Hare, Richard Mervyn

(1919– )

English moral philosopher, and professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, then at the university of Florida. Hare's first book The Language of Morals (1952) made prescriptivism a leading theory of the nature of moral judgement. His analyses of the notion of commendation, and of universalizability in ethics, remain landmarks in the application of philosophy of language to moral theory. In subsequent works (especially Freedom and Reason, 1963, and Moral Thinking: its Levels, Method, and Point, 1981) Hare has attempted to show that ethical arguments can be underwritten by reason, in that moral concepts obey a logic sufficiently powerful to show some variety of utilitarianism to be true. Hare's utilitarianism tries to balance the virtues of both direct and indirect or rule-orientated versions of the doctrine. The resulting ‘two-level’ view has proved controversial, with critics claiming that the agent is left in an unstable position, not knowing whether to deliberate as an ‘archangel’ capable of utilitarian reasoning, or in a more everyday, intuitive and agent-centred fashion.