (one that it has in general, or, more likely, one
that it takes on in this context). Suppose that *S*
judges *A*'s lying to him to be bad. This must be because, in
his view, it has some general bad-making characteristic (or set
of characteristics) *B\**; this lies behind Premise 1. Then, in
a simple case (which should suffice for making the present point),
what lies behind Premise 2. will be the equal but conditional
ascription of *B\** to *A*'s lying to him. Premise
1. becomes the antecedent that discharges the consequent of Premise
2., 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 descriptive
meaning of "bad" that is spelled out in *B\**; but,
of course, we want to have an inference to a prescriptive, and not
just a descriptive, conclusion. Eriksson now draws on a point that is
already recurrent in Hare: in virtue of universalizability, *S*
faces a problem if he wishes to mean 1. prescriptively while refusing
to mean 3. prescriptively. If he is to forbid *A*'s lying to
him, but not his lying to *A*, he will need to identify some
relevant alternative to *B\** that fits *A*'s lying to
him, but not his lying to *A*; this is where descriptive
meaning becomes crucial. What here defines "relevance"? A
mere difference of identity between *S* and *A* is
excluded from counting as relevant by universalizability. Yet no
doubt *S* is also distinguishable from *A* by various
general features, and any of these might serve to make a permissible
distinction between the two cases. Here we need to appeal to the full
force of the Golden Rule Argument that we shall come to in the next
section: what is likely to exclude the speaker from making some
artificial distinction that permits him to lie to *A*, but
not *A* to lie to him, will be his inability sincerely and
prudently to select his prescriptions in accordance with it.


 

There can be no doubt that Hare would have welcomed this solution. Two
obvious objections to it arise from problems that anyway attach to his
conception of "descriptive meaning":


1. *S* may have only a vague notion of the content of *B\**.
2. Even if *S* has a clear (or sufficiently clear) notion of
*B\**, *A* may well have a different notion himself,
and/or no clear understanding of *S*'s notion.



Evidently, Hare needed to give further thought, within a philosophy of
thought and language, to what must be a concept of speaker's
meaning. (At reading parties and in informal discussion, he took a
keen interest in the work of H.P. Grice; yet, perhaps out of an
awareness of its complications, he never engaged with it in print, or
in this connection.) A local reply, which keeps away from any such
general philosophy, must have to be on the lines of the
following. Evidently, it wasn't material to the validity of the
inference as I presented it how we choose to
specify *B\**. Hence *S* and *A* can share a grasp
of the validity of the inference even if they both lack, or fail to
share, any suitable conception of *B\**. All that Eriksson
offers, and that I have presented, is a schematic grounding of the
inference; and, for the reasons given, we can grasp, before we are
able to spell out the details in a way that can reliably
underpin *S* and *A*'s reasoning together to an ethical
conclusion, how the schema confirms the validity of the inference. And
one real possibility that may ease the situation is this: *S*
and *A* may agree that there is no relevant general
characteristic that distinguishes *S*'s lying to *A*
from *A*'s lying to *S*, though they disagree - or
are each unclear - about what characteristic makes both
wrong.



Discussion has focused upon the special problems that arise over
embeddings within the antecedents of conditionals. With the occurrence
of moral predicates within indirect speech Hare faced separate
difficulties, and ones to which he offers no explicit
solution. However, if there is to be any hope of a solution, he
may *need*, in this case, to exploit his notion of descriptive
meaning. Take as an example, "*S* believes that lying is
wrong", or alternatively (and indifferently) "*S*
holds lying to be wrong." A direct analysis of what he believes
in believing this is hardly going to be available. Yet one may be able
to specify, taking Hare's analysis of "Lying is wrong" as
a hypothesis, what has to be true if *S* is to count as
believing that lying is wrong. *S* needs to have a conception
of some feature that characterizes lying in virtue of which, once he
is prescribing universally, he forbids it. (Or else, *S* may be
unable to say what it is about lying that makes it wrong to lie, yet
without doubting that lying has some feature that does this.) What
then gives intelligibility and determinacy to the content of his
"belief" is not a set of truth-conditions, but an act of
will that rests upon a factual basis, and does not simply reiterate
what his nanny has taught him to will. He holds what is
straightforwardly a factual belief about lying (though he may be
variably able to articulate it), and forbids lying in the light of
that.




## 4. Decisions of Principle




The two features of prescriptivity and universalizability remained the
twin pillars of Hare's theory ever afterwards. The term
"universalisability" was to become the title of a slightly
later paper (1954/5) which also sorted out a confusion that causes
real trouble in Aristotle and
Kant. "General" *terms* (such as "man"
or "Greek") contrast with "singular" ones
(such as "Socrates"). However, in the case
of *maxims*, one needs to keep two distinctions apart: a maxim
may 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 specification
of a kind); a maxim may also be "general", rather than
"specific", in identifying a *wide* class of agent
or act--a difference that is one of degree (so that the universal
rule "Always give true evidence" is more specific than
"Always tell the truth", and more general than
"Always give true evidence on oath"). Any discussion of
the practicality and acceptability of "general principles"
needs to keep these distinctions apart. Hare's clarity on the matter
is his most important non-disputable contribution to philosophy.




In his essay "Practical Reason" (1950), he had already
argued that many decisions are decisions of principle not in deriving
from a principle, but in establishing one. As he remarked there, 



> It is not easier, but more difficult, to decide to
> accept a very general command like "Never tell lies" than
> it is to decide not to tell this particular lie ... If we cannot
> decide even whether to tell this lie, we cannot, *a fortiori*,
> decide whether to tell lies in innumerable circumstances whose details
> are 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 such
concepts as "friend"; but he discarded that approach
before trying it out in print. His paper
"Universalisability" (1954/5) stressed one's personal
responsibility in making decisions that are also decisions of
principle. The next important development came in a second
book, *Freedom and Reason* (1963), in which the formal features
of prescriptivity and universalizability generate a "Golden
Rule" 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 them
likewise"). Hare offers a simple scenario (1963: 90-1):
suppose that *A* owes money to *B*, who owes money
to *C*, and that the law allows creditors to exact their debts by
putting their debtors into prison. If *B* simply decides "I
will put *A* into prison", there may be nothing to say to
him. But can he say "I ought to put *A* into prison"?
If he does, he commits himself to a principle such as "If this
is the only way to exact the debt, the creditor should imprison the
debtor". *B* is unlikely to be willing to prescribe a
likely implication of this, "Let *C* put me into
prison", since that would frustrate his own interests. Hare
argues that the form of argument retains its force even if, in
fact, *B* is not himself a debtor; for the judgment "I
ought to put *A* into prison", and the principle that it
invokes, will still entail conditionals, such as "Let me be put
into prison if I am ever in *A*'s situation", to
which *B* is unlikely to be able honestly to subscribe.




In *Freedom and Reason*, Hare allows the argument to be evaded
by the "fanatic" who is so committed to some impersonal
ideal (say that debtors deserve a hard time) that he is willing to
disregard his own personal interests (including the interests that he
has himself as a debtor, or would have if he were a debtor). A later
tightening of the argument (first set out fully in 1972c), hoped to
close off this possibility. In their practical force, ideals are
equivalent to universal preferences that differ from personal
preferences in their content, but owe their moral weight to the
prevalence and intensity of whatever preferences their realization
would satisfy. That *B* would really rather go to prison himself
than have debtors be treated leniently is possible, but improbable. A
more likely fanatic is guilty of a kind of imprudence in failing to
give due weight to his own interests, actual or counter-factual. The
emergent ethical theory is a distinctive variety of utilitarianism,
one that identifies the moral good with the maximization not of some
subjective state such as happiness, but of the satisfaction of
preferences.




The argument excited almost as much skepticism as attention. It seemed
implausible that the very activity of prescribing universally should
commit a speaker to a substantive ethical position, let alone one so
distinctive. However, the logic of Hare's position became perspicuous
in his third book, *Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and
Point* (1981). It is there set out as follows. In wondering
whether he should assent to the statement "*A* ought
to ph", the speaker has to reflect whether he can
prescribe that everyone should act in the same way, whatever his own
situation. "I" connotes no essence (e.g., human): each of
us *might* be anything, and so has, when prescribing for all
situations, actual or possible, to be concerned on behalf
of *everybody*. There is further a prescriptive aspect to the
meaning of "I": to take a role to be possibly *one's
own*, and to prescribe for that possible situation, is to give
weight to the preferences of the occupant of that role as if they were
actually one's own. Hence, the speaker can rationally assent to a
particular "ought"-statement only if it is derivable from
some universal principle that he will accept if he gives impartial and
positive weight to all preferences whose satisfaction would be
affected by its observance. Thus moral reflection generates a
universalized prudence. Moral ideals register within this framework
simply as universal preferences; to allow one's own ideals to override
more intense or prevalent desires or ideals of others is a kind of
egoism, and so excluded. Human decision remains free, however rational
and informed, because anyone can avoid the constraints of morality by
declining to moralize; for this reason, it remains true that no
"is" entails an "ought".




This is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily bold, intellectual
construction, which invites debate at many points. Zeno Vendler (1988:
181) urged that we keep apart the semantic thesis (which may be true
or nearly true) that "I" is a pure indexical, from any
metaphysical claim (which may baffle us) that it denotes a pure
subject which can take on *any* state or role. In his reply,
Hare clearly shies away from adopting a metaphysical position stranger
than Vendler's own (which rejects Cartesian egos but does admit a
transcendental ego). Yet he still supposes it to be true that "I
might be Napoleon", and that "the world in which I was
Napoleon would be a different world than this, though not in its
universal properties" (1988a: 285). He even supposes that I can
consider situations in which I am a stove, a mountain, or a
tree--although, since I cannot care what happens to me if I
become such a thing, the consideration is
idle (1988a:
283). Hare seems here to have entered rather unexpected territory. It
would have suited his usual common sense to permit me to imagine
not *that I am* Napoleon, but *being* Napoleon, i.e.,
what it was like to be Napoleon; and that can suffice to incline one
to ambivalence about the outcome of Waterloo. But he requires there to
be a possible situation in which I am, at any rate,
relevantly *just like* Napoleon if he is to maintain that
prescribing, say, "All men like Napoleon should receive their
come-uppance" applies even *to oneself*, and so may be
imprudent.




A danger remained of deriving a kind of imperative from an
indicative. No doubt Napoleon very much wanted to win the battle. Does
awareness of that fact commit me to prescribing, on the
counter-factual supposition that I am Napoleon, that Napoleon be
victorious? Here Hare makes further use of his thesis that the meaning
of "I" is partly prescriptive: to hypothesize "if I
were Napoleon" is *already* to "identify with his
prescriptions", in the sense of prescribing that, other things
being equal, they be satisfied within the scope of the hypothesis
(1981: 96-9). 




The solution is equally elegant and audacious. It may confirm doubts
whether the situation of my being Napoleon is a *situation* at
all. (For if it *were* a possible situation, of the
same *kind* as an actual situation, how could I
be *logically*--as opposed to humanly--constrained in
what attitude I adopted towards it?) It also throws open questions
about what identifying with Napoleon's prescriptions comes to. One
might think that, if "I" is *fully* prescriptive, I
cannot prescribe that Napoleon be defeated in the situation in which I
am Napoleon, since that is certainly not what he wanted or would ever
have wanted; if so, I cannot honestly prescribe that all men like
Napoleon be defeated, since, for one case (that in which I am
Napoleon), I do *not* want that. What Hare requires is a weaker
identification: given that I am moralizing, and hence prescribing for
all situations of a given general kind, I must give *some*
weight to the preferences that are mine in the situation in which I am
Napoleon, but not *more* weight than that which I give to the preferences
that are mine in any of the other situations; hence, in deciding what
to prescribe universally, I must weigh all relevant preferences
equally (relative to their prevalence and intensity). This is exactly
where Hare intends to lead us; but he invites the question how he can
prove that one is *taken* that way by the logic of
"ought" and "I".


## 5. Attending to Preferences




A related query (which *Moral Thinking* leaves as
"unfinished business"; 1981: 105, cf. 1997) arises about
the range of preferences that prescribing universally commits one to
taking on board. If "I" is fully prescriptive, it may
further follow that to suppose that I am some person is to take on
board *all* his preferences, including "external"
ones about matters (say his neighbors' sexual or dietary
practices) that may never impinge upon his consciousness. Yet
sometimes Hare only demands impartiality between interests, which is
narrower. To accommodate precisely that, we might distinguish a
sympathetic "I": to suppose that I am some person might be
to give full weight to his preferences regarding his own
experiences. This would still leave open whether I should take into
account his prudential preferences (now-for-then) for his future, or
only his synchronic preferences (now-for-now) regarding his present
state. Alternatively, we might admit an egocentric "I":
this would let us give weight to Cheops' desire that *he*
receive a big funeral after his death, but not to external desires
that do not essentially refer to their possessor. Yet such options
embarrass if the aim was to derive a precise ethical theory from the
very logic of the concepts.




As Hare notes (1981: 103), restrictions upon the relevant range of
preferences may have the effect of bringing together a utilitarianism
that aims to maximize pleasure or happiness, and one that aims to
maximize the satisfaction of preference. Yet to have any hope of
achieving this we would need a double restriction: the only
preferences to be considered must be now-for-now or then-for-then, and
they must be fully internal in relating only to conscious states of
the subject--indeed, more precisely, to features of those states
of which the agent is conscious, or, for short, *what it is
like* to be in those states. However, this position is doubly
insecure. First, when discussing the treatment of now-for-then
preferences, Hare takes over from Richard Brandt the idea that
rational agents seek to maximize the satisfaction of their present
preferences after they have been adjusted in the light of full
exposure 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 prefer
after full exposure to logic and the facts?" The same issue
arises even with now-for-now preferences. Hare discusses, though in a
different context (1981: 142-4), the pleasure machine imagined
by J.J.C. Smart (Smart & Williams 1983: 18) that maximizes the
pleasures of a subject through generating a stream of illusory but
enjoyable experiences. He sees it as an advantage of his variety of
utilitarianism that, not being "formulated in terms of
pleasure", it can give weight to whether
"we *prefer* a life for ourselves plugged into the
machines to one devoted to pursuits now considered normal and
enjoyable" (1981: 143). That suggests that we should give weight
to now-for-now preferences whose objects are *not* restricted
to conscious features of current mental states. Further, if we follow
Brandt, we should ask not what now-for-now preferences an
agent *actually* has, but which he *would* have after
subjection to Brandt's "cognitive psycho-therapy". Yet
this implication may trouble us, not only because of the indefinite
scope it offers to paternalism, but because it would seem
undeterminable what an agent *would* want if indefinitely
informed.




The other source of insecurity is doubts about whether, within Hare's
framework, we are justified in restricting the relevant range of
preferences. If, in deciding what ought to be done, I am rationally
bound to identify with the agents whose preferences, internal or
external, bear on it, how can I fail to take on the widest range of
actual preferences, now-for-then as well as now-for-now and
then-for-then, external as well as internal, and uninformed as well as
informed? Hare inclines this way, writing "It is still my belief
that a full account of the matter would assign weight to *all*
preferences" (1981: 103-4). However, how might this best
be done? Let us take them in turn.


1. *Now-for-then preferences*. Hare is clear that we take
into account *how much* an agent prefers one thing to another,
also to *how many* agents prefer it. This suggests that we
should also attend to *how long* an agent has a preference; for
it would seem arbitrary to count a preference twice if two men have
it, if only for a day, but only once if one man has it for two
days. We might assimilate the questions *how long* and *how
many* by dividing people into time-slices within which their
relevant preferences are stable, and asking *how many*
person-slices shared some given preference. Yet the effect is
curious. Within the life of an individual, a preference may become
overriding because he has entertained it for a long time, even if it
has been replaced by conflicting preferences at the time of
action. (And the theory would not allow one to give precedence to the
preferences of the person-slice who acts on the grounds of agential
autonomy; for agents enjoy no such privilege.)
2. *External preferences*. One difficulty here is in assessing
the intensity of an external preference that is idle, but perhaps
because the agent can do nothing towards satisfying it. Apparent
intensity may be deceptive: it is the mark of a sentimental attitude
that it may be warmly felt, and yet at the same time inactive and
insincere. However, the same problem arises elsewhere; it is not
peculiar to external preferences.
3. *Uninformed preferences*. It is hard to see how Hare's
framework itself justifies disregarding these. However, subjects may
have a higher-level preference that, where they hold or lack a
lower-level preference only out of ignorance, its presence or absence
should be discounted--thought perhaps only so long as this does
not give rise to a denial of autonomy within spheres where each of us
expects to be free to act at will according to his own judgment.




There is further unclarity in the notion of a *preference.*
Hare had long distinguished being in *pain*, to which one may
be indifferent (if the pain is slight, or if one has undergone
prefrontal lobotomy), and *suffering*, which entails having a
desire (not necessarily overriding) to escape it. Now it is plausible
to suppose that, of any variety of suffering, there is such a thing
as *what it is like to be subject to it.* (So Hare can write of
a group of sufferers, "I shall not know what it will be like for
them ... unless I know what it is like to suffer like
that"; 1981: 92.) This applies so long as the desire that is an
aspect of suffering is of a kind that is bound to be *felt.*
Yet we all are subject to an indefinite range of desires that are
dispositional; and even occurrent desires may be manifest in how we
think or act without being felt. Hare appears to overlook such
variations when he writes of preferences in general, "If I do
not feel the preference with the intensity which the person in the
situation feels it, I have not fully represented his situation to
myself" (Seanor & Fotion 1988: 288). And yet, when he
considers failures to act as one prescribes (e.g., 1981: 21-2),
he shows an awareness that how one chooses and acts can be equally
indicative as anything one feels of what one prefers. No doubt this
could be sorted out, and precisely by recognizing (as Hare doubtless
could have, though the language is not his) that the *criteria*
of preference are multiple. However, this would have for him two
drawbacks. First, it multiplies the possible ways in which one might
count as "identifying with" another. Hare has written,
"In identifying myself with some person either actually or
hypothetically, I identify with his prescriptions" (1981:
96-7). Yet another way might be imagining what it is like to be
him at some time or in some situation--which is different, though
it may (to the extent that his preferences come to his mind as objects
of attention) be overlapping. Secondly, it confirms a doubt that one
is likely to have anyway about the comparability of preferences. If I
feel like doing something but, for no compelling reason, fail to do
it, whereas you do it without any prior or accompanying consciousness
of the preference, who has the stronger preference to do it? The
question is liable to be unanswerable.


## 6. Possible People




Outside *Moral Thinking* itself, a striking application of
Hare's framework was to possible people, that is, to people who may
exist, with preferences and interests to be satisfied, if we choose to
bring them into existence. Ought we to do so, so long as this will
increase the total satisfaction of preference? A positive answer has
implications--though not, Hare argued, very radical
ones--for population policy, and the morality of such practices
as abortion and IVF. Hare reasons that, if I am glad that I exist, I
tenselessly prescribe, *ceteris paribus*, that my parents bring
me into existence; universalizing the prescription, I must
prescribe, *ceteris paribus*, the bringing into existence of
others relevantly like me (1975, 1988b, 1988c).




This is intriguing, though not unproblematic. We may be struck by its
invocation, in effect, of past imperatives (such as Gerald Manley
Hopkins's "Have fair fallen, O fair, fair have
fallen", addressed to Henry Purcell, which Hopkins explained, in
a letter to Bridges on Feb. 3 1883, as 'the singular imperative
(or optative if you like) of the past, a thing possible and actual
both in logic and grammar, but naturally a rare one'). Not that
this is new: Hare had had already to defend them in prescriptivist
analysis of "I ought to have done that". A further
question is whether Hare has correctly isolated the initial
attitude. If what I am glad of is the kind of life I experience, in
preference to there simply being less life of this kind in the world
(cf. 1988c: 173-4), then, if universalization generates a
golden-rule argument, it should indeed lead me to
prescribe, *ceteris paribus*, creating other similar lives
(unless it is the uniqueness of the life that I value). But Hare also
supposes that what Jane Doe is grateful for is that *she*, Jane
Doe, exist and not someone else, even equally privileged, in her place
(1988b: 87-8). Yet it is less clear that we can expect her to
have that attitude, let alone its analogue, within Hare's
framework, of being specially glad that Dick Hare (or someone with all
his universal qualities) exists--supposing that he is glad to
exist--in that possible world in which she is (or has all the
universal qualities of) Dick Hare.


## 7. Levels of Moral Thinking




A different feature of his theory, first presented (in different
terminology) in "Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism"
(1976), and fully explored in *Moral Thinking* (1981), is a
distinction between a "critical" level of thinking,
conducted by "archangels" with the use of "Golden
Rule" arguments, and an "intuitive" level, conducted
by "proles" with the use of simple principles (often
articulating emotional responses) whose acceptance can be justified at
the critical level. These two levels define not two social castes, but
two roles between which each of us learns to alternate as appropriate.
The complication is actually inevitable within consequentialism, which
has to separate the question *how one should act* from the
question *how one should think about how to act*--for ways
of thinking have consequences no less than ways of acting (and
thinking that one should act in a certain way entails no success in so
acting, nor even any attempt). A utilitarian assessment of practical
principles has to consider not only their *observance utility*
(OU), which is what good will come of enacting them, but also
their *acceptance utility* (AU), which is (roughly) what good
will come of intending to enact them. (Note that intending to act in a
certain way is itself a *mental act.* There is no ground here
to shift to a different *form* of utilitarianism,
"rule" rather than "act", or
"indirect" rather than "direct"; rather, so
far we are simply extending act-utilitarianism to a wider range of
acts, mental as well as physical.) A broad generalization that Hare
favored is that the highest OU is likely to attach to highly specific
principles, 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 a
higher OU than one simply forbidding adultery; but, if there are
potential Don Juan's around with a talent for false rationalization,
its AU may be lower.




This complication was both convenient, and problematic. Hare had long
been wearied by familiar objections citing concrete cases where
utilitarian theory appears to conflict with moral intuition, as when
an American sheriff might judicially execute one suspect in order to
prevent a mass lynching of others. He could now hope to accommodate
these at the "intuitive" level of thinking. An inability
ever to countenance judicial murder may be recommendable *by*
critical *to* intuitive thinking as a constraint upon practical
reflection in an emergency. And given that the attitude is approved,
if not reasserted, by critical thinking as Hare conceives it, how can
it in itself tell against his conception of critical thinking? (It
would be a case, so to speak, of biting the hand that fed one.)




However, there is a difficulty. It is one thing to *make do*
with intuitive ways of solving problems that are the best available
within limits of time and information, while leaving them subject to
correction at leisure or in retrospect; it is another to accept a
theory that approves one's actually *assenting* to certain
principles whose contents it cannot endorse. And yet a rule that is a
mere "rule of thumb" is a paper shield against temptation.
All is well if the theory can be self-effacing, so that the agent
discards it as and when he adopts an intuitive viewpoint; but, in
Hare's scenario, in which the agent has internalized both critical and
intuitive ways of thinking, how is he to keep out of mind, as he tests
his practical commitment to some intuitive principle, that it is
simply not of a kind (being absolute, and yet evidently equivalent to
no 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 about
Hare, Hunt 1999: SS5). Hare anticipated it as follows:



> To say that it is impossible to keep critical and intuitive
> thinking going in the same thought-process is like saying that in a
> battle a commander cannot at the same time be thinking of the details
> of tactics, the overall aim of victory, and the principles (economy of
> force, concentration of force, offensive action, etc.) which he has
> learnt 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 as
this remains the best way in context of achieving his goals. However,
Hare came to deprecate that phrase (1981: 38), and to emphasize that
the "prima facie principles" he prefers to speak of have
the power to produce *compunction* even where their neglect,
since well grounded, cannot produce *remorse* (1981: 30). Yet
how is this to work? No doubt it is possible to combine being
convinced both that one has to do *X* in some difficult situation
(say when only lying will save my father), and that doing *X*
remains in some significant way *bad.* Yet this thought
requires the possession of a distinctive concept of *being bad*
whose application, on occasion, though lacking the power to determine
an ethical decision, remains obstinately significant and
inexpungible. Without such a concept, talk of
"compunction" is out of place. Hare makes room for this
when he concedes that moral concepts may suffer a sea-change when they
are applied at the intuitive and non-critical level. The only
particular proposal he makes is that "ought" becomes
overridable; yet he should surely be willing to concede that quite new
concepts may come into being--all, of course, under the arching
guidance of critical thinking. And one such concept might be expressed
by a use of "morally bad" of a kind associated with moral
philosophies that Hare would otherwise reject.




However, it must remain a problem that, precisely to the extent that
intuitive thinking can draw upon conceptions of its own, a clear-eyed
intuitive thinking that does not occlude the judgments of critical
thinking must be as problematic for Hare as a clear-eyed acrasia that
unites conscious and voluntary infringement of a prescription with
continued acceptance of it. Force still attaches to an objection by
Williams (1988: 190):



> 
> 
> The theory ignores the fact that the responses are not merely a
> black-box mechanism to generate what is probably the best outcome
> under confusing conditions. Rather, they constitute a way of seeing
> the situation; and you cannot combine seeing the situation in that
> way, *from* the point of view of those dispositions, with seeing it
> in the archangel's way, in which all that is important is maximum
> preference satisfaction, and the dispositions themselves are merely a
> means to that.
> 
> 


## 8. Traces of Positivism in Religion and Metaethics




Hare did not suppose that the modern thinking man could long remain
what he called a "simple believer"; so he welcomed
attempts by R.B. Braithwaite and others to empty religion of dogmatic
content. He called himself a "Christian empiricist", but
thought the question whether he was really a *Christian*
terminological. What he retained for himself was what he once called
a "blik", an attitude to the world which somehow gave him
confidence to live and think morally, trusting (as he put it)
"in my own continued well-being (in some sense of that world
that I may not now fully understand) if I continue to do what is right
according to my lights", as also "in the general
likelihood of people like Hitler coming to a bad end" (1950/1:
38). John Hare (2002: 307) connects the inhibitions that held his
father back from belief not just with modern skepticism, but with
"a philosophical doctrine about meaning which he inherited from
Carnap and the logical positivists"; for "He thought he
could not make meaningful assertions about subjects, like God, which
lay beyond the limits of possible sense experience". Thus he
denied that the transcendental has anything to do with prayer, asking
"What is the difference between there being a transcendental God
who listens to the prayer and directs events accordingly, and it just
being the case that the events take place?", and answering
"None at all" (1973: 27). The upshot is fatal to the
orthodoxies of belief as of unbelief:



> Where the transcendental is concerned, there is no
> difference between a true story and a myth; it is therefore wrong to
> speak of the person who prays having an *illusion* that there
> is 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 the
substantiality of philosophical disagreement. Presumably Plato was
making a mistake of a kind when, as Hare diagnosed it, he



> interpreted the experience which *we* call
> "having a particular mental image of a square" as
> "having, on a particular occasion, a mental look at the
> Square". (1964: 67)
> 
> 


Within meta-ethics, however, Hare was inclined to suppose that such
variations fail to be more than verbal. This suspicion was first
expressed 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 at
issue:



> Now we may well ask, seeing that we are all agreed
> that there *is* this experience, no matter what you call it,
> what on earth is the point of having long philosophical arguments
> about what you do call it.
> 
> 


Take a case of disagreement about pacifism:



> The Whites describe this situation by saying that
> there is a difference of opinion between us as to whether fighting
> does or does not possess the quality right; the Blacks, on the other
> hand, describe it by saying that we have different feelings about
> fighting. But the situation which they are both trying to describe is
> precisely the same, and they know it ... They are disagreeing
> merely about words.
> 
> 


Hare pursued this skepticism in two published
papers, "Nothing Matters" (1959), and "Ontology in
Ethics" (1985). Here he suspects of vacuity certain terms that
get overworked, "true", "fact",
"world", "objective", "realist",
"cognitivist"; hence he thinks it much harder than many
have done to define a position that is distinctively objectivist. (It
is certainly not enough to reassert "Murder is wrong" in a
peculiar and, as it were, metaethical tone of voice, firm and yet
unemotive.) What I have traced back to a verificationism that may now
seem dated becomes well-grounded when applied to abstractions that, as
appropriated by philosophers, await a clear sense.


## 9. Afterword




Hare's unpublished paper "Moral Objectivity" contains a
striking passage, unparalleled elsewhere, that confirms Lucas's
supposition (2002: 31) of a connection between his war experience and
a vein of existentialism. He imagines being an interpreter in a
Japanese prisoner-of-war camp who is trying to persuade the Japanese
commander not to send sick people out to work on the railway:



> 
> I ask him to visualise, not certain non-natural properties, but the
> very natural, real properties of the situations that the alternative
> courses of action will bring about ... It is not by any appeal to
> intuition that I can conduct my argument; ... it is by revealing
> to 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 only
> leave 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 of
> life, my own standard of values, my own principle of choice. In the
> end we all have to choose for ourselves; and no one can do it for
> anyone else.
> 
> 




What makes Hare arguably unique, though at the same time closer in
approach to Kant than to the utilitarians whose ally he became, was
that he combined this insistence upon the ineluctability of individual
choice with an optimistic view of the possibilities of making choices
rationally. (Indeed, he played with the idea that Kant could have been
a utilitarian, 1993b.) What reconciles these two features of moral
thinking, in his view, is nothing other than the logic of the
practical "ought". That this is crucial and central was
already a claim within his early and unpublished monograph "An
Essay 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 we
> in our own times have seen how quickly people like Thrasymachus spring
> up, 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 suppose
that language is rather our servant than our master, and that the
rationality of reasoning in the ways he recommends needs to be
established on general grounds, and not made to depend upon theses
about the connotations of a word. Secondly, one of the theses in
question--that practical "ought"s entail
imperatives--is hardly obviously true; one might rather expect an
Oxford philosopher, in the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, to
be sensitive to the objection that the modal "You ought to
do *X*" no more entails the imperative
"Do *X*" than the modal "He ought to have got
home by now" entails the indicative "He has got home by
now". (Think how much more plausible it is to infer the second
from "He must have got home by now".)




Hare had replies to both objections, which he sets out briefly
in *Moral Thinking* (1981). He insists that we need our words
to mean what they do mean if we are to answer the questions that we
want to ask:



> If we were to alter the meaning of our words, we
> should be altering the questions we were asking, and perhaps
> answering, in terms of them ... If we go trying to
> answer *those* questions, we are stuck with *those*
> concepts. (1981: 18)
> 
> 


And yet, at the same time, he asserts no more
than that the practical "ought" is a "near
neighbour" to the deontic "must" (1981: 7),
acknowledging



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


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



> But "ought" aspires to the status of
> "must", and ... in rigorous, critical moral reasoning
> has to be used like it. (1981: 24)
> 
> 


In Hare's view, it is human weakness that is
served better by "ought" than by "must", and
we reveal our commitment to the logic of "must" in uses of
"ought" that fall short of that logic, and yet constantly
aspire to live up to it. "Intuitive" thinking may be as
necessary as "critical", and yet it is never such as to
enjoy a secure resting-place in our hearts and minds.




At the heart of Hare's ethical theory, therefore, lies a vision of
human beings as unable to live up to a way of thinking towards which
they are nonetheless ineluctably drawn. He perceives there to be a
drama inherent in the human condition to which no fully integrated and
unified system could do justice. His philosophy is currently somewhat
out of fashion, in part through a reversion to various forms of
cognitivism in ethics, in part through changes in the style of
philosophy, which now pursues the clarity that he desired through a
new complexity and professionalization. At least in the short term, it
is probable, and in accord with the "strange dream" from
which we started, that his thinking will come to be viewed from a
distance, as playing a once important role within the non-cognitivist
strain in ethics that was dominant through much of the 20th
century. And yet it may yet come to hold the attention of a new
audience through its recognition of the tensions inherent in any
practical thinking that responds without complacency to the
aspirations of our ethical ideals, and the limitations of our moral
capacities.



> 
> 
>  Supplementary Document:
>  Hare's "An Essay on Monism"
> 
> 
> 
>