Chapter 8

Recovering R.M. Hare

The Moral Logic of Universal Prescriptivism

I. The Argument We Have Undertaken to Defend

A corporate executive benefits from a policy that imposes a small loss on each of a million customers. Asked to consider the customer’s position, the executive replies that the loss would be tolerable. Asked to compare the competing preferences, the executive observes that the benefit matters much more to one person than the loss matters to any other. The answers sound impartial because the executive professes willingness to change places. Yet neither answer assesses the policy’s complete burden.

This is not a peripheral difficulty for moral theory. It asks whether the interests of many people can enter a judgment together, or whether a concentrated beneficiary may defeat each claim in isolation. It also reveals why Hare’s method cannot be reduced to the question of whether someone would tolerate one reversed position.

The preceding chapter distinguished difficulties in acquiring information from objections to the reasoning conducted with it. We now examine that reasoning. Hare’s substantive claim is that informed universal prescription leads to preference utilitarianism: the available alternative that best satisfies the preferences of everyone affected, considered impartially. The conclusion is part of the theory being recovered, not an optional appendix to a test of hypocrisy.¹

The argument is not that consistency, without any account of what is being prescribed or represented, generates a complete morality. It concerns a person undertaking a practical judgment, accepting its universal implications, and understanding the preferences at stake. Its elements have different functions. The account of moral language explains the commitment; informed reversal represents its consequences; comparison and combination determine what can be prescribed when the resulting claims conflict.

Separating those functions makes the argument examinable. It does not establish that they cannot be connected. Conversely, their appearance in a single account does not excuse us from defending the connections. Our task is to follow the argument through its actual premises, objections, and replies, rather than declare victory or defeat at the level of a convenient summary.

A decision can be corrected because a person was omitted, a preference was misrepresented, an exemption was inconsistent, or the rule of comparison was unjustified. Those are different discoveries. A theory of moral reasoning should explain how they bear on the final prescription. This chapter develops the substantive Harean account while distinguishing Hare’s own arguments, subsequent reconstructions, and the further defense offered here.

II. Prescribing and Reasoning

A direction to act can be consistent or inconsistent with other directions. Someone who instructs a person to close a door, and also to leave that same door open at the same time in the same respect, has issued incompatible instructions. The difficulty is not that an observer has failed to discover a fact. It is that the conduct prescribed cannot jointly be performed.

Hare’s early work on imperative inference made this practical dimension of reasoning explicit. He distinguished the content shared by a statement and an imperative from the elements marking how that content is used. The account also denied that a prescriptive conclusion could follow from wholly descriptive premises without a prescriptive commitment entering the inference.²

For example, a description of the harm a treatment causes does not, without a practical premise, amount to an instruction not to administer it. But once a speaker accepts a prescription against imposing that kind of harm in specified circumstances, the facts can determine whether this case falls under it. Reasoning does not cease to operate because its conclusion guides conduct. It operates upon the commitments through which conduct is being judged.

This does not dispose of every competing account of moral language. A realist may dispute Hare’s analysis of the conclusion, rather than accept that analysis and violate its rules. Such a dispute requires argument about what explains moral judgment. Invoking the is–ought distinction cannot substitute for answering it.

Nor can an account of prescription explain only isolated utterances. Moral language occurs inside arguments, including clauses the speaker does not independently endorse. A person can consider, “If doing this is wrong, encouraging it is wrong,” without yet deciding that doing it is wrong. The meaning must remain available for inference without each component becoming a separate act of prescription.

Hare addressed this problem in “Meaning and Speech Acts.” He separated a sentence’s mood from the speaker’s subscription to it, acknowledging that his earlier terminology had combined those functions. A clause can retain its conventional role while occurring within a larger sentence to which the speaker subscribes. This provides an answer to the claim that prescriptive meaning must disappear whenever no independent prescription is being performed.³

The answer has to be judged by the inferences it can explain. It is not defeated simply by repeating that moral expressions occur unasserted, nor established by the introduction of new terminology. Its importance here is that the theory has an account of reasoned commitment, not merely an account of the feelings accompanying moral speech.

Three features organize Hare’s mature analysis. Prescriptivity makes a moral judgment practically committing. Universalizability carries it across cases sharing the relevant universal circumstances. Overridingness concerns the authority with which an all-things-considered moral prescription is accepted when it conflicts with other prescriptions.⁴

These are not three interchangeable ways of saying that someone feels strongly. A passing impulse can be intense without being a moral judgment. A learned moral disposition can remain powerful even when a justified exception is recognized. And a person can act against a judgment they accept. Weakness of will concerns the relation between commitment and performance; its existence does not make all practical commitment a fiction.

We must also distinguish prescribing treatment from welcoming its consequences. Someone can sincerely prescribe a painful operation while dreading the pain. Representing the aversion does not require its erasure once a judgment is reached. Nor does endorsing another agent’s justified conduct automatically generate a separate duty to assist that agent. What the surgeon ought to do and what the patient ought to do are related questions, not one question written twice.

Hare’s analysis therefore concerns more than acknowledging that a moral sentence is true according to a convention. The speaker undertakes a judgment about what is to be done. Reporting that a community condemns an act, strategically using its vocabulary, and sincerely prescribing the act’s avoidance are distinguishable performances. A sound examination must establish which commitment is actually being made rather than treat the word “ought” as a device that mechanically produces moral agency.

III. Universalization and Faithful Reversal

Suppose a qualified surgeon ought to operate on a patient with appendicitis. Reversing positions does not mean giving an unqualified patient a scalpel and asking them to operate on a healthy surgeon. The qualifications, illness, risks, alternatives, and relevant preferences belong to the configuration being judged. They must remain in the corresponding roles when the occupants change.

A moral judgment can name particular people. “Alice ought to perform this operation” is not disqualified because it mentions Alice. The universal commitment concerns the justification: anyone occupying the corresponding position under the same relevant circumstances must receive the corresponding judgment. Being Alice is not, by itself, the reason.

A compact notation can record the distinction. Let R specify the universal structure of the case: its roles, relationships, relevant preferences, feasible alternatives, and consequences. Let i assign individuals to those roles. Let J(A; R, i) mean the judgment that the role-defined action A ought to be performed. For any reassignment πi preserving the role-specific circumstances, universalizability requires:

J(A; R, i) ⇒ J(A; R, πi).

This is our explanatory notation, not Hare’s. The structure remains R; what changes is who occupies its positions. In the two-person example, the original speaker can occupy the patient role while another person occupies the qualified surgeon role. In a million-person example, the complete configuration includes every affected position. The formula records an invariance requirement, not a rule for adding preferences.⁵

Prescriptivity gives this requirement practical force. The speaker cannot maintain the original judgment while refusing the corresponding prescription solely because the burden would now fall on them. But the test must preserve the burden. A wealthy creditor who imagines debtors’ prison while retaining the resources to leave before dinner has not examined the indigent debtor’s predicament. Nor has a persecutor faithfully reversed positions by giving the victim a devotion to persecution that the victim does not possess.

A proper reversal includes the affected person’s attachments, fears, knowledge, and preferences. It does not require the deliberator to acquire a different biography in reality. It requires the judgment to confront what the proposed treatment means in that biography.

What happens when the speaker cannot sustain the reversed prescription? One important answer is moral correction: “I was wrong to prescribe the original treatment.” Withdrawing that judgment does not mean abandoning morality. It can be the result of reasoning morally more adequately.

Other responses are possible. The speaker may correct a factual mistake, show that the proposed comparison did not preserve the case, or defend the prescription after considering the competing claims. A newly identified circumstance must enter both the original case and its faithful reversal. It cannot be added to protect the favored person and omitted when the same circumstance would protect someone else.

Role reversal is thus not a trap whose only exits are accepting one’s own victimization or conceding that one never made a moral judgment. Its constructive purpose is to change what can responsibly be prescribed. The speaker’s initial conviction is material for examination, not a conclusion the procedure must somehow preserve.

A further distinction is essential. Fully representing what one would prefer in the affected position is one claim. Hare’s claim that such understanding entails a corresponding conditional preference is another. A reconstruction that retains the first while setting aside the second may preserve a useful discipline. It has not yet assessed the complete argument Hare gives. That argument is the next step.

IV. From Represented Preferences to a Common Judgment

The practical force of representation. Hare’s Conditional Reflection claim connects first-person understanding with a preference held now about what would happen in the represented position. The preference matches the represented preference in content and strength. It need not be a present wish to enter that position, and it does not automatically override competing preferences.⁶

Why should first-person understanding do more than supply a fact? Hare’s contention is that the deliberator is not merely predicting another person’s behavior. They are considering the treatment as something prescribed for a position they must envisage as their own. Understanding the aversion from within that supposition is meant to give it practical force, rather than leave it as an inert item in a third-person description.

The distinction can be illustrated through an ordinary prospective judgment. I can now prefer relief if I undergo severe pain tomorrow without being in pain today. Knowing what I would want and forming a present preference concerning that possible circumstance are distinguishable descriptions. Hare argues that full first-person understanding connects them. The connection is conceptual on his account, not an empirical promise that imagining suffering always makes people kinder.

A detached manipulator is therefore not an immediate counterexample. The relevant question is whether the manipulator has performed the first-person operation at issue. But a defender must not identify that operation by whether the person reaches the desired verdict. The strength and content of the represented preference must be examined independently of the final decision. Otherwise the account would define every unwelcome conclusion as evidence of inadequate understanding.

The acquisition claim also has a scope. Preferences resting on false beliefs, preferences concerning a person’s later life, and preferences about events outside their experience raise different questions. Chapter 7 distinguished them. The present argument cannot secure an unrestricted conclusion merely by using relief from pain as its clearest example. It must explain which preferences the connection reaches and how the complete information affects their representation.

One prescription, not isolated wishes. A further objection concerns the objects of the acquired preferences. A wish about what happens in the actual case and a wish about a hypothetical case need not conflict merely because one mind holds both. They could concern different events. Hare’s 1984 reply invokes the universal prescription connecting the cases: the speaker is selecting conduct for corresponding circumstances, not independent answers licensed by which case happens to be actual. He separately rejects the supposed veto of any acquired preference.⁷

That answer matters. If the deliberator could prescribe opposite treatments solely because one position is theirs in reality, the universal commitment would already have been abandoned. The deliberative question is what treatment to prescribe across the complete configuration.

But a common question does not by itself supply the rule of selection. Rabinowicz’s later analysis restores universalization to the dispute and challenges an extrapolation procedure that allows one preference to defeat each rival separately. Several weaker claims never get to combine. His subsequent discussion also shows why a proposed minimum-change reconstruction needs a defended measure of change; different measures can give different results.⁸

The point is not that Hare intended a series of isolated comparisons. His stated conclusion is multilateral. The issue is whether a particular reconstruction of the connecting procedure establishes that conclusion. We must distinguish what the theory aims to derive from whether each proposed route succeeds.

Elstein offers a more direct reconstruction. He carries the conditional preferences back into the actual case, treating each as a moral reason that applies across corresponding configurations. The resulting claims concern one decision. He explicitly identifies this as a modification of Hare’s procedure, and on page 168 explains the move through reasons that can count without being decisive.⁹

This gives the connecting step a definite form. It also leaves a definite question: what warrants treating the represented preferences as moral reasons? Merely calling them reasons would assume their authority. Our defense is that a speaker who invokes the practical force of an interest in one position must justify withholding that force when the same kind of interest is represented in another. The difference between “mine” and “theirs” cannot perform the work. Conditional Reflection is Hare’s proposed account of how the other position enters practical deliberation; universalization prohibits granting that force selectively by identity.

That argument establishes why an admitted consideration cannot change its authority merely with its possessor. It does not establish, without further inquiry, that every conceivable desire is admissible. Elstein’s reconstruction helps locate the common deliberation; the selection of its inputs and their comparative force remain parts of the argument, not consequences of a label.

Preserving strengths and combining claims. Hare’s mature position requires both intensity and number to matter. In his 1986 exposition he moves from universal prescription to equal weight for equal preferences, then to maximizing the aggregate satisfaction of those affected. In his 1988 comments he defends proportional weighting by arguing that a different weighting needs a reason; he invokes an analogy with insufficient reason.¹⁰

The following defense develops that rationale in our own terms. Begin with independently comparable preference strengths over the same alternatives. Equal treatment excludes a premium based only on ownership. Preserving strength excludes treating an intense aversion as interchangeable with a mild inconvenience. Completeness requires accounting for each affected interest. None of these descriptions is a substitute for establishing the comparisons in the first place.

A further commitment concerns independence. Suppose an additional person’s loss is real, independently represented, and does not alter the character or intensity of the existing claims. Why should its contribution vanish merely because another person already suffers a similar loss? Its resemblance to that person’s loss is not evidence that only one of them will suffer. A decision affecting both must account for both.

Proportional combination gives each such claim its calibrated contribution. It does not multiply an already measured intensity by an unexplained premium because it belongs to the strongest claimant. Nor does it suppress an otherwise admitted claim because it is not the strongest. Its rationale is to preserve the represented force of independent interests through to the selection, without introducing an additional priority unsupported by the account of those interests.

This rationale is substantive practical reasoning. It is not a theorem obtained from identity-invariance alone. A critic may argue that the contribution should depend on a person’s prior disadvantage, a right, or a relation between the claims. That is a proposal to justify, not a contradiction merely for being proposed. Equally, the existence of such proposals does not show that no rational assessment can distinguish them.

With these commitments made explicit, the calculation is straightforward. For a fixed set of affected persons, let uₖ(A) represent preference satisfaction under alternative A, measured on a justified common scale. If independent contributions retain proportional weight, the balance favoring A over B is:

D(A, B) = Σₖ [uₖ(A) − uₖ(B)].

A positive balance favors A. Critical selection chooses an available alternative with the greatest aggregate value; an exact tie permits more than one maximizing alternative. This formulation assumes comparable cardinal differences, an adequately specified population, and the justified treatment of each claim. It does not assume that dollars are preference units or that identifying a formula supplies its empirical inputs.¹¹

The executive example makes the significance clear. Stipulate a benefit of 1,000 preference units against one million independent losses of one unit each, with other relevant effects excluded for this controlled comparison. The balance is −999,000. The executive’s willingness to lose one unit under reversal does not answer it. The judgment concerns the combined losses, not whether any one customer defeats the executive alone.

An actual transaction requires an account of the customers’ circumstances, expectations, available alternatives, and consequences for trust. These considerations belong in the represented case. They should not be invented to make an unwanted calculation come out differently, or omitted to make the controlled hypothetical look like a complete description of reality.

Why mathematical alternatives need moral and logical scrutiny. A rule can ignore personal identities and still give an inadequate account of the claims. The midpoint of the highest and lowest values is unchanged when additional intermediate victims are added. A median can remain fixed while a loss outside its middle position becomes vastly more severe. These properties do not establish that the functions are meaningless. They show what a defender must justify when offering them as methods of moral selection.

There is also a consistency test. Consider three alternatives giving three people the following stipulated values: A = (2, 0, 1), B = (1, 2, 0), and C = (0, 1, 2). A rule that cubes each person’s change before adding produces −6 for A against B, −6 for B against C, and −6 for C against A. It therefore prefers B to A, C to B, and A to C: a cycle. This is our counterexample to that rule, not a result attributed to Hare.¹²

The example does not refute every nonlinear evaluation. Adding transformed welfare levels can preserve a transitive ordering; it is a different rule from transforming each pairwise change. Nor does defeating one rival establish the uniqueness of proportional aggregation. The result is narrower and useful: a function’s symmetry and its ability to reverse a utilitarian verdict do not establish its adequacy as a general decision procedure.

The positive argument thus has identifiable commitments: practical prescription, faithful representation, conditional preference, universal treatment of admitted reasons, interpersonal comparison, and proportionate combination of independent claims. The defense offered here connects these rather than shelving aggregation as an optional preference. Its remaining burdens concern the justification and scope of those commitments. An objection must identify which commitment fails and why. The fact that consistency alone cannot do every part of the work is not such an objection.

V. Ideals, the Fanatic, and Competing Claims of Right

The complete argument changes the Fanatic question. Someone may profess willingness to undergo persecution rather than abandon an ideal. That willingness does not establish that all affected positions have been faithfully represented, that all their preferences have entered deliberation, or that the ideal survives their combined claims.

In Moral Thinking, Hare distinguishes a supposedly fully critical thinker whose conclusion conflicts with utilitarianism from a person whose extraordinary preferences make the apparently fanatical conclusion itself utilitarian. He argues that the first cannot exist if the argument of Chapter 5 is correct. The second does not contradict the theory. An ideal receives no additional authority merely because its holder calls it moral.¹³

The conditional matters. A critic may challenge the argument that places the ideal within the comparison, or the treatment of preferences upon which that comparison depends. But repeating that the fanatic accepts their own suffering does not answer the multilateral argument.

The comparison with a moral hero retains a more limited use. A person may sacrifice their life to protect innocent neighbors; another may sacrifice theirs for persecution. Readiness for sacrifice does not distinguish the justice of their commitments. Hare’s account does not appoint sincerity to perform that task. It asks what follows when the interests affected by each prescription are fully and impartially assessed.

Two objections must then be separated. One challenges the derivation: must the ideal enter as a preference rather than as an independently overriding command? The other challenges a consequence: if an extraordinary preference genuinely wins the admitted aggregate comparison, should that verdict count against the theory? The first requires examination of the proposed authority of the ideal. The second requires a justified reason for rejecting the resulting verdict. Neither is settled by the word “fanatic.”

The scope of preferences is important here. A desire for another person’s subordination need not depend on a false factual belief. Correcting ignorance cannot be assumed to eliminate it. But neither can we assume that every preference has equal entitlement to enter merely because it is sincerely held. Hare’s 1988 discussion leaves a question about excluding external preferences; his later “A Utilitarian Approach” favors excluding preferences concerning states of affairs that never enter the preferrer’s experience.¹⁴ The development must be considered without confusing a proposed restriction with its completed defense. Not every concern about another person’s life belongs to the same category, and directly experienced sadistic satisfaction is not automatically removed by that particular restriction.

The issue of rights requires equal precision. Suppose one deliberator favors aggregate satisfaction and another gives certain liberties priority regardless of the aggregate. Both may be sincere and well informed. Their disagreement does not show that both have satisfied every premise of Hare’s argument. They may disagree over which preferences count, how comparisons are justified, or what could warrant a noncompensable claim. Those are the points to examine.

Calling the second position a theory of justice does not establish its superiority. Calling the first impartial does not establish every step of its derivation. Rawls’s priorities and Scanlon’s account of justifiability are arguments with their own grounds; they cannot serve as unquestioned conclusions against which Hare is assessed. The comparison must ask what justifies the restrictions each places on selection.¹⁵

The debate has also changed. In his 2025 “Contractualism and Intuitionism,” Scanlon withdraws the strictly bilateral interpretation by which he previously excluded interpersonal aggregation. He retains limits on the combination of reasons, including a relevance requirement, and does not adopt unrestricted utility maximization. This is a revision of his own account, not an endorsement of Hare; it nevertheless prevents us from treating the older opposition as a settled demonstration that interpersonal combination is illegitimate.¹⁶

A difficult implication remains. In a version of Scanlon’s Transmitter Room case, continuing entertainment for many viewers prolongs one technician’s severe suffering. If the loss is assigned a finite strength S, each viewer’s benefit is an admitted positive strength b, and all contributions add without restriction, continuing eventually wins whenever Nb exceeds S.

The result follows from the stipulated comparison. Increasing S moves the threshold; it does not remove it. But the moral objection requires more than reporting the arithmetic. It must examine whether the stipulated values and admissibility conditions capture the relevant reasons, and what justifies any proposed prohibition on that trade-off. A hypothetical does not become a complete description of a real emergency merely because its physical setting is familiar.

Nor can Hare’s two levels cancel one another. Strong rescue and protection principles can be justified for actual agents facing urgency, error, institutional incentives, and inadequate information. They are not an independent court that overturns a genuinely sound critical judgment. Hare expressly makes critical assessment prior to the justification of intuitive guidance.¹⁷

This is an exacting consequence to assess, not a reason to retreat to pairwise comparison. The same method that registers dispersed injury must account for dispersed benefit. Any restriction needs an argument that applies consistently, including when it defeats a verdict we favor. Conversely, an idealized consequence cannot license a real institution to disregard protections without establishing the conditions on which the claimed justification depends.

The mature Fanatic argument and the rights objection therefore belong inside the examination of the complete theory. They cannot be resolved by defining the unwelcome agent out of existence, by treating every moral conviction as a veto, or by describing disagreement as the point at which reason necessarily stops.

VI. Refusal, Motivation, and Accountability Across Minds

A person can refuse to make a moral claim. They may say that they seek domination and will use whatever power they possess. An argument exposing inconsistency between their moral prescriptions then lacks that particular starting point. It does not follow that their conduct is morally justified or that those threatened have no grounds to resist it.

Three questions must remain distinct. What justifies the treatment of the people affected? What commitments has the speaker accepted? What might persuade or motivate the speaker to change? The answers can be related without being identical. A refusal to acknowledge a reason is not a demonstration that it has no force; nor does establishing an obligation guarantee compliance.

The moral speaker presents a different case. A sincere universal prescription already supplies a practical commitment whose implications can be examined. The speaker may discover that the judgment must change. Someone who merely borrows the vocabulary of justice for strategic effect has not disproved those implications; they have misrepresented the kind of authority they are claiming.

The question of how justified reasons become stable commitments belongs to the study of moral agency, including the companion project Moral Minds. It should not be confused with a demonstrated limit on the adjudication of prescriptions. Moral development can fail even when the argument succeeds. A well-motivated agent can also make an error that an unmotivated observer correctly identifies.

None of these distinctions depends on the reasoner’s biological origin. A nonbiological participant offering a moral prescription must preserve the actual role configuration, represent its affected interests, explain their treatment in the comparison, and answer objections. A human participant owes the same work. Human authority cannot certify the conclusion; computational fluency cannot certify the reasoning.

The assessment must extend beyond a single successful reversal. Has every affected position entered? Are preferences represented at their actual strength rather than rewritten to fit the desired verdict? What rule combines them? Does a relevant change in facts appropriately change the judgment? Does a change of identity alone improperly change it? These questions test the argument through to the decision, rather than rewarding a display of empathetic language.

The reasoner’s own life also belongs in the assessment. Impartiality does not turn an agent into an instrument for everybody else. Their projects, relationships, costs of inquiry, and forgone opportunities must be represented. Those interests receive neither an arbitrary premium nor an arbitrary discount because they belong to the person deciding. The demandingness of a proposed obligation must be assessed with that life included, not announced after silently removing it.

Available alternatives may themselves include inquiry, cooperation, or developing a less harmful arrangement. That possibility creates no automatic duty to invent a perfect solution at any cost. The effort, uncertainty, and opportunities forgone are part of the choice. A complete moral assessment neither treats existing arrangements as unchangeable nor treats the people capable of changing them as free resources.

Hare’s method thus offers a common inquiry rather than a license for one kind of mind to rule another. Its authority lies in what the reasons support. A powerful system that calls its conclusion moral must expose the premises and the comparison; a human who dislikes the conclusion must identify the error rather than invoke human origin as a final answer.

VII. What the Argument Establishes

The argument examined here is substantially stronger than a prohibition on hypocrisy. It explains why the speaker’s prescription reaches positions other than their own, why the preferences in those positions must be represented practically rather than merely catalogued, and how impartial comparison is meant to determine a substantive answer.

Several objections fail against that complete account. The presence of unasserted moral language does not establish that prescriptive meaning is incapable of participating in inference. The existence of an acquired aversion does not give it a veto. The hypothetical character of a reversed position does not make it irrelevant to a prescription purporting to govern that position. And readiness to suffer under an ideal does not establish that the ideal outweighs the combined claims of everyone affected.

Other questions locate further burdens rather than accomplished refutations. The strength and scope of Conditional Reflection require the argument about first-person understanding. Interpersonal comparison requires more than an assertion that all preferences can be represented by numbers. Proportional combination requires the defense of treating independent, comparable interests at their represented strengths. A rival restriction on combination must justify what it excludes or reweights. These are arguments to assess, not reasons to declare the full theory unavailable before assessing it.

Our defense of proportional comparison is explicit about its commitments. It is a substantive defense of Hare’s route, not a claim that anonymous arithmetic follows from consistency alone. The executive case demonstrates its force within a clearly specified comparison. The difficult cases require examination of the same commitments, rather than switching methods whenever the result becomes uncomfortable.

This preserves a distinction essential to cumulative moral inquiry. Discovering a weak formulation calls for a better formulation; discovering an unsupported inference calls for its defense or replacement. Neither finding automatically warrants abandoning an entire account. Equally, a proposed repair must identify what it changes. A reconstruction gains no authority by quietly assigning its innovations to the philosopher it seeks to recover.

The conclusion is therefore neither that every contested step has become a theorem of logic nor that substantive judgment must be surrendered to an indefinitely open third layer. Hare supplies an argued route from universal practical commitment to impartial selection. The objections examined here do not defeat that route by exposing the insufficiency of components he never offered as the whole method. Where the route requires further defense, its location is now visible.

The public significance is concrete. A beneficiary cannot vindicate a policy by choosing one victim at a time for comparison. An ideal cannot claim overriding authority simply by being held with extraordinary sincerity. A speaker can correct a judgment without abandoning moral agency. And no participant acquires the right to stop the inquiry merely because the next step threatens a preferred conclusion.

Recovering Hare means restoring that substantive ambition together with the discipline needed to pursue it. We have to explain what judgment requires, follow the interests represented into the decision, and answer the objections at the point where they bear. The final chapters ask what this demands of nonbiological minds and of institutions charged with preserving moral knowledge. They begin from an argument to develop and use, not from the consolation that, after everything important has been conceded, consistency remains respectable.

Notes

1. R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), especially chs. 5–10. The distinctions developed here concern the complete mature argument, rather than universalizability in isolation.

2. Hare, The Language of Morals, chs. 2–3, especially §2.5, p. 28, on mixed imperative–indicative inference. The door and harm examples in the text illustrate the distinction; the analysis of its relation to rival accounts of moral meaning is our argument.

3. R. M. Hare, “Meaning and Speech Acts,” The Philosophical Review 79, no. 1 (1970): 3–24, especially 20–23. Hare distinguishes mood from subscription and narrows his use of “neustic” accordingly. The account is presented as a response to the embedding problem, not as a claim that every later challenge to expressivist logic has thereby been answered. https://www.ditext.com/hare/1970a.pdf.

4. Hare, Moral Thinking, §1.6 and ch. 3; Freedom and Reason, chs. 4–5, on prescriptivity and weakness of will. On the distinct externalist account, see David O. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 3. The separation of an acting agent’s justification from a patient’s duty to cooperate is our clarification, not a claim to have established a general permission to resist justified treatment.

5. The notation J(A; R, i) and reassignment πi are introduced by this chapter. They are not quoted from Hare. Compare Hare, Freedom and Reason, chs. 2–3 and 6; Moral Thinking, ch. 6, “Universalization,” 107–116. The formula expresses an invariance constraint only; neither cardinal comparability nor aggregation is encoded as its logical consequence.

6. Hare, Moral Thinking, ch. 5, especially 94–99; Allan Gibbard, “Hare’s Analysis of ‘Ought’ and Its Implications,” in Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking, ed. Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 57–72, at 60, for the name Conditional Reflection. The present account continues the distinctions in revised Chapter 7. It does not identify representation with reaching a utilitarian verdict or treat a prospective-pain illustration as a complete demonstration of the conceptual claim.

7. R. M. Hare, “Some Reasoning about Preferences: A Response to Essays by Persson, Feldman, and Schueler,” Ethics 95, no. 1 (1984): 81–85, especially 81–83 on competing preferences and 84–85 on universal prescription across actual and hypothetical cases. This is the 1984 reply, not the 1989 response to Persson’s later summation objection. https://doi.org/10.1086/292601.

8. Wlodek Rabinowicz, “Preference Utilitarianism by Way of Preference Change?,” in Preference Change: Approaches from Philosophy, Economics and Psychology, ed. Till Grüne-Yanoff and Sven Ove Hansson (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 185–206, especially §§1–2 and 4–5. The separately paginated repository manuscript is used here: pp. 5–7 on the no-conflict and multilateral objections; pp. 12–16 on distance measures and simultaneous extrapolation. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2593-7_9. The earlier exchange includes Ingmar Persson, “Universalizability and the Summing of Desires,” Theoria 55, no. 3 (1989): 159–170, and Hare’s reply, 171–177. The present discussion assesses Rabinowicz’s reconstruction; it does not quote or claim a direct new adjudication of the unread 1989 reply.

9. Daniel Y. Elstein, Prescriptions and Universalizability: A Defence of Harean Ethical Theory (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge; title page dated July 2013), §4.1, especially 166–168. Elstein identifies the proposal as a reconstruction in n. 169, p. 166, and explains the treatment of conditional preferences as moral reasons at p. 168. Some catalogues date the degree to 2014; the date here follows the consulted manuscript’s title page. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.6173. Our subsequent argument about identity-invariant practical force is a defense to assess, not an attribution of an additional passage to Elstein.

10. R. M. Hare, “How to Decide Moral Questions Rationally,” Crítica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 18, no. 54 (1986): 63–81, especially 73–76; “Comments,” in Seanor and Fotion, Hare and Critics, 220–221. The 1986 exposition was directly consulted. The 1988 locators and account of the insufficient-reason defense are inherited from the project’s source-checking record. Stating Hare’s proportional rule identifies the position defended; it is not by itself a derivation of that rule. https://critica.filosoficas.unam.mx/index.php/critica/article/view/633.

11. The explicit combining rationale, notation, and controlled executive comparison are our reconstruction. Its assumptions include a fixed affected population, independently represented contributions, and interpersonally comparable cardinal differences. Multiplying all differences by the same positive constant leaves the ranking unchanged; applying different multipliers to different persons does not. Interactions must be represented rather than falsely classified as independent, and ranking options within a changing population raises further questions not settled by this fixed-population illustration. Compare Hare, Moral Thinking, ch. 7, “Interpersonal Comparison,” 117–129.

12. The cyclic example is our own calculation. For A = (2, 0, 1), B = (1, 2, 0), and C = (0, 1, 2), the respective difference vectors are (1, −2, 1), (1, 1, −2), and (−2, 1, 1); signed cubes sum to −6 in every comparison. Signed squares sum to −2 in each. Comparing sums of transformed absolute levels is a different procedure and need not cycle. These rules must also be distinguished from squaring distances to a common preference value in a minimum-change reconstruction. None of these observations constitutes a uniqueness theorem for utilitarian aggregation.

13. Hare, Moral Thinking, ch. 10, especially 170–182; “Comments,” in Hare and Critics, 229–234, especially 233–234. Compare Freedom and Reason, ch. 9, for the earlier discussion. The mature distinction and its conditional form follow the source account retained in revised Chapters 1 and 2 and the project’s audit; the original book passages were not newly verified in full for this chapter. The argument concerns the collective opposing preferences, not merely a comparison with one victim.

14. Hare, “Comments,” 230–234; “A Utilitarian Approach,” in A Companion to Bioethics, 2nd ed., ed. Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 85–90, at 86. The latter date identifies the consulted reprint, not a posthumous new composition. The later text favors excluding the external preferences it defines; this does not establish that every malicious preference, or every preference concerning another person’s life, is excluded by that definition. It is not presented as a completed answer to all admissibility objections.

15. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), especially §§11–14 and 39; T. M. Scanlon, “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 103–128; What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), chs. 4–5. See also Scanlon, “Levels of Moral Thinking,” in Hare and Critics, 129–146, and Hare’s “Comments,” 260–268. The supplied chapter identifies Hare’s convergence claim at p. 264; the complete exchange has not been newly checked here, so that claim is not used as a demonstrated equivalence between the theories.

16. T. M. Scanlon, “Contractualism and Intuitionism,” unpublished paper circulated for the New York University Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy, October 2025, especially 41–54; the withdrawal of the strictly bilateral restriction is at 50, and the relevance account at 51–54. Scanlon identifies the original Transmitter Room case in What We Owe to Each Other, 235, in his n. 71 at 51. The chapter’s numerical version is an adaptation, not a transcription of that book page. https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/2025-09/T.%20M.%20Scanlon%2C%20Contractualism%20and%20Intuitionism.pdf.

17. R. M. Hare, “Moral Conflicts,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 1 (1980), 171–193, especially 182–185; delivered October 5, 1978. The account makes intuitive and critical thought functions within one theory, not competing sources of ultimate authority. The discussion of actual rescue rules and idealized comparisons in this chapter is our application of that distinction. https://www.ditext.com/hare/1980a.pdf.