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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2019
R. M. Hare has an ambitious project of arguing from a limited set of premises about the nature of moral thought and language all the way to substantive utilitarian conclusions. I reconstruct Hare's argument, identify an important problem for Hare, and then develop and endorse a restricted Hare-like argument. This argument is less ambitious than Hare's, and does not substantiate utilitarian conclusions on its own, but I demonstrate that it nonetheless imposes important constraints on moral judgements and I indicate how it can play a role in a larger argument for utilitarian conclusions.
1 Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The view Hare develops in this book is grounded in his previous work, including both Hare, R. M., Language of Morals (Oxford, 1952)Google Scholar and Hare, R. M., Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963)Google Scholar.
2 Harsanyi, John, ‘Morality and Theory of Rational Behavior’, Social Research 44 (1977), pp. 623–56Google Scholar, and Gibbard, Allan, Reconciling our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics (Oxford, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 My reconstruction of Hare's analysis is informed by Gibbard, Allan, ‘Hare's Analysis of “Ought” and its Implications’, Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking, ed. Seanor, Douglas and Fotion, Nicholas (Oxford, 1988), pp. 57–72Google Scholar, which Hare approves of, writing: ‘Gibbard, unlike many writers, gets me right’, in Hare, R. M., ‘Comments’, Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking, ed. Seanor, Douglas and Fotion, Nicholas (Oxford, 1988), pp. 199–293, at 230Google Scholar. See also Hare, R. M., ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, Utilitas 14 (2002), pp. 269–305, at 300–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Hare also identifies a third feature of moral judgements, that they are overriding, but this does not play a significant role in his analysis, as recognized in Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 21 and 54 and Hare, ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, p. 290.
5 Gibbard, ‘Hare's Analysis’, p. 58.
6 Hare, ‘Comments’, pp. 229–30.
7 Hare, Moral Thinking, p. 21.
8 Hare, Moral Thinking, p. 21.
9 Hare, Moral Thinking, p. 107.
10 This terminology is from Gibbard, ‘Hare's Analysis’.
11 Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 95–6.
12 For example, Nagel, Thomas, ‘The Foundations of Impartiality’, Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking, ed. Seanor, Douglas and Fotion, Nicholas (Oxford, 1988), pp. 101–12Google Scholar; Griffin, James, ‘Well-Being and its Interpersonal Comparability’, Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking, ed. Seanor, Douglas and Fotion, Nicholas (Oxford, 1988), pp. 73–88Google Scholar; and Harsanyi, John, ‘Problems with Act-Utilitarianism and Malevolent Preferences’, Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking, ed. Seanor, Douglas and Fotion, Nicholas (Oxford, 1988), pp. 89–99Google Scholar.
13 See Overvold, Mark, ‘Self-Interest and the Concept of Self-Sacrifice’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 10 (1980), pp. 105–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar; Kraut, Richard, ‘Desire and the Human Good’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 68 (1994), pp. 39–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Adams, Robert, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar.
14 See Heathwood, Chris, ‘The Problem of Defective Desires’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (2005), pp. 487–504CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Heathwood, Chris, ‘Preferentism and Self-Sacrifice’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (2011), pp. 18–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 For example, Hare, Moral Thinking, p. 42.
16 Hare, Moral Thinking, p. 21.
17 Hare, Moral Thinking, p. 107.
18 I adopt this terminology from Darwall, Stephen, ‘Reasons, Motives, and the Demands of Morality’, Moral Discourse and Practice, ed. Darwall, Stephen, Gibbard, Allan and Railton, Peter (Oxford, 1997), pp. 305–12Google Scholar.
19 Compare Svavarsdóttir, Sigrún, ‘Moral Cognition and Motivation’, Philosophical Review 108 (1999), pp. 161–219, at 172–3, n. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. After explaining the strength of Hare's version of judgement internalism, she writes: ‘Hare, as far as I know, is alone in holding this stronger thesis’.
20 Railton, Peter, ‘Naturalism and Prescriptivity’, Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1989), pp. 151–74, at 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Railton, ‘Naturalism’, p. 154.
22 Svavarsdóttir, ‘Moral Cognition’, p. 218.
23 I have formulated this claim in terms of ‘morally prescribing’ and ‘moral prescriptions’ in order to restrict myself to a sense of prescriptivity that is sufficiently weak for all to endorse. In the ensuing discussion, I will drop the ‘morally’ modifier for simplicity of prose, but it will always be implied.
24 Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 101–6 and Brandt, Richard B., A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar.
25 Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 94–9.
26 To be clear, this is not an objection to the idea of cognitive psychotherapy or the way Brandt uses it in his own analysis, just a worry about a combination of cognitive psychotherapy with the conditional reflection thesis.
27 Hare's own view is that conditional reflection applies equally to preferences and prescriptions, but that is because he thinks of prescriptions as expressions of preferences. See Hare, Moral Thinking, p. 222.
28 My ambivalence above about conditional reflection of preferences grows out of uncertainty over whether this critical distance is available with respect to preferences. According to Hare, it is not.
29 Brandt, A Theory, pp. 10–13 and 113–16.
30 Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 140–6 and 170–82.
31 Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 130–46.
32 In my view, there are other cases in which Hare's response to the fanatic, and his related response to counter-intuitive implications of his view, has a role to play in defence of the restricted Hare-like argument I will be endorsing, although discussion of that goes beyond the scope of this article.
33 Note that in cases in which I think others fail to recognize their own worth, perhaps as a result of conditioning or objectionably adaptive preference formation, I can be required to conditionally reflect what I take to be evaluatively informed prescription tendencies that place greater weight on their own interests and well-being than they do.
34 Gibbard, Reconciling, p. 50.
35 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971)Google Scholar; Rawls, John, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA, 2001)Google Scholar; and Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar.
36 Gibbard, Reconciling, p. 152.
37 Daskal, Steven, ‘Original Position Models, Trade-Offs and Continuity’, Utilitas 28 (2016), pp. 254–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 My own view, defended in Daskal, ‘Original Position Models’, is that Gibbard and Harsanyi, like Hare, are also not able to get all the way to traditional utilitarian conclusions. But I argue that they get relatively close, and that their analysis poses a more formidable challenge to non-utilitarian contractualists than is generally recognized. If I am right that the restricted Hare-like argument of this article vindicates the ‘You'd have agreed’ retort, that bolsters their argument by closing off one possible avenue of response.
39 Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 218–28.
40 Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 104–6.
41 Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 130–68.
42 Hare, ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, p. 269.
43 I would like to thank students in several classes at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University for extensive discussions that have been invaluable in refining my understanding of Hare's analysis. Thanks also to two anonymous referees for extremely helpful comments, questions and suggestions. And special thanks to Allan Gibbard for sparking my interest in Hare.