British moral philosopher

Richard Mervyn Hare FBA (21 March 1919 – 29 January 2002), usually cited as R.:M. Hare, was a British 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, the *ysis of formal features of moral discourse justifying preference utilitarianism.

Some of Hare's students, such as Brian McGuinness, John Lucas, and Bernard Williams went on to become well-known philosophers. Peter Singer, known for his involvement with the animal liberation movement (who studied Hare's work as an honours student at the University of Melbourne and came to know Hare personally whilst he was an Oxford BPhil graduate student), has explicitly adopted some elements of Hare's thought, though not his doctrine of universal prescriptivism.

Contents

• 1 Life and career
• 2 Influences
• 3 Universal prescriptivism
• 4 Importance of specificity
• 5 Applied ethics and political philosophy
• 6 Select works
• 7 See also
• 8 Notes
• 9 References
• 10 Further reading
• 11 External links

Life and career

Richard Hare was born on 21 March 1919 in Backwell, Somerset. He attended Rugby School in Warwickshire, followed in 1937 by Balliol College, Oxford, where he read greats (cl*ics). Having joined the officer training corps whist still at Rugby, on the outbreak of World War II, he volunteered to serve with the Royal Artillery.

Hare was taken as a prisoner of war by the *anese from the fall of Singapore in 1942 to the end of the Second World War. Hare's wartime experience had a lasting impact on his philosophical views, particularly his view that moral philosophy has an obligation to help people live their lives as moral beings. 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 C. C. W. Taylor.

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 to 1996; honorary fellow at Balliol from 1974 to 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 Gainesville, a post he held until 1994.

After suffering a series of strokes, R.:M. Hare died in Ewelme, Oxfordshire, on 29 January 2002.

At his memorial service held at St Mary's Church, Oxford, in May of that year, Peter Singer delivered (as he felt Hare would have wished) a lecture on Hare's "Achievements in Moral Philosophy" which concluded by giving three "major, lasting" ones, namely, "restoring reason to moral argument, distinguishing intuitive and critical levels of moral thinking, and pioneering the development of ... applied ethics".

Influences

Hare was greatly influenced by the emotivism 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. His hybrid approach to meta-ethics distinguishes him from cl*ical 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 *essment. Although Hare used many concepts from Kant, especially the idea of universalisability, 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 (1952), Freedom and Reason (1963), and Moral Thinking (1981), Hare gave shape to a theory that he called universal prescriptivism. 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 descriptions. 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 by Frankena, Nobis and others 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. In brief, this means that we should act in such a way as to maximise the satisfaction of people's preferences.

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 cir*stance 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.

Select works

• Hare, R. M. (1952). The Language of Morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OCLC:1034413.
• Hare, R. M. (1972). Essays on Philosophical Method. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN:9780520323346.
• Hare, R. M. (1981). Moral Thinking: its levels, method, and point. Oxford New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University Press. ISBN:9780198246602.
• Hare, R. M. (1982), "Ethical theory and Utilitarianism", in Sen, Amartya; Williams, Bernard (eds.), Utilitarianism and beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.:22–38, ISBN:9780511611964.
• Hare, R. M. (1983). Plato. Oxford New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University Press. ISBN:9780192875853.
• Hare, R. M. (1989). Essays in Ethical Theory. Oxford England New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University Press. ISBN:9780198240716.
• Hare, R. M. (1989). Essays on Political Morality. Oxford New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University Press. ISBN:9780198249955.
• Hare, R. M. (1992). Essays on Religion and Education. Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University Press. ISBN:9780198249962.

*For a more complete list of publications see the annotated bibliography by Keith Burgess-Jackson.

See also

• Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford
• Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Notes

References

Further reading

• Price, A. W. ‘Hare, Richard Mervyn’, Proceedings of the British Academy 124 (2004), 117–37
• Price, A. W. "Hare, Richard Mervyn (1919–2002)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online:ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/76706.

External links

• Anthony Price. "Richard Mervyn Hare". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• R. M. Hare - resources page containing Hare's writings, secondary literature, reviews, obituaries and a bibliography
• R. M. Hare in Conversation (on his 80th birthday)
• R. M. Hare. (in Italian)

Theories

• Anti-realism
• Australian realism
• Causal theory of reference
• Descriptivism
• Emotivism
• Feminism
• Functionalism
• Logical atomism
• Logical positivism
• Marxism
• Neurophilosophy
• Ordinary language
• Pragmatism
• Quietism
• Scientific structuralism
• Sense data

Concepts

• *ysis (paradox of *ysis)
• *ytic–synthetic distinction
• Counterfactual
• Natural kind
• Reflective equilibrium
• Supervenience

Philosophers

• Noam Chomsky
• William Lane Craig
• Keith Donnellan
• Paul Feyerabend
• Gottlob Frege
• Edmund Gettier
• Jaakko Hintikka
• Giuseppe Peano
• Karl Popper
• Nathan Salmon
• Russ Shafer-Landau
• Ernest Sosa
• Barry Stroud
• Alfred Tarski
• Jan Łukasiewicz
• Michael Walzer
• Nicholas Wolterstorff

Harvard

• Roderick Chisholm
• Donald Davidson
• Daniel Dennett
• Nelson Goodman
• Christine Korsgaard
• Thomas Kuhn
• Thomas Nagel
• Robert Nozick
• Hilary Putnam
• W. V. O. Quine
• John Rawls

Notre Dame

• Robert Audi
• Peter van Inwagen
• Alvin Plantinga

Pittsburgh School

• Robert Brandom
• Patricia Churchland
• Paul Churchland
• Adolf Grünbaum
• John McDowell
• Ruth Millikan
• Alexander Pruss
• Nicholas Rescher
• Wilfrid Sellars
• Bas van Fra*en

Pragmatism

• Susan Haack
• Nicholas Rescher
• Morton White

Princeton

• Alonzo Church
• Jerry Fodor
• David Lewis
• Jaegwon Kim
• Saul Kripke
• Richard Rorty

Quietism

• James F. Conant
• Alice Crary
• Cora Diamond

Stanford School

• Nancy Cartwright
• John Dupré
• Peter Galison
• Ian Hacking
• Patrick Suppes

• Category
• Index