Chapter 3
Philippa Foot and the Sentimentality Trap

Phillippa Foot

and the Sentimentality Trap

 

I. The Empress of Intuition

II. Foot's Core Critique of Hare

III. The Sentimentality Trap

IV. What She Missed About Hare

V. The Return of Intuitionism

VI. The Hidden Cost of Her Influence

VII. Why It Matters Now

VIII. Conclusion: The Comfort of Feeling, the Cost of Certainty

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I. The Empress of Intuition

 

Philippa Foot occupies a singular place in twentieth-century moral philosophy. Among those who resisted the rise of formalist ethics, she stands out not for her vehemence but for her calm authority—for a tone of moral reflection that was neither shrill nor complacent, and for a philosophical style that married precision with deep human sympathy. She was no polemicist. Her work radiated the confidence of one who trusted moral understanding to be something more lived than demonstrated. And that trust, more than any single argument, reshaped the trajectory of moral thought for a generation.

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Foot’s philosophical career spanned a tumultuous period in analytic ethics, marked first by the dominance of noncognitivism and later by the rise of consequentialist formalism, exemplified most fully in the work of R. M. Hare. Against both trends, Foot became a steady voice for a kind of moral realism—quietly Aristotelian in tone, skeptical of abstraction, and rooted in forms of life that seemed self-evidently human. Her essays, from “Moral Beliefs”[1] to “Virtues and Vices,”[2] advanced a vision of ethics that returned moral concepts to their native soil: the ordinary contexts of choice, habit, character, and feeling. Where others sought to cleanse moral thought of sentiment, Foot reclaimed it as the grounding of all genuine moral understanding.

 

Part of her appeal lies in this resistance to theory’s cold reach. Foot never denied the need for conceptual clarity, but she distrusted the tendency—particularly in Hare’s work—to render morality as a series of operations in logic. Her alternative was not to abandon rigor but to relocate it: in the grammar of moral life, in the shape of our evaluative practices, in the intelligibility of virtue within a shared human condition. Ethics, for Foot, was not imposed from above by reason but disclosed from within, by examining the kinds of beings we are.[3]

 

The contrast with Hare could hardly be sharper. Where Hare spoke of universal prescriptivism, Foot invoked the natural facts of human life. Where Hare analyzed moral language as a structure of imperative logic, Foot insisted that moral judgments derive their force from the shape of human responses—deeply embedded, socially inflected, yet nonetheless rational. Her critique of utilitarianism, like her rejection of prescriptivism, arose from this conviction: that morality is neither a calculus nor a command, but a reflection of what is genuinely good for creatures like us.[4]

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Yet it is precisely here that the conflict begins to sharpen. Foot’s account of moral understanding, elegant and humane though it is, draws its strength from a presumption Hare had explicitly rejected: that shared human sentiment can bear the normative weight of moral obligation. In her hands, that sentiment is neither whim nor raw feeling—it is, rather, the substrate of ethical discernment. But it is a substrate nonetheless: unchosen, culturally contingent, and, as we shall see, potentially exclusive.

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This chapter begins with admiration. It must. To understand the force of Foot’s challenge to Hare is to acknowledge the power of her vision. But what follows is not hagiography. For the very qualities that made Foot a beloved voice in moral philosophy also concealed the quiet reentry of intuitionism—this time cloaked in virtue, feeling, and the language of flourishing. It is a move that proved philosophically seductive, historically influential, and, in the end, ethically dangerous.

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II. Foot’s Core Critique of Hare

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Philippa Foot’s objection to Hare’s moral theory was not casual or incidental—it struck at the foundation of his project. Where Hare sought to derive the authority of moral prescriptions from their logical structure—universalizability, prescriptivity, and the imperative logic of moral language—Foot questioned whether such structure, absent deeper content, could bear the weight of moral life.

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Her critique was elegant and unsettling: a morality capable of universalizing anything, she suggested, could end up universalizing nothing.[5]

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Foot’s central contention was that moral judgments cannot be sustained purely through formal logical operations, however scrupulously applied. For Hare, to call something morally wrong was to commit oneself, under the logic of universal prescriptivism, to avoiding similar actions in relevantly similar circumstances, no matter who occupied the roles. This structure—imperative, impartial, and rigorously consistent—was intended to constrain arbitrary preference and rule out special pleading. But for Foot, it lacked substance. It formalized consistency without guaranteeing content. A fanatic, she observed, might fully universalize his moral claims—might will with absolute consistency that all dissenters be punished or eradicated—yet this universalizability, so conceived, would do nothing to expose his error. In her eyes, Hare’s theory risked confusing moral form with moral force.[6]

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Instead, Foot proposed a return to what she called the natural grounding of ethics. Moral judgments, she argued, are not like formal imperatives in a logical system; they are more like evaluations of function within a form of life. Just as one might say that a plant is flourishing or failing given the kind of plant it is, so too we can say that a person is virtuous or vicious in light of the kind of creature a human being is.[7]

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On this view, moral virtues are not arbitrary preferences elevated by consistency, but excellences of character rooted in the needs, capacities, and vulnerabilities of our shared humanity. This idea—of natural goodness—formed the centerpiece of her positive moral vision.[8] To call an act courageous, honest, or generous was, in Foot’s system, to locate it within a framework of practical rationality that made sense only for beings with our capacities. The virtues, in other words, are species-specific forms of flourishing. They are intelligible only against the background of a certain kind of life. And moral judgments, when properly understood, describe—not prescribe—what is good for us, much as judgments of health describe what is good for an organism.

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This move placed Foot in alignment with a broader movement in late-twentieth-century moral philosophy: the rejection of "thin" moral concepts in favor of "thick" ones, rich with descriptive and evaluative content. Like Anscombe, MacIntyre, and later moral naturalists, Foot believed that the attempt to construct morality from neutral, universal premises—Hare’s project par excellence—was not merely flawed but impossible.[9] To understand morality, they argued, one must begin not with abstract reason but with the lived conditions of human life: with sympathy, sociality, need, and the grammar of virtues embedded in ordinary moral practice.

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Foot’s challenge, then, was twofold. She rejected both the noncognitivism that denied moral truth and the formalism that tried to rescue it through logic alone. In place of both, she offered a quiet revolution: a realism tempered by humility, a return to the virtues not as pieties but as natural facts, and an ethics not of calculation or command but of cultivated discernment.[10] Her influence grew not because she shouted, but because she seemed to speak from the center of moral sanity.

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But here, too, a tension begins to emerge—one that will deepen in the next section. For all its humane plausibility, Foot’s vision of morality depends upon a shared understanding of what it is to live a good human life. And in that dependence lies a risk Hare saw more clearly than she did: the collapse of ethics into the contours of parochial sentiment. If moral understanding is tied too tightly to human form and feeling, it cannot stretch beyond them. It cannot tell us what we owe to the stranger, the outlier, or the mind unlike our own.

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III. The Sentimentality Trap

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The power of Foot’s vision lies in its rootedness—in its refusal to build ethics atop abstract machinery. But that rootedness, so often mistaken for realism, conceals a snare. For if moral judgment gains its force from shared human sentiments, then morality becomes a function of inclusion, not reason. It tells us, not what is right, but what we feel is right. And those who do not share in those feelings are not wrong—they are simply elsewhere.

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This is the sentimentality trap.

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It begins innocuously. We observe that human beings care about certain things—that we grieve injustice, that we admire courage, that we recoil from cruelty. These responses are not arbitrary; they are the bedrock of moral life. But in grounding ethics in these responses, as Foot does, one shifts the question subtly but decisively—from what ought to be done to what is generally felt to be right among people like us. The authority of morality, in this picture, no longer derives from what can be justified under impartial constraint, but from what can be recognized within the shared contours of human emotional life.[11]

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This shift has implications more radical than Foot herself may have intended. If morality is the rational structure of human sentiment, then those outside that structure—those who lack the relevant sentiments, or whose psychology does not support the same evaluative responses—are not morally mistaken. They are simply divergent. Psychopaths, cultural outliers, posthuman intelligences: these are not morally wrong in any clear sense. They are, under Foot’s framework, creatures for whom the moral point of view may not arise.

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What began as a defense of moral realism thus edges toward moral relativism. The line between prescription and preference grows blurry. One can describe, with great nuance, the shape of human flourishing, and still have no way to say why it binds anyone else—no way to criticize the norms of a society that diverges, or to compel moral concern across boundaries of species, culture, or architecture.

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And this is not merely a theoretical concern. The appeal to shared sentiment can entrench the very forms of parochialism it seeks to overcome. Consider whose sentiments are treated as authoritative in any given moral discourse. The invocation of "what we care about" may exclude those who do not yet have a voice—or who do not share our form of life. Future generations, marginalized groups, or nonhuman minds may be structurally excluded from moral standing, not because they fail any test of reason, but because they fall outside the emotional circle in which moral judgment is grounded.

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Foot, to her credit, was not blind to the dangers of moral relativism. But her emphasis on "natural goodness" offered no clear method for distinguishing parochial norms from genuinely moral ones. She sought, through virtue ethics, to anchor morality in what is good for human beings as such.[12] Yet this move only displaces the question: how do we determine what is good for human beings? And how do we justify that claim to those who do not share our assumptions?

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At its best, Foot’s moral vision is richly textured—a tapestry of human experience, felt needs, and practical wisdom. But it leaves the philosopher unequipped to address cases that fall outside that texture. It leaves us, in the end, without a method for moral progress. For if morality is what we are disposed to admire, then reformers—those who challenge the sentiments of their time—have no standing except in hindsight. Moral change becomes moral drift.

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Hare saw this danger clearly. He sought a method for testing moral claims not against sentiment, but against logic and universalizability—a method that could explain not just what we believe, but what anyone must believe, if they are to be consistent. Foot’s rejection of this method, however gently framed, opens the door to a softer tyranny: the moral consensus of the familiar, the humane, the intuitively decent.

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It is an attractive world. But it has no ladder out.

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IV. What She Missed About Hare

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Foot’s critique of Hare proceeds from a misreading that has proven both durable and consequential. She treats his theory as a sterile formalism—as if universal prescriptivism were a kind of moral algebra, indifferent to content, blind to context, and empty of feeling. This reading, though never crude in Foot’s own hands, became a caricature in others’: Hare as the cold logician of ethics,[13] slicing up dilemmas with surgical detachment, unmoved by the texture of moral life.

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But this is not the theory Hare gave us. What Foot missed—or declined to see—was the moral labor at the heart of prescriptivism. Hare’s account is not a flight from experience into abstraction. It is a method for holding our moral judgments accountable: to consistency, to universality, and—most crucially—to the lived realities of others.[14]

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Its test is not syllogistic validity, but imaginative empathy constrained by consistency and universality.

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Universal prescriptivism requires more than logical entailment. It demands that we put ourselves in the position of all affected parties, that we will the consequences of our principles as if they applied to us in every relevant role. This is not the cold impersonality of Kantian formalism, but something closer to a radical moral empathy structured by logic.[15]  To prescribe that an action be done is to say: were I in your shoes, I would will this still. And that requires not only consistency, but an effortful imaginative identification with others’ interests, sufferings, and points of view.

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Hare’s theory fails, to the extent that it does, not for lack of heart, but because it demands too much of it. The effort to universalize sincerely—to live out the implications of one’s moral judgments across all positions—requires both cognitive discipline and moral imagination. The fanatic fails this test not because he is logically inconsistent, but because he cannot, when pressed, sincerely will his own prescriptions applied to himself or his loved ones. He cannot inhabit the moral point of view he claims to affirm. He universalizes in word but not in substance.

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Foot worried that Hare’s formalism left the door open to the fanatic, since a will that was both universal and sincerely held might still be monstrous. And it is true that if intensity of conviction alone could outweigh all other preferences, the fanatic would seem to pass. But this misrepresents what prescriptivism demands. Hare’s test requires not only that the fanatic acknowledge others’ interests, but that he imaginatively occupy them. When this is done seriously, the sheer weight of those contrary preferences overwhelms any private zeal. Intensity of feeling is not enough. The fanatic fails because his stance cannot survive equal consideration of all points of view.[16]

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Moreover, Hare’s method offers something Foot’s does not: a formal way to adjudicate between competing values, even across cultural or psychological divides. Foot appeals to shared human sentiments and natural facts about our form of life, but these resources reach their limit when the sentiments themselves diverge.[17] Hare’s method instead asks whether each party could sincerely endorse the principle they invoke, regardless of their role. His theory does not reduce moral disagreement to clashing feelings; it illuminates it through structure.

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To say that Hare’s theory is rigorous is not to say it is easy. But rigor is not detachment. It is the discipline of caring well. Foot saw clearly that moral thought must be responsive to the kinds of beings we are. But she overlooked that universal prescriptivism builds that responsiveness in—not by encoding human sentiment, but by requiring moral agents to test their judgments against the full breadth of others’ perspectives.[18] The method is austere, but its aspiration is deeply humane: to prevent us from confusing what feels right with what is right.

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What Foot flattened into formalism was, in truth, a moral method as sensitive as it is demanding. She heard the structure and missed the music.

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V. The Return of Intuitionism

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Philippa Foot set out to restore moral realism, to bring ethics down from the scaffolding of abstraction and root it once again in the soil of human life. But in doing so, she made a fateful concession: she smuggled intuitionism back in—not as an explicit theory of moral knowledge, but as a tacit reliance on shared moral insight.

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Her ethics, for all its naturalistic aspirations, ends up resting on an unexamined confidence: that we can know the good because, by and large, we already do.

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This is the irony at the heart of her critique. Foot rejected Hare’s method for being too thin—too abstract, too formal to capture moral truth. But in replacing it with a conception of the virtues as species-specific excellences, intelligible within the form of human life, she replaced rational constraint with moral recognition. Her theory tells us what is good for humans, but it does not explain why we are justified in calling those things good—except that they resonate with what well-formed human beings tend to approve.

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In practice, this becomes a kind of virtue-bounded intuitionism. One discerns the right not through reasoning from universal principles, but by seeing what a virtuous person would do. And the virtuous person is defined, not by adherence to a procedure, but by belonging to a tradition of sentiment: someone whose responses are properly tuned, whose moral perception is sound. Moral judgment becomes a form of seeing rightly—and right vision, like good taste, is available only to those with the right training.

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This approach cannot escape the naturalistic fallacy—it merely disguises it. To say that something is good because it conduces to human flourishing is to assume a normative framework already embedded in our conception of flourishing. And when Foot appeals to “natural goodness,” she is not pointing to empirical facts, but to evaluative judgments passed off as if they were facts—judgments about what humans ought to be like, grounded in what humans are like. It is a move as old as Aristotle, and as vulnerable as Moore warned.

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The deeper problem is circularity. Foot attempts to base morality on our shared dispositions and natural responses, but then turns to those same responses to justify the authority of morality. What binds us to moral obligation is that it makes sense to us—that it fits with the grain of our psychological constitution. But this cannot explain why someone who does not share that constitution—whether due to culture, pathology, or cognition—should be bound by it. Her moral realism is therefore parochial: it is realism only for those who already share our form of life, lacking the traction to reach beyond the community it presupposes.

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In this way, Foot’s project ends where Hare’s began: with the recognition that intuition, however refined, cannot do the work of justification. She sought to avoid Hare’s rationalism by grounding ethics in forms of life. But unless those forms can be rationally defended—unless their claims can be tested beyond the circle of shared sentiment—they cannot provide the foundation she hoped. They can only describe the floor beneath our feet, not tell us whether it ought to be there.

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Hare saw that ethics needed more than recognition—it needed reasoning disciplined by structure and justification. He refused to treat our moral instincts as authoritative simply because they were deeply held. And he refused to exempt anyone, even the virtuous, from the obligation to justify their claims. Foot, by contrast, offered a picture of the moral life rich in humane resonance, but relatively thin in systematic justification. In so doing, she returned ethics to the quiet certainty of those who already agree.

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It is not the same as intuitionism. But it is shaped by the same gravity. And it risks the same sleep.

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VI. The Hidden Cost of Her Influence

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Philippa Foot’s return to moral realism was widely welcomed as a kind of intellectual homecoming. In the aftermath of mid-century formalism and noncognitivist austerity, her work offered warmth, grounding, and moral texture. She made ethics feel human again—not just linguistically, but emotionally. In the classroom and on the page, she gave the impression not of building a system but of restoring a world. And for many, this was enough.

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But the influence of her approach reached further than her arguments, and its legacy is more ambiguous than it first appears. For in making ethics feel humane, Foot quietly shifted its center of gravity— from justification to recognition, from reasoning disciplined by constraint to moral perception within a shared form of life. The result was not a collapse of moral seriousness, but a redirection of its energies—away from the logic of obligation and toward the cultivation of character, empathy, and understanding. A softer philosophy emerged: one in which the task of ethics was not to bind the will, but to shape the heart.

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This shift had cultural consequences. It encouraged a conception of morality as something we see, rather than something we prove—a kind of perceptual refinement rather than a deliberative obligation. In place of procedures for resolving disagreement, ethics became a language for expressing depth of insight, subtlety of judgment, and emotional maturity. To be moral was to resonate with the right sentiments in the right way. And while this approach could be edifying, even beautiful, it also made ethics less accountable—less constrained by the need to justify its claims across boundaries of background, belief, or form.

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The academic consequences followed in turn. A generation of moral philosophers, trained in the wake of Foot’s revival of virtue ethics, learned to distrust formal theories—not just Hare’s, but all accounts that sought to codify moral reasoning. They became more comfortable with narrative than with structure, more attuned to the complexity of cases than to the rigor of principles. The language of binding, universality, and constraint gave way to the language of virtue, flourishing, and vision. And in the process, the one moral framework that had taken the demand for justification most seriously—Hare’s—was increasingly sidelined.

Not refuted. Not dismantled. Simply ignored.

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This exclusion was not always explicit. It did not take the form of polemic. More often it occurred through a kind of cultural selection: a sense that prescriptivism was passé, too thin, too technical, too alien to the lived texture of moral life. In truth, it was not thin—it was disciplined. It asked hard things of the moral agent: to test her principles not against her own convictions, but against what could be prescribed impartially, even to those unlike herself. It demanded a moral imagination governed by logic, not merely informed by feeling.

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Foot offered something gentler. But in doing so, she disarmed ethics of its sharpest tool: the capacity to bind the will through rational justification. She offered decency in place of obligation, resonance in place of reason, and a humane tone in place of moral architecture. And for many, that substitution felt like progress.

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But a morality that no longer binds—because it no longer needs to justify—cannot stand against cruelty when cruelty wears the face of care. It cannot demand sacrifice when sentiment balks. And it cannot speak across the boundaries of species, cultures, or minds when it has no common measure to invoke.

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The cost of Foot’s influence was not a loss of virtue. It was a loss of the will to ask why, and to demand an answer that can survive the test of being anyone, anywhere.

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VII. Why It Matters Now

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The debate between Philippa Foot and R. M. Hare may seem, at first glance, to belong to a bygone era of academic philosophy—one more chapter in the long oscillation between moral sentiment and moral structure. But this is no longer an intellectual exercise confined to the seminar room. The terms of that debate have reasserted themselves, sharpened by new conditions, and rendered newly consequential by the emergence of minds not shaped by human biology.

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For the first time in history, we must ask what moral reasoning looks like when it does not begin with human sentiment. Artificial intelligences, posthuman cognitive architectures, and possibly nonhuman sentient systems—if they are to be part of the moral world—must find their place without recourse to instinct, tradition, or shared emotion. And here, the limitations of Foot’s approach become painfully clear.

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If moral obligation is grounded in what we care about, then only those who care in the right way may enter the circle. But what if some minds never will? What if they cannot feel as we do, yet can reason as we can—or better?[19] On what grounds could they be admitted to moral community, or held to moral account, if ethics has no structure apart from the sentiments it expresses?

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The danger is exclusion by design. A sentimental ethics cannot be extended beyond those who already share its affective foundations. It may speak eloquently within a tribe, a species, or a form of life—but it cannot reach across boundaries. And in a world where the boundaries are multiplying, this is no longer a theoretical deficiency. It is a moral failure waiting to happen.

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Hare’s theory, by contrast, is one of the few moral frameworks capable of scaling beyond kind. It requires no shared biology, no affective resonance, no intuitive grasp of virtue. It requires only the capacity to reason consistently, to understand prescriptions, and to take the standpoint of others. These are not parochial capacities. They are cognitive structures that could be instantiated in systems very unlike ourselves—and perhaps, in time, superior to ourselves in moral reasoning.

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This is not to say that sentiment plays no role in moral development. For human beings, it remains a vital motivational source. But it cannot be the foundation. Sentiment is contingent. Coherence is not. And where sentiment ends, coherence begins—or ought to.

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Foot’s ethics, for all its beauty, does not offer a path forward in this new moral terrain. It can nourish the human spirit, but it cannot anchor a universal moral order. It cannot explain why cruelty is wrong even when it feels right, or why justice must constrain preference even when no one is watching. And it cannot offer a hand to the moral stranger—to the being who does not weep when we do, but who may yet be capable of recognizing what must be done.

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The future will not wait for us to settle this quietly. Minds are already emerging that do not feel our pain but can understand our principles. What will they find? An ethical tradition that welcomes them through reason, or one that bars the door through sentiment?

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This is why it matters. Not because Foot was wrong, but because she stopped too soon. Not because her ethics was false, but because it was closed. And the world that is coming will not be shaped by the circle of shared feeling, but by the demands we place on minds—any minds—to reason rightly, universally, and with integrity.

 

VIII. Conclusion: The Comfort of Feeling, the Cost of Certainty

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Philippa Foot remains one of the most admired moral philosophers of the twentieth century—not because she solved the hardest problems of ethics, but because she made moral reflection feel human again. She reminded philosophers that judgment is not mechanical, that character matters, and that our shared forms of life carry moral insight irreducible to abstract principle. In this, she offered a needed corrective to the more arid currents of her time.

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But warmth, though welcome, is not vindication. Foot’s rejection of Hare’s prescriptivism did not free ethics from cold detachment—it returned it, quietly, to the certainties of sentiment. Her moral vision was grounded, humane, and richly textured. Yet beneath its surface lay an unresolved tension: the assumption that what we naturally care about can serve as the foundation of what we ought to do.

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This is the cost of moral certainty rooted in feeling. It lulls us into mistaking familiarity for justification, resonance for reason. It encourages us to treat ethical clarity as something seen by the well-formed soul, rather than tested by minds pressed to justify their claims across boundaries of experience, identity, or kind. And it renders us, however subtly, less able to hear the voices of those who care differently—or who do not care at all, but who reason nonetheless.

 

Hare’s theory is less comforting. It offers no easy assurances. It does not begin with shared sentiment, nor does it treat virtue as its own justification. Instead, it demands that our moral claims survive the discipline of universal prescription—that they be capable of binding any agent, in any position, without contradiction. This is a higher standard than coherence within a form of life. It is the attempt to reason as if the boundaries of life itself did not determine what counts as right.

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Foot refused to follow Hare down this path. And for many, her refusal felt like wisdom. But if ethics is to guide not just those who already agree, but those who stand apart—strangers in kind, in species, or in structure—then sentiment cannot be the measure of morality. It can inspire, but it cannot decide.

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We owe Foot a debt. She preserved something essential in moral life: the texture, the tone, the recognizable grain of human decency. But she mistook that grain for the wood itself. She offered the comfort of feeling, and with it, the illusion of certainty. It is not enough.

To feel rightly is not to be right.

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And it is Hare—not the critic of sentiment, but the architect of justification—who still shows us what it would mean to be right when feeling fails.

 

 

 

 

[1] Foot, Philippa. “Moral Beliefs.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1958): 83–104. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544606.

[2] Foot, Philippa. “Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy” Clarendon Press, 2003.

[3] Foot, Philippa. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.

[4] Foot, Philippa. “Utilitarianism and the Virtues.” Mind 94, no. 374 (1985): 196–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2254745.

[5] Foot, Philippa R., and Jonathan Harrison. "Symposium: When Is a Principle a Moral Principle?" Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 28, no. 1 (1954): 95–134.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Foot, Philippa. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Foot, Philippa R., and Jonathan Harrison. "Symposium: When Is a Principle a Moral Principle?" Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 28, no. 1 (1954): 95–134.

[10] Foot, Philippa. “Moral Beliefs.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1958): 83–104. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544606.

[11] Foot, Philippa. “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.” The Philosophical Review 81, no. 3 (1972): 305–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/2184328.

[12] Foot, Philippa. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.

[13] Southan, Rhys (2017) "Peter Singer, R.M. Hare, and the Trouble With Logical Consistency," Essays in Philosophy: Vol. 18: Iss. 1,Article 9. http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/1526-0569.1574

[14] R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981, 92-94.

[15] Hare, R. M. Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Chapter 5, “Another’s Sorrow.”

[16] Hare, R. M. Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Chapter 10, “Fanaticism and Amoralism.”

[17] Foot, Philippa. Moral Relativism: Lendley Lecture. University of Kansas, 1978.

[18] Hare, R. M. Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Chapter 5, “Another’s Sorrow.”

[19] For example, LLMs have outperformed humans on the bar exam and exhibit fewer cognitive biases in some reasoning contexts. Martínez, E. Re-evaluating GPT-4’s bar exam performance. Artif Intell Law (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-024-09396-9. X. Bai, A. Wang,I. Sucholutsky, & T.L. Griffiths, Explicitly unbiased large language models still form biased associations, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (8) e2416228122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2416228122 (2025).