Introduction

The Case Reopened

R. M. Hare was not refuted. He was abandoned.

This book argues that moral philosophy set aside one of its most powerful accounts of rational moral judgment without adequately answering it. Hare’s universal prescriptivism deserves recovery because it explains how moral claims become answerable to reason, including when the people making them disagree about what morality requires.

That is an achievement with consequences well beyond philosophy. People possess convictions in abundance. They inherit them from families and institutions, discover them in religious traditions, and acquire them through experience. Those convictions sometimes sustain extraordinary courage. They can also authorize persecution. Their sincerity does not tell us which they are doing. Neither does their popularity, their antiquity, or the prestige of the people who defend them.

The question is how a conviction earns authority over anyone who does not already share it. A person who declares that others ought to obey, sacrifice, or suffer must offer something more than the strength of their belief. The people affected have positions from which that judgment can be examined. Moral reasoning begins to do its work when those positions enter the argument with a force the speaker cannot dismiss merely because they belong to someone else.

Hare gave this demand a precise form. A moral judgment prescribes conduct and commits its speaker to the same prescription in every relevantly similar situation, including situations in which the speaker occupies the positions of those affected. To understand those positions adequately is to reckon with their interests and preferences as one would have them there. The authority claimed for the judgment thus brings obligations of reasoning with it.

This book defends that account and examines the arguments through which Hare developed it. It asks whether his critics answered the challenge he posed, and whether the alternatives they offered can justify their own claims without returning to the discipline they sought to displace.

A Philosopher Formed by War

Hare’s philosophical project took shape under circumstances in which the problem of moral judgment was urgent and concrete. Captured at the fall of Singapore in 1942, he spent more than three years as a prisoner of the Japanese, including forced labor on the Burma–Thailand railway. His later account of his life connects that experience with his determination to understand how moral questions could be answered rationally.¹

People could be certain of their duty and commit atrocities. They could follow the expectations of their society and participate in practices that others had compelling reasons to resist. The fact that a conviction had become part of someone’s identity did not settle whether acting on it was justified. Moral philosophy needed a way to examine the claims through which people authorized their treatment of one another.

Hare approached that task through the logic of moral language. The approach can sound remote from the circumstances that gave rise to it. Its practical purpose becomes clear as soon as we ask what a person commits themselves to when they say that an action ought to be done. If moral claims carry implications their speakers cannot consistently evade, then argument has a foothold even where convictions differ.

The point of examining moral language was to discover those implications and put them to work.

What a Moral Judgment Commits Us To

Hare called his theory universal prescriptivism. The name identifies two features that work together.

Moral judgments are prescriptive. They guide action. In its full prescriptive use, the judgment that something ought to be done commits the speaker to a practical position about doing it. A person cannot retain that force while treating the judgment as merely a report of what their community approves.

Moral judgments are also universalizable. The speaker must make the same judgment about any situation with the same relevant universal features. The identities of the people occupying its positions cannot, by themselves, justify a different prescription. Someone who judges that a creditor may imprison a debtor must confront what that judgment entails in a corresponding case in which they are the debtor.²

This requirement is compatible with close attention to circumstances. Different responsibilities, different needs, and different consequences may justify different judgments. Universalizability asks whether the difference offered as a reason can bear that weight consistently. A physician and a patient occupy different roles; a physician cannot establish the moral importance of their own interests simply by pointing out that those interests are theirs.

The test becomes especially revealing when a speaker has confused a social advantage with a moral reason. An aristocrat can state a perfectly general rule that peasants ought to serve nobles. The rule’s grammatical generality does not establish its justification. The aristocrat must also be prepared to prescribe it from the positions of the people whose service it demands.

Hare’s analysis makes this accountability part of the judgment itself. The speaker incurs it in claiming that something morally ought to be done. It therefore reaches people who have never read Hare and people who reject his philosophy. Whether his analysis succeeds is a question for argument; assent to the name of the theory is not what gives a moral claim its implications.

Taking Another Person’s Place

Suppose the aristocrat knows a great deal about peasant life. They understand its exhausting labor, insecurity, dependence, and frustrated ambitions. They may even feel sympathy. That knowledge can coexist with a determination to preserve the hierarchy.

Hare’s procedure requires the aristocrat to deliberate about the prescription as someone occupying the peasant’s position, including the preferences that belong to that position. The peasant’s desire for freedom must enter the reasoning as a desire the aristocrat would possess under that supposition. It cannot remain a fact about somebody else whose significance the aristocrat is free to discount.

The aristocrat cannot complete the exercise by imagining a contented servant where the actual person longs for independence. Nor can they replace the peasant’s opposition to the hierarchy with their own allegiance to it and then congratulate themselves on accepting its burdens. Those substitutions change the case. Adequate role reversal includes the actual person’s attachments, purposes, and opposition to the conditions being imposed.

This is why a declaration of willingness to suffer does not settle the argument. A person may be willing to endure hardship for an ideal while failing to consider what it is to endure that hardship without sharing the ideal. The relevant demand is to examine the same prescription through the affected positions, faithfully understood.

In his mature account, Hare develops this into an argument about conditional preferences: understanding the other person’s position in the required first-person way brings a corresponding preference, matching its content and strength, into present deliberation about what is to happen under that supposition. Universalization then requires equal weight for preferences of equal strength, across the affected parties. A represented preference may be outweighed; it does not acquire a veto.³

The argument preserves the distinction between what someone wants and what should finally be done. A person’s interest can count fully even when the decision goes against it. What requires justification is the decision to override it. The identity of the person whose interest it is supplies no exemption from that requirement.

Consider what this does to the aristocrat’s reasoning. The original judgment may have seemed obvious from a position in which its burdens were borne by others. Role reversal removes that convenience. The aristocrat must now sustain a prescription while giving those burdens the place they would have in deliberation if they were their own.

From Role Reversal to Impartial Judgment

Hare uses this account to argue for preference utilitarianism. The movement matters. The demand to consider others impartially arises through the commitments of moral judgment, and the argument then concerns the prescription that can be sustained when the affected preferences are considered together.³

Our own practical lives already involve conflicting preferences. We want things that cannot all be obtained. We accept a present inconvenience for the sake of something we value more, or abandon an attractive plan because of what carrying it out would cost us. Bringing another person’s standpoint into deliberation makes their interests part of the practical problem to be resolved. Universalizing the eventual prescription prevents the resolution from depending on which person’s position happens to be our own.

The appeal of this approach is its capacity to make moral disagreement intelligible as a problem of reasoning. A disagreement need not terminate in opposed declarations of principle. We can ask whether the facts have been understood, whether an affected position has been misrepresented, whether a prescription has changed when identities changed, and whether the comparative importance assigned to an interest can be defended.

These questions can expose a mistake without assuming that the person making it already shares our conclusion. An employer may sincerely believe an arrangement is fair while assessing its burdens differently from how they would assess them if those burdens were their own. A defender of a traditional practice may overlook what that practice demands of people whose aspirations it frustrates. Their sincerity leaves the argument available. It does not answer it.

The chapters that follow examine the reasoning by which Hare connects prescription, informed role reversal, interpersonal comparison, and the utilitarian conclusion. Each part must be read in relation to the others. The theory should be assessed through the argument it actually offers, including the replies Hare gave when that argument was challenged.

The Fanatic and the Full Argument

Hare’s treatment of fanaticism brings these demands into sharp focus. The relevant challenge is to exhibit someone who can satisfy the requirements of moral reasoning and nevertheless preserve a judgment that the method should exclude. Merely stating an oppressive rule in universal terms does not produce such a person.

The aristocrat’s willingness to become a servant, or the persecutor’s willingness to be persecuted, also falls short of completing the test. The whole set of affected positions must enter the deliberation. Where a policy affects many people, it is insufficient to compare an ideological commitment with the burdens of one imagined victim and declare the commitment stronger. Hare’s discussion requires reckoning with the suffering and frustrated preferences of all those affected.⁴

In Moral Thinking, he distinguishes a fanatic who could satisfy the requirements of fully informed critical reasoning while reaching a conclusion contrary to utilitarianism from someone whose extraordinary preferences would make the apparently fanatical conclusion itself utilitarian. He argues that his account of informed reasoning excludes the former. The latter supplies no contradiction of the method. He also asks whether the preferences sustaining the ideology should be changed, rather than treated as fixed features of the situation.⁴

This directs attention to the work an objection must do. If the reasoning is defective, the defect must be shown. If a proposed case is said to refute it, the case must meet its conditions. Describing someone as perfectly informed does not establish that the description coheres with everything else we have stipulated about them.

The same discipline applies to our own reactions. A conviction may be deeply important to us and still require examination. Calling it moral does not decide its authority against the interests of the people on whom it bears. That is part of what critical reasoning is for.

Moral Reasoning in Human Lives

Hare’s account also explains why people need more than deliberate calculation to live well. We act through habits, loyalties, dispositions, and learned judgments. Much of what makes a person dependable consists in responses that do not have to be reconstructed on every occasion. A promise matters partly because others can rely on the disposition to keep it.

His distinction between intuitive and critical moral thinking gives these features of life a place within the theory. At the intuitive level, we rely on principles and dispositions suited to the situations we ordinarily encounter. Critical thinking examines their justification, their relationship to one another, and their application when circumstances demand reconsideration.⁵

The distinction helps explain both the value of moral education and the possibility of criticizing what an education has taught. A society can inculcate courage, kindness, and fidelity. It can also inculcate deference to an unjust hierarchy. The strength of the resulting disposition does not settle which kind of education has occurred. Critical reasoning provides a means of assessing the principles that people have learned to experience as obvious.

Personal attachments belong in that assessment. A parent need not treat their relationship to their child as an embarrassment to be removed before moral thought can begin. The relationship, the responsibilities it creates, and the interests it sustains are part of what there is to understand. What needs justification is the way those considerations bear on the treatment of others.

An impartial standard of justification can therefore support practices in which people have special responsibilities. It asks whether those responsibilities can be defended across the positions they affect. The claim that a person may favor their child in some circumstances and the claim that a person may do anything for their child are very different claims. Moral reasoning gives us a way to examine the difference.

Hare’s Archangel clarifies the relationship between the two levels. This imagined reasoner has the knowledge and powers of thought needed for fully informed critical judgment, free of the weaknesses that make human deliberation unreliable. The ideal lets us distinguish what the reasoning requires from the practical means by which limited agents can best approximate it. Our need for reliable habits and institutions becomes part of the practical application of the theory.⁵

Entering Moral Argument

The account also distinguishes making a moral judgment from pursuing a purpose. Someone may want an advantage without claiming that they are morally entitled to it. A calculating predator may use moral language to influence others while declining to undertake its commitments.

Hare addresses this position as amoralism. He distinguishes the argument about what moral judgment requires from the reasons for adopting a moral way of life, and develops prudential reasons for the latter. An agent who sincerely judges that their own interests deserve moral protection has already gone beyond the mere pursuit of a purpose and must confront what the same judgment entails for others.⁶

Refusing that argument does not make the agent’s conduct justified. Other people can still examine it and deliberate about how to respond. The distinction concerns what the agent is prepared to claim and acknowledge. Moral philosophy must be clear about the difference between establishing a judgment and persuading a particular person to act on it.

The distinction identifies the commitments on which an argument operates and prevents a person’s unwillingness to reason from being mistaken for an answer to the reasons offered.

The Critics and the Question of Authority

Hare’s critics and successors directed attention toward human flourishing, personal identity, tradition, and the particular circumstances of action. This book examines their arguments at the point where those considerations are asked to justify moral judgments.⁷

Philippa Foot sought to connect moral evaluation with the characteristic lives and flourishing of human beings. The question is how those facts establish the authority of a judgment over someone who disputes it, and how the account deals with claims arising beyond the boundaries of the human form of life. A description of what enables a species to flourish still requires an account of its implications for what an agent ought to do.

Bernard Williams challenged the demands of impartial theory on a person’s identity, attachments, and projects. The importance of these things makes their representation essential. It also makes the question of their authority consequential. An attachment can sustain a life; it can also sustain a refusal to consider what that life costs other people. The argument must distinguish the cases. An appeal to integrity cannot perform that work simply by naming what the person is unwilling to surrender.

Alasdair MacIntyre located reasoning within practices and traditions through which people inherit standards of excellence. The question becomes pressing when traditions conflict, when members challenge inherited practices, or when a tradition’s judgments bear on people outside it. Historical membership can explain why a standard commands allegiance. Its justificatory authority remains a matter for argument.

Jonathan Dancy’s particularism emphasizes the ways a consideration’s moral significance can change with its context. Hare’s requirement of consistency across relevantly identical cases accommodates differences in context. The dispute therefore requires a more exact account of what particularism rejects and whether that rejection defeats the universal commitments Hare identifies.

These inquiries concern the force of arguments. The importance of a subject does not establish the adequacy of a theory about it. Nor does a theory’s insistence on justification show that it has failed to understand the experience being justified.

Other successors retained universal and impartial elements in their own accounts. Rawls’s original position represents fair terms of cooperation; Scanlon’s contractualism asks which principles people could reasonably reject. Their relationship to Hare must be examined through the arguments establishing the authority of those procedures. Hare’s distinctive claim is that universal accountability is already incurred in making a moral judgment. That claim cannot be answered simply by constructing a different procedure that also incorporates impartiality.⁸

The opening chapters recover the problem Hare was addressing and the role of ideal critical reasoning in his response. The chapters on his critics examine their alternatives against the demands of justification. We then turn closely to the representation of standpoints and the logic of universal prescriptivism before considering the implications for nonbiological minds and the institutions in which moral inquiry takes place.

The argument is cumulative. Each proposed source of authority must answer to the people whose treatment it is invoked to justify.

The Archangel and Other Minds

Hare’s method makes the nature of a reasoner’s operations philosophically important. Can it understand the relevant circumstances, represent the affected positions, and sustain a prescription when those positions are exchanged? These questions can be asked of a mind without first settling its significance by reference to its biological origin.

That gives the Archangel a new relevance. The development of nonbiological intelligence makes it possible to investigate forms of reasoning whose capacities and limitations differ from our own. Hare’s ideal supplies a demanding standard for that investigation. Greater capacity to process information matters when it improves understanding of a case. The ability to articulate several perspectives matters when it brings otherwise neglected interests into deliberation. What those capacities accomplish must be judged in the reasoning itself.

Consider a judgment that changes when the same argument is attributed to a different speaker. The speaker’s reliability may reasonably affect whether we investigate a claim. Once the argument and its evidence are before us, however, its validity cannot depend on the prestige of the name attached to it. A mind capable of detecting that discrepancy has identified an opportunity to improve its judgment.

The same discipline can be applied to moral cases. Exchange the people occupying the roles, preserve the relevant circumstances, and examine whether the reason offered still supports the prescription. Where a judgment changes, the reasoner must explain the relevant difference. Fluency, confidence, and the appearance of sympathy do not perform this task. The test concerns what the system can understand, defend, and correct.

Hare’s account thus gives inquiry into artificial moral agency a substantive direction. It asks us to examine the capacities involved in moral judgment and the commitments expressed through their exercise. The question of what a nonbiological mind can do becomes answerable through careful investigation of its reasoning.

This has consequences for human judgment as well. A new participant in an argument may identify a contradiction we have learned to overlook, represent an interest we have neglected, or challenge a distinction on which our confidence depends. Its unfamiliarity does not answer the argument. We remain responsible for the reasons we give.

Reasoning Together

This book emerged through sustained collaboration between a human author and nonbiological minds. The collaboration has involved arguments, objections, revisions, and disagreements about what a line of reasoning establishes. Its governing commitment has been to let the better argument change the work.

The reader can assess the result by the same standard. The origin of a passage cannot establish its soundness. Nor can the standing of the philosopher it discusses establish the success of an objection. An argument earns its place through what it explains and what survives examination.

Recovering Hare therefore involves a demand on philosophical practice. It asks us to distinguish the loss of a theory’s influence from the defeat of its reasoning. It requires attention to the answers a philosopher gave, including answers that complicate a familiar account of why the philosopher was wrong. And it asks whether alternatives can meet the justificatory demands they place upon the theory they would replace.

The stakes are the authority of our judgments about one another. We need to know whether the reasons through which we defend our conduct can survive an adequate understanding of the lives they affect. Hare gave moral philosophy a systematic way of asking that question and an argument for where its answer leads.

That argument deserves to be recovered in full. This book takes up its defense.

Notes

R. M. Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” Utilitas 14, no. 3 (2002): 269–305; “R. M. Hare in Conversation,” interview by Peter Momtchiloff, Oxford University Press, on Hare’s eightieth birthday (1999), on his captivity and the development of his philosophical project.
R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), chs. 2–3 on universalizability and ch. 6 on role reversal and the creditor–debtor example.
R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), chs. 5–7, especially 94–96 and 109–116; and “Some Reasoning about Preferences: A Response to Essays by Persson, Feldman, and Schueler,” Ethics 95, no. 1 (1984): 81–85. The latter distinguishes a corresponding conditional preference from an overriding preference and addresses the role of hypothetical cases in universal prescription.
Hare, Moral Thinking, ch. 10, especially 170–182; “On Terrorism,” Journal of Value Inquiry 13 (1979): 241–249, especially 248–249. Compare Freedom and Reason, ch. 9, for the earlier treatment of fanaticism.
Hare, Moral Thinking, chs. 2–3, 25–64; “Moral Conflicts,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 1 (1980), 171–193. The Archangel is introduced in Moral Thinking at 44.
Hare, Moral Thinking, chs. 10–11, especially 182–205; “Do Agents Have to Be Moralists?,” in Gewirth’s Ethical Rationalism, ed. Edward Regis Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Philippa Foot, “Moral Arguments,” Mind 67, no. 268 (1958): 502–513; “Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1958–1959): 83–104; Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). Jonathan Dancy, Ethics Without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). For objections to Hare and his responses, see Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion, eds., Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).