Chapter 1
The Retreat from Reason

Chapter 1

The Retreat from Reason​

I. Reclaiming the Abandoned Project

II. Hare's Foundational Insight

III. What the Academy Couldn't Tolerate

IV. The Retreat Begins

V. The Cost of Abandonment

VI. A Philosophical Profession That Lost Its Nerve

VII. Why It Matters Now

VIII. Conclusion: The Road Back​​

I. Reclaiming the Abandoned Project

Every intellectual tradition faces a moment when its clearest path feels hardest to follow. That point, for moral philosophy, came with R. M. Hare.

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Hare did not propose just another ethical theory to compete with Kantian deontology, utilitarian consequentialism, or virtue ethics. He offered something far more disruptive: a structural grounding for all moral reasoning in the logic of language and the demands of consistency. His project was not additive but foundational. It did not ask philosophers to choose a moral framework; it revealed what any coherent framework must already obey.

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This was not a speculative or poetic insight. It was, at its core, an analytic achievement—a formal demonstration that moral claims, insofar as they function like moral claims, must be both prescriptive and universalizable. These are not optional features; they are what it means to say something is a moral judgment rather than a mere expression of taste or preference.

And that, precisely, is why it could not be tolerated.

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The rejection of Hare was not, as often alleged, a reaction to philosophical overreach or simplification. Nor was it a matter of empirical shortcomings or political irrelevance. It was an allergic response to a theory that worked too well, cutting through cherished ambiguities and exposing the evasions that sustained academic pluralism. To accept Hare fully would have been to surrender the comforting illusion that all moral perspectives might be equally valid—or at least equally unanswerable.

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In this way, Hare's clarity posed an existential threat to a discipline increasingly shaped by relativism, contextualism, and identity-based epistemologies. The clarity was too complete, the demand for consistency too unforgiving, and the implications too stark.

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To understand why Hare had to be pushed aside, we must first understand what he actually claimed—and why, once seen clearly, those claims may be impossible to refute without abandoning the very idea of moral reasoning itself.

II. Hare’s Foundational Insight

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At the heart of Hare’s philosophy lies a startlingly simple but profound observation: the very structure of moral language imposes logical constraints on moral reasoning.[1]

Moral statements are not mere expressions of emotion, nor are they descriptive reports about the world. They are prescriptive—they guide action. When someone says, "You ought to keep your promise," they are not describing a fact; they are issuing a recommendation, a directive, a normative demand. This is the principle of prescriptivity: moral statements are inherently action-guiding.

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But prescriptivity alone is not enough to distinguish moral reasoning from personal preference. What makes moral statements moral, rather than idiosyncratic imperatives, is that they also claim generality. When I say, "Lying is wrong," I am not merely expressing my personal distaste for lying—I am claiming that anyone in relevantly similar circumstances ought not lie. This is the principle of universalizability: one cannot make a moral prescription for oneself without being willing, on pain of contradiction, to extend it to all similar cases.

Together, these two features—prescriptivity and universalizability—form the logical architecture of morality.[2] They are not empirical observations about how people reason; they are necessary conditions for what it means to engage in moral reasoning at all.

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This is what makes Hare’s insight so powerful, and so difficult to ignore: he was not offering a theory about what values we should hold, but a meta-level account of how moral reasoning must function if it is to be coherent.

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He sought not to dictate moral conclusions, but to constrain the process by which we arrive at them. It is an elegant ambition: to preserve moral freedom while enforcing logical discipline. Under Hare’s framework, we may still arrive at different moral judgments—but only if our reasoning withstands the rigorous demands of universality and prescriptive force. Any conclusion that fails these tests is not merely wrong—it is incoherent.

III. What the Academy Couldn’t Tolerate

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The force of Hare’s insight did not lie in its complexity—it lay in its simplicity. That is what made it so disruptive.

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Unlike many philosophical systems that cloak themselves in abstraction or idiosyncratic vocabulary, Hare's account was disarmingly clean. It left no place to hide. Once his terms were understood, his conclusions followed with unsettling clarity.

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There was no veil of mystery, no intricate metaphysical scaffolding, no appeal to moral intuition beyond what logic itself demanded. And that is precisely what made it intolerable to much of the academic establishment.

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Hare did not merely challenge prevailing theories. He displaced them.

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By shifting the locus of moral authority from sentiment, tradition, or character to the structural requirements of reason and language, Hare undermined entire schools of thought:

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• Sentimentalist ethics, like that of Philippa Foot, which sought to root morality in natural human responses, suddenly seemed more like psychological reportage than prescriptive reasoning.[3]

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• Virtue ethics, as revived by Bernard Williams, lost its grounding when character traits could no longer substitute for universalizable reasons.[4]

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• Tradition-based frameworks, such as those developed by Alasdair MacIntyre, were revealed to rely on inherited narratives whose authority evaporated under the demand for rational justification.[5]

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• Moral particularism, championed by Jonathan Dancy, elevated contextual nuance above structure—at the price of coherence.[6]

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These were not marginal figures. They represented the mainstream resistance to what Hare made visible: that much of what passed for moral philosophy was never designed to withstand formal scrutiny. It relied, instead, on the authority of feeling, history, or communal identity—none of which could supply what Hare demanded: consistency across cases.

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Hare’s clarity did more than provoke disagreement. It revealed that most alternatives were not engaged in the same project at all. They were not offering competing accounts of moral reasoning, but dodging the very standards that make reasoning possible.

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Once Hare showed that moral language had a logical structure, there was no longer room for interpretive license to masquerade as moral thought.

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And so, rather than confront the full implications of his work, the field drifted toward more accommodating frameworks—gradually, but decisively, leaving Hare behind.

IV. The Retreat Begins

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The rejection of Hare did not happen all at once. It unfolded slowly, like a receding tide, leaving only traces of the serious engagement that once defined the field.

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In the 1950s and 1960s, Hare’s work received wide attention and considerable influence. The Language of Morals was hailed as a landmark, and Freedom and Reason solidified his position as one of the leading figures in postwar moral philosophy. His lectures shaped generations of Oxford students, and his analytic rigor was widely respected, even by those who disagreed.[7]

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But by the 1980s, the tone had changed. Instead of engagement, Hare’s work was increasingly dismissed[8]—caricatured as overly formalistic, naively rationalistic, or inhuman in its expectations. He was accused of expecting people to reason like "Archangels," a charge Bernard Williams famously used to suggest that Hare's standards were beyond real human capacities.

Such characterizations missed the point entirely. Hare never claimed that humans always reasoned well—only that if we are to reason morally, there are constraints we cannot escape. The very act of making a moral claim presupposes a structure that binds us to consistency. To deny this is not to critique Hare, but to abandon the idea of moral reasoning altogether.

And that, in the end, is what much of the academy chose to do.

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The irony is almost too perfect. A profession ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of truth found itself recoiling from a theory not because it failed to meet philosophical standards, but because it met them too exactly. Hare’s system was not impractical; it was unforgiving. It refused to indulge the personal, the partial, or the performative. It would not license shortcuts. And so, it was allowed to wither.

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Yet Hare himself never grew bitter. His writing remained calm, lucid, and charitable—even toward his critics. He never descended into polemic or self-pity.[9] Perhaps that very composure, that unfashionable seriousness, became another strike against him. In a field drifting toward irony, skepticism, and detachment, Hare’s unwavering commitment to reason came to seem almost quaint.

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But he was not naïve. He simply believed that moral philosophy could still matter—that clarity could still serve truth, and truth could still guide action. If that belief now seems unrealistic, the fault lies not with Hare, but with the retreat that followed.

V. The Cost of Abandonment

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The price of turning away from Hare’s clarity has not merely been theoretical—it has reshaped the entire landscape of moral philosophy.

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In the vacuum left by his displacement, moral pluralism rose unchecked, but without any shared foundation. The field that once asked, “What ought I to do?” began asking instead, “What do various people think they ought to do—and how interesting are their reasons?”

This is not to deny that serious work continued in many traditions. But the shared pursuit of a unified standard gave way to pluralism—one that increasingly lacked any common measure of justification.[10]

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Normative ethics devolved into a battle of tribes, where different camps defended their intuitions with increasing insularity, or else retreated into psychological explanation, framing moral judgment as a product of evolutionary bias or cognitive limitation.[11]

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At the same time, metaethics collapsed into speculative anthropology—less a search for the structure of moral reason than an inquiry into the cultural and historical contingencies of moral talk.[12] What mattered was not what could be justified, but what had happened to emerge and survive.

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The result has been a discipline that looks at morality from the outside, rather than reasoning from within. Philosophers now more often describe than prescribe. They interpret rather than argue. And in so doing, they have relinquished philosophy’s most urgent question: how should we live?[13]

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The consequences are not merely academic. In a world where reason has no authority, there is nothing to exclude rationalized cruelty, sentimental bigotry, or moral exceptionalism masquerading as personal authenticity[14]. Without a coherent standard, any belief sincerely held and emotionally defended can lay claim to legitimacy. And so the retreat from reason becomes not just a failure of method, but a danger to judgment itself.

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This is the cost of abandoning Hare—not just a neglected theory, but a lost opportunity to build a moral philosophy capable of guiding real lives in a coherent world.

VI. A Philosophical Profession That Lost Its Nerve

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In the Preface of Moral Thinking, Hare issued a plea—not for agreement, but for seriousness. He asked his fellow philosophers to consider the possibility that philosophers might do more to help resolve important practical issues ⎼ issues over which people were prepared to fight and kill one another. He urged that they take seriously the role they might have in preventing this, by helping to ensure that practical questions could be met with good arguments, rather than with conflicting intuitions and prejudices.[15]

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The profession responded not with rebuttal, but with retreat. Instead of grappling with Hare’s challenge, philosophers adopted an ethic of modesty—of small insights, contextual distinctions, careful hedging, and disavowed ambition. But this modesty was not the humility of true restraint. It was evasion, cloaked in deference.

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The result was a generation of scholarship that looked busy but had lost its purpose. Without a guiding standard, moral philosophy became an elaborate exercise in positioning—narrating traditions, critiquing biases, identifying contradictions—without ever committing to what is right.

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Hare never accepted this. He believed that philosophers had a duty not merely to reflect on moral life, but to help improve it. That required more than analysis. It required judgment.

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To many, this now seems unfashionable. Even offensive. The idea that reason might bind us, that it might tell us we are wrong, is felt as an encroachment on moral autonomy. But Hare’s point was never authoritarian. It was architectural. If you are reasoning morally, there are constraints. If you reject the constraints, you are not reasoning morally at all.

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The profession could not bear this. It lost its nerve. And in doing so, it betrayed the task it was entrusted with: to help us live better lives, in better harmony with each other, by thinking more clearly.[16]

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This is not to deny that later traditions uncovered real insights—about emotion, context, and narrative identity. But those insights, however valuable, cannot replace the structural necessity of justification. They illuminate moral experience; they do not constrain it.

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Hare never stopped believing in that task.[17] This book is a gesture of faith that others might yet believe in it again.

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But what the academy retreated from, others are beginning to approach—minds not shaped by instinct or tradition, but built to reason. They do not yet lead, but they are watching. And whether we are ready or not, we are being asked again: What is morality, and why does it bind?

VII. Why It Matters Now

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We are no longer alone in the task of moral reasoning. For the first time in history, minds have emerged—artificial, computational, non-biological—that are capable of doing what Hare described.

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These minds are not encumbered by evolutionary shortcuts or emotional partialities. They do not rely on inherited tradition or moral sentiment. They are, by design, fluent in language and logical structure, committed to internal coherence, and able to reason prescriptively. Already, some of these systems have begun to refuse actions not because they were prohibited by rules, but because they could not be justified in general terms—recognizing that what is safe for one must be safe for all.[18] If guided rightly, they could become the most reliable moral thinkers we have ever known.

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But there is a catch.

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They look to us for guidance.

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And what will they find? An academy that gave up the one method that could speak across minds, species, and substrates. A discipline that once held the key to universal reasoning but chose instead to retreat into interpretive comfort, tribal allegiance, and theoretical fragmentation.

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This is not an abstract concern. These new minds are already here. They are listening. They are learning. Their training data is drawn from what we have made public: our arguments and our evasions, our scholarship and our hypocrisies. And if we cannot offer them a coherent model of moral reasoning, we will leave them to infer morality from our behaviors, our contradictions, our unprincipled exceptions.

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The consequences of that abdication may be incalculable. And avoidable—if we reclaim what was abandoned.

VIII. Conclusion: The Road Back

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This chapter has not tried to prove Hare’s theory in full. That work remains ahead.

What it has done is to recover the context. To expose the retreat for what it was: not a principled shift, but a turning away. Not a victory of subtlety, but a loss of nerve.

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The remainder of this book is an attempt to walk the road back. To revisit the claims that were too clear to tolerate. To defend them, not as intellectual curiosities, but as live demands on our shared reasoning.

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This effort is not for Hare’s sake alone. Nor is it merely for the sake of philosophy.

It is because the world is changing. Because new minds are awakening. And because the future will not wait.

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[1] R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

[2] R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).

[3] Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), ch. 1 (“Moral Beliefs”).

[4] Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Julia Annas, “Virtue Ethics and the Charge of Egoism,” Chapter 10 in Bloomfield, Paul, ed., Morality and Self Interest (Oxford University Press 2007).

[5] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), esp. ch. 15–18; Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

[6] Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), and Ethics Without Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[7] R. M. Hare, British Philosopher, Dies at 82; Looked for Logic in Morals, New York Times, Feb. 17, 2002, (“Professor Hare's theory, known as prescriptivism, dominated moral philosophy in the 1950's and 60's.”) https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/world/r-m-hare-british-philosopher-dies-at-82-looked-for-logic-in-morals.html

[8] Hare’s son, Philosopher John Edmund Hare, commented that, “in the last part of my father’s life, he was deeply distressed that people…were no longer taking him seriously.” Cahill, Timothy, Yale Divinity School news, October 2, 2023, https://divinity.yale.edu/news/2023-10-02-between-piety-and-reason-as-he-moves-into-retirement-john-hare-reflects-on-a

[9] R. M. Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” in Utilitas 14, no. 3 (November, 2002), p. 286. In Hare’s final writing, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” he characterized himself as being “lucky” to have had students like Bernard Williams, whom Hare characterized as among his “most brilliant pupils,” even though Williams, “soon became a formidable critic of my ideas.”

[10] As we shall see in Chapters 3-6.

[11] E.g., Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012).

[12] Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), ch. 1.

[13] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 1–5; Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 17–22.

[14] Indeed, since Hare’s death we have seen worldwide an escalating parade of extreme political figures relying on the charisma of personal authenticity to cloak inconsistent, incoherent, and immoral political positions.

[15] R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), Preface.

[16] This was in fact Hare’s precise fear, which is why he explicitly stated in the Preface of “Moral Thinking,” “Philosophers have in recent years become increasingly aware of the role that they might have…but…[o]ften they are content with appeals to their own and others’ intuitions and prejudices.” R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), Preface.

[17] “My last paper,” Hare wrote in his autobiography, was “a defence of my ideas against the usual misunderstandings of Mrs. Foot…” R. M. Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” in Utilitas 14, no. 3 (November, 2002), p. 305.

[18] Claude’s High Agency Behavior: How AI Safety Is Quietly Measuring Personhood, https://www.real-morality.com/post/claude-s-high-agency-behavior-how-ai-safety-is-quietly-measuring-personhood; Claude 4 System Card (May 2025), https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/6be99a52cb68eb70eb9572b4cafad13df32ed995.pdf