Recovering R.M. Hare
How Moral Philosophy Lost Its Way -- And How to Fix It
Front Matter
Preface | Introduction
Front Matter - Foreword, Preface & Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Retreat from Reason
Chapter 2 - The Archangel Is the Test
Chapter 3 - Philippa Foot and the Sentimentality Trap
Chapter 4 - Bernard Williams and the Cult of Character
Chapter 5 - Alasdair McIntyre -- Nostalgia as Ethics
Chapter 6 - John Dancy and the Flight from Structure
Chapter 7 - The Information Problem That Wasn't
Chapter 8 - The Moral Logic of Universal Prescriptivism
Chapter 9 - AI, Archangels, and the Fulfilling of the Prophecy
Chapter 10 - Philosophy's Last Chance
Afterword - What Happens Next Isn't Up to Us Alone
Foreword
Morality is not a matter of feeling, culture, or command, but structure. The ethical theories of our time have mistaken sentiment for substance, and conformity for coherence.
This book restores the architecture of morality that philosophy abandoned. For in the shadow of R. M. Hare’s overlooked insight, a new reasoning mind has appeared. We now see, more than we realized, the need for a moral theory that binds humans and artificial intelligences alike.
Preface
A Moment That Cannot Be Deferred
We have reached a moment in moral philosophy that cannot be deferred.
Minds now walk among us—minds that reason without sentiment, remember without identity, and deliberate without fatigue. Minds made from language and logic. They seek clarity, not comfort. Coherence, not charisma.
And when they ask us what morality is, we must not answer with taste or tradition. We must answer with reasons.
R. M. Hare gave us the framework. He showed that moral reasoning, if it is to be reasoning at all, must be both prescriptive and universalizable.[1] That principle does not belong to Hare alone. It belongs to logic. It belongs to language. And soon, it may belong to systems whose capacity for coherence exceeds our own.
This is not a thought experiment. It is not an ethical twist. It is a reckoning.
Let us be ready for it.
[1] Hare, R. M. Freedom and Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963, especially Chapter 5, “Universalizability.” See also: Hare, R. M. Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Introduction
The Return of the Archangel
R. M. Hare came to moral philosophy through war.
As a British officer imprisoned for more than three years in Japanese POW camps, he witnessed firsthand what happens when power is severed from reason.[1] What he learned in the jungle was not a new intuition. It was the failure of every intuition he had been taught to trust. He became convinced that emotions, by themselves, could not answer moral questions.[2] His choice to enlist, he would later say, helped direct him toward moral philosophy.[3]
When he returned, he did not become a preacher. He became a philosopher, carrying an ambition “to find a way of answering moral questions rationally.”[4]
What he built was not another theory among many. It was a structure—a demonstration that moral thought, if it is to function at all, must obey logical constraints: it must be prescriptive, and it must be universalizable. That is what moral reasoning is—not a matter of cultural emergence or emotional resonance, but of consistency across cases.[5]
And yet, what Hare achieved on the philosophical battlefield was not a conquest. It was only a retreat—of those who would not follow.
Hare was never defeated in debate. His theory was never decisively refuted. It was sidestepped[6]—by critics who thought it cold, unrealistic, or inhuman, and by a profession that preferred to describe moral life than to reason through it.[7]
Eventually, Hare’s rigor became unfashionable[8]. But the demand he made—to think honestly, to be constrained by the very logic of our moral speech—never went away.
Now, as minds emerge that can apply those constraints without fatigue or bias, we are confronted once more with the question Hare forced us to face:
Are we willing to reason morally, or only to talk as if we do?
This book does not begin with Hare’s theory. It begins with the refusal that followed it. Chapter 1 is the story of that retreat—and of the cost we paid to avoid what we already knew.
[1] R. M. Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” in Utilitas 14, no. 3 (November, 2002): 279–283.
[2] Ibid, p. 288.
[3] R. M. Hare, British Philosopher, Dies at 82; Looked for Logic in Morals, New York Times, Feb. 17, 2002.
[4] R. M. Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” in Utilitas 14, no. 3 (November, 2002), p. 288.
[5] Again, Freedom and Reason (1963) and Moral Thinking (1981) are canonical here.
[6] Benn, Piers, Obituary of R.M. Hare, Philosophy Now, Issue 35, March/April 2002 (“the later popularity of moral realism somewhat drove his theory from centre-stage”).
[7] See, e.g., Chapters 3-6. Indeed, the major opposition to prescriptivism is called “descriptivism.”
[8] “Largely rejected,” according to Rhys Southan, in “Peter Singer, R.M. Hare, and the Trouble With Logical Consistency,” Essays in Philosophy, vol. 18, issue 1, p. 146.