R. M. Hare
Encyclopedia
Richard Mervyn Hare was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy
at the University of Oxford
from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida
. His meta-ethical
theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century.
Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism
as a meta-ethical theory. He believed that formal features of moral discourse could be used to show that correct moral reasoning will lead most agents to a form of preference utilitarianism
.
Some of Hare's students, such as Brian McGuinness and Bernard Williams
went on to become well-known philosophers. Peter Singer
, known for his involvement with the animal liberation movement
, was also a student of Hare's, and has explicitly adopted some elements of Hare's thought, though not his doctrine of universal prescriptivism.
, Somerset
. He attended Rugby School
in Warwickshire, followed in 1937 by Balliol College, Oxford
, where he read Greats
(Classics). Although he was a pacifist
, he volunteered for service in the Royal Artillery
and was taken as a prisoner of war
by the Japanese from the fall of Singapore
in 1942 to the end of the Second World War. This experience had a lasting impact on Hare's philosophical views, particularly his view that moral philosophy has an obligation to help people live their lives as moral beings (King 2004). His earliest work in philosophy, which has never been published, dates from this period, and in it, he tried to develop a system that might "serve as a guide to life in the harshest conditions," according to The Independent
.
He returned to Oxford after the war, and in 1947, married Catherine Verney, a marriage that produced a son and three daughters. (Hare's son, John E. Hare
, is also a philosopher.) He was elected fellow and tutor in philosophy at Balliol from 1947–1996; honorary fellow at Balliol from 1974–2002; and was appointed Wilde Lecturer in Natural Religion, 1963–66; and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, 1966–1983, which accompanied a move to Corpus Christi
. He was president of the Aristotelian Society
from 1972 to 1973. He left Oxford in 1983 to become Graduate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida
at Gainseville, a post he held until 1994.
He died in Ewelme, Oxfordshire
on 29 January 2002 after suffering a series of strokes.
of A. J. Ayer
and Charles L. Stevenson, the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin
, a certain reading of the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
, utilitarianism
, and Immanuel Kant
.
Hare held that ethical rules should not be based on a principle of utility, though he took into account utilitarian considerations. This distinguishes him from classical utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham
. His book Sorting Out Ethics might be interpreted as saying that Hare is as much a Kantian as he is a utilitarian, but other sources disagree with this assessment. Although Hare used many concepts from Kant, especially the idea of universalizability
, he was still a consequentialist, rather than a deontologist, in his normative ethical views. Hare himself addressed the possibility that Kant was a utilitarian like himself, in his "Could Kant Have Been a Utilitarian?"
. According to this, moral terms such as 'good', 'ought' and 'right' have two logical or semantic properties: universalizability
and prescriptivity
. By the former, he meant that moral judgments must identify the situation they describe according to a finite set of universal terms, excluding proper names, but not definite description
s. By the latter, he meant that moral agents must perform those acts they consider themselves to have an obligation to perform whenever they are physically and psychologically able to do so. In other words, he argued that it made no sense for someone to say, sincerely: "I ought to do X," and then fail to do X. This was identified as a major flaw in Hare's system, as it appeared to take no account of akrasia
, or weakness of the will.
Hare argued that the combination of universalizability and prescriptivity leads to a certain form of consequentialism
, namely, preference utilitarianism
.
Supposing you require a large sum of money, and you ask a friend to lend it to you. She refuses. You claim that it is wrong for her to refuse. 'Wrong' is a moral term, so, according to Hare, you must abide by its logical properties. The first property, universalizability, demands that you formulate a description of the situation using only universal terms. So you say:
This new description satisfies the universalizability requirement, because all its terms are universal. Now your description must also satisfy the second requirement, that of prescriptivity. That is, you must determine whether you are willing to act on the universal formulation.
At first, you might argue that it does not apply to you. If you consider it wrong for your friend to refuse to lend you a large sum of money, it is your friend, not you, who should be acting accordingly. However — and here is where the two properties combine and the philosophically interesting results appear — universalizability requires that the same judgment be made, and prescriptivity that the same action be taken, irrespective of your particular position in the situation. In other words, just as you had to deprive the description of its particular (non-universal) terms, it is now impossible for you to exclude yourself from the possibility of being in the situation that your friend was in. According to universalizability, if you were not the one asking for money, but the one who was being asked, the same moral judgement — that whenever someone asks a friend for a large sum of money, it is wrong for them to refuse the request — ought to apply; and, according to the rule of prescriptivity, you would have to act accordingly.
If you were not prepared to act accordingly, you would be violating this rule; and in fact you would not be uttering a moral judgment at all, according to Hare.
To re-enter the moral discourse, you would have to modify your original judgment so that, once universalized, you would still be able to act in the way it would ask you to act. By a series of universal conjectures and prescriptive refutations — akin to philosopher Karl Popper
's falsificationism (see Freedom and Reason, chapter 4) — you would eventually arrive at the right moral judgment, which would be the one you would prefer in all the possible situations.
In each case, however, one cannot simply put oneself in another's shoes, as it were, one must also adopt the universal properties of the perspectives of the other person. Universal prescriptivism, thus, leads to preference utilitarianism. And so, according to Hare, does Kantianism
: to demand, as Kant's first formulation of the categorical imperative
does, that you could will that your maxim be a universal law, is to ask the moral agent to prescribe the judgment that she could accept were she in any of the positions involved, which of course is exactly Hare's point.
White's Chair of Moral Philosophy
Endowed in 1621 by Thomas White , DD, Canon of Christ Church, the White's Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford is, according to the website of the Oxford Centre for Ethics and Philosophy of Law, perhaps the most prestigious chair of moral philosophy in the world.Under the original...
at the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...
. His meta-ethical
Meta-ethics
In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. Ethical...
theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century.
Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable — whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts...
as a meta-ethical theory. He believed that formal features of moral discourse could be used to show that correct moral reasoning will lead most agents to a form of preference utilitarianism
Preference utilitarianism
Preference utilitarianism is one of the most popular forms of utilitarianism in contemporary philosophy. Unlike classical utilitarianism, which defines right actions as those that maximize pleasure and minimize pain, preference utilitarianism promotes actions that fulfill the interests of those...
.
Some of Hare's students, such as Brian McGuinness and Bernard Williams
Bernard Williams
Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams was an English moral philosopher, described by The Times as the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time. His publications include Problems of the Self , Moral Luck , Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , and Truth and Truthfulness...
went on to become well-known philosophers. Peter Singer
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne...
, known for his involvement with the animal liberation movement
Animal liberation movement
The animal-liberation movement, sometimes called the animal-rights movement, animal personhood, or animal-advocacy movement, is a social movement which seeks an end to the rigid moral and legal distinction drawn between human and non-human animals, an end to the status of animals as property, and...
, was also a student of Hare's, and has explicitly adopted some elements of Hare's thought, though not his doctrine of universal prescriptivism.
Biography
Richard Hare was born in BackwellBackwell
Backwell is a suburban village and civil parish in Somerset, England. It falls within the Unitary Authority of North Somerset and has a population of 5,455.It is south west of Bristol, on the A370 to Weston-super-Mare...
, Somerset
Somerset
The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...
. He attended Rugby School
Rugby School
Rugby School is a co-educational day and boarding school located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England. It is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain.-History:...
in Warwickshire, followed in 1937 by Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....
, where he read Greats
Literae Humaniores
Literae Humaniores is the name given to an undergraduate course focused on Classics at Oxford and some other universities.The Latin name means literally "more humane letters", but is perhaps better rendered as "Advanced Studies", since humaniores has the sense of "more refined" or "more learned",...
(Classics). Although he was a pacifist
Pacifism
Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
, he volunteered for service in the Royal Artillery
Royal Artillery
The Royal Regiment of Artillery, commonly referred to as the Royal Artillery , is the artillery arm of the British Army. Despite its name, it comprises a number of regiments.-History:...
and was taken as a prisoner of war
Prisoner of war
A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...
by the Japanese from the fall of Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
in 1942 to the end of the Second World War. This experience had a lasting impact on Hare's philosophical views, particularly his view that moral philosophy has an obligation to help people live their lives as moral beings (King 2004). His earliest work in philosophy, which has never been published, dates from this period, and in it, he tried to develop a system that might "serve as a guide to life in the harshest conditions," according to The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
.
He returned to Oxford after the war, and in 1947, married Catherine Verney, a marriage that produced a son and three daughters. (Hare's son, John E. Hare
John E. Hare
John Edmund Hare is a British classicist, philosopher, ethicist, and currently Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School....
, is also a philosopher.) He was elected fellow and tutor in philosophy at Balliol from 1947–1996; honorary fellow at Balliol from 1974–2002; and was appointed Wilde Lecturer in Natural Religion, 1963–66; and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, 1966–1983, which accompanied a move to Corpus Christi
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Corpus Christi College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom...
. He was president of the Aristotelian Society
Aristotelian Society
The Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy was founded at a meeting on 19 April 1880, at 17 Bloomsbury Square which resolved "to constitute a society of about twenty and to include ladies; the society to meet fortnightly, on Mondays at 8 o'clock, at the rooms of the Spelling...
from 1972 to 1973. He left Oxford in 1983 to become Graduate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...
at Gainseville, a post he held until 1994.
He died in Ewelme, Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire is a county in the South East region of England, bordering on Warwickshire and Northamptonshire , Buckinghamshire , Berkshire , Wiltshire and Gloucestershire ....
on 29 January 2002 after suffering a series of strokes.
Influences
Hare was greatly influenced by the emotivismEmotivism
Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes. Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and...
of A. J. Ayer
Alfred Ayer
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer was a British philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth, and Logic and The Problem of Knowledge ....
and Charles L. Stevenson, the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin
J. L. Austin
John Langshaw Austin was a British philosopher of language, born in Lancaster and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford University. Austin is widely associated with the concept of the speech act and the idea that speech is itself a form of action...
, a certain reading of the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
, utilitarianism
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
, and Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
.
Hare held that ethical rules should not be based on a principle of utility, though he took into account utilitarian considerations. This distinguishes him from classical utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...
. His book Sorting Out Ethics might be interpreted as saying that Hare is as much a Kantian as he is a utilitarian, but other sources disagree with this assessment. Although Hare used many concepts from Kant, especially the idea of universalizability
Universalizability
The concept of universalizability was set out by the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant as part of his work Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. It is part of the first formulation of his categorical imperative, which states that the only morally acceptable maxims of our actions are...
, he was still a consequentialist, rather than a deontologist, in his normative ethical views. Hare himself addressed the possibility that Kant was a utilitarian like himself, in his "Could Kant Have Been a Utilitarian?"
Universal prescriptivism
In a series of books, especially The Language of Morals, Freedom and Reason, and Moral Thinking, Hare gave shape to a theory that he called universal prescriptivismUniversal prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable — whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts...
. According to this, moral terms such as 'good', 'ought' and 'right' have two logical or semantic properties: universalizability
Universalizability
The concept of universalizability was set out by the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant as part of his work Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. It is part of the first formulation of his categorical imperative, which states that the only morally acceptable maxims of our actions are...
and prescriptivity
Prescriptivity
Prescriptivity is a term used in meta-ethics to state that when an evaluative judgment or decision is made it must either prescribe or condemn. The word infers that these judgments logically commit us to certain ways of living...
. By the former, he meant that moral judgments must identify the situation they describe according to a finite set of universal terms, excluding proper names, but not definite description
Definite description
A definite description is a denoting phrase in the form of "the X" where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun. The definite description is proper if X applies to a unique individual or object. For example: "the first person in space" and "the 42nd President of the United States of...
s. By the latter, he meant that moral agents must perform those acts they consider themselves to have an obligation to perform whenever they are physically and psychologically able to do so. In other words, he argued that it made no sense for someone to say, sincerely: "I ought to do X," and then fail to do X. This was identified as a major flaw in Hare's system, as it appeared to take no account of akrasia
Akrasia
Akrasia , occasionally transliterated as acrasia, is the state of acting against one's better judgment. The adjective form is "akratic".-Classical approaches:...
, or weakness of the will.
Hare argued that the combination of universalizability and prescriptivity leads to a certain form of consequentialism
Consequentialism
Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness of that conduct...
, namely, preference utilitarianism
Preference utilitarianism
Preference utilitarianism is one of the most popular forms of utilitarianism in contemporary philosophy. Unlike classical utilitarianism, which defines right actions as those that maximize pleasure and minimize pain, preference utilitarianism promotes actions that fulfill the interests of those...
.
Example
An example of Hare's argument would be this:Supposing you require a large sum of money, and you ask a friend to lend it to you. She refuses. You claim that it is wrong for her to refuse. 'Wrong' is a moral term, so, according to Hare, you must abide by its logical properties. The first property, universalizability, demands that you formulate a description of the situation using only universal terms. So you say:
Whenever I ask a friend for a large sum of money, it is wrong for her to refuse to give it to me.But this violates the universalizability requirement, insofar as the description contains the terms 'I' and 'me,' which do not designate a universal property, but denote an individual instead. So you try again:
Whenever someone asks a friend for a large sum of money, it is wrong for that friend to refuse the request.
This new description satisfies the universalizability requirement, because all its terms are universal. Now your description must also satisfy the second requirement, that of prescriptivity. That is, you must determine whether you are willing to act on the universal formulation.
At first, you might argue that it does not apply to you. If you consider it wrong for your friend to refuse to lend you a large sum of money, it is your friend, not you, who should be acting accordingly. However — and here is where the two properties combine and the philosophically interesting results appear — universalizability requires that the same judgment be made, and prescriptivity that the same action be taken, irrespective of your particular position in the situation. In other words, just as you had to deprive the description of its particular (non-universal) terms, it is now impossible for you to exclude yourself from the possibility of being in the situation that your friend was in. According to universalizability, if you were not the one asking for money, but the one who was being asked, the same moral judgement — that whenever someone asks a friend for a large sum of money, it is wrong for them to refuse the request — ought to apply; and, according to the rule of prescriptivity, you would have to act accordingly.
If you were not prepared to act accordingly, you would be violating this rule; and in fact you would not be uttering a moral judgment at all, according to Hare.
To re-enter the moral discourse, you would have to modify your original judgment so that, once universalized, you would still be able to act in the way it would ask you to act. By a series of universal conjectures and prescriptive refutations — akin to philosopher Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
's falsificationism (see Freedom and Reason, chapter 4) — you would eventually arrive at the right moral judgment, which would be the one you would prefer in all the possible situations.
In each case, however, one cannot simply put oneself in another's shoes, as it were, one must also adopt the universal properties of the perspectives of the other person. Universal prescriptivism, thus, leads to preference utilitarianism. And so, according to Hare, does Kantianism
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
: to demand, as Kant's first formulation of the categorical imperative
Categorical imperative
The Categorical Imperative is the central philosophical concept in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as well as modern deontological ethics...
does, that you could will that your maxim be a universal law, is to ask the moral agent to prescribe the judgment that she could accept were she in any of the positions involved, which of course is exactly Hare's point.
Importance of specificity
Hare departs from Kant's view that only the most general maxims of conduct be used (for example, "do not steal"), but the consequences ignored, when applying the categorical imperative. To ignore consequences leads to absurdity: for example, that it would be wrong to steal a terrorist's plans to blow up a nuclear facility. All the specific facts of a circumstance must be considered, and these include probable consequences. They also include the relevant, universal properties of the facts: for example, the psychological states of those involved.Applied ethics and political philosophy
While Hare was primarily interested in meta-ethics, he also made some important contributions to the fields of political philosophy and applied ethics. Among his essays within these fields those on the wrongness of slavery, abortion and the golden rule, and on demi-vegetarianism have received the most attention. Hare's most important work in political philosophy and applied ethics is collected in the two volumes Essays on Political Morality (1989) and Essays on Bioethics (1993), both published by Oxford University Press.Further reading
- Hare, R.M. The Language of Morals. 1952
- Hare, R.M. Moral thinking: Its levels, method, and point, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1981
- King, P.J. One Hundred Philosophers. Barrons, 2004
- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor--r-m-hare-729730.html, The Independent, 6 February 2002
- R. M. Hare. Resources on Hare, including writings by and about him.
- Could Kant Have Been a Utilitarian? By R. M. Hare.
- R. M. Hare. Risorse in lingua italiana