R. M. Hare 1919 – 2002

Richard Mervyn Hare was a British analytic moral philosopher and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. After captivity in the Far East during the Second World War, he returned to develop a distinctive metaethical position known as universal prescriptivism, according to which moral judgements are universalizable imperatives. His The Language of Morals, Freedom and Reason, and Moral Thinking shaped post-war analytic ethics by combining a careful logical analysis of moral language with a substantive moral theory of two-level utilitarianism. He taught generations of moral philosophers, including Peter Singer.