R. M. Hare Quotes on Virtue
R. M. Hare’s The Language of Morals (1952), Freedom and Reason (1963), and the late Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (1981) gave mid-twentieth-century analytic ethics its most influential statement of universal prescriptivism. The central commitments — that moral judgments are universalizable prescriptions whose acceptance commits the speaker to the corresponding action whenever the relevantly similar conditions obtain, and that the combination of universalizability and prescriptivity supplies the formal foundation from which a substantive utilitarian normative theory can be derived — articulate a position intermediate between the early-positivist emotivism of Ayer and Stevenson and the substantive realist alternatives of Moore and the contemporary intuitionists. The framework shaped the Oxford analytic ethical tradition through Hare’s many students (notably Peter Singer, who developed the utilitarian implications) and supplied a principal philosophical target of the subsequent virtue-ethics revival.
Quotes
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Attributed to R. M. Hare:
“Moral judgements are universalizable prescriptions.”
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Attributed to R. M. Hare:
“To call something good is to commend it.”
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Attributed to R. M. Hare:
“Universalizability is the formal property of moral judgements.”
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Attributed to R. M. Hare:
“Moral education is the cultivation of universalizable preferences.”
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Attributed to R. M. Hare:
“We must be ready to prescribe to ourselves what we prescribe to others.”
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“The rules of moral reasoning are, basically, two, corresponding to the two features of moral judgment...When we are trying, in a concrete case, to decide what we ought to do, what we are looking for...is an action to which we can commit ourselves (prescriptively) but which we are at the same time prepared to accept as exemplifying a principle of action to be prescribed for others in like circumstances (universalizability)...[I]f we cannot universalize the principle, it cannot become an ‘ought’.”
Freedom and Reason , 1965, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 89-90 -
“[In the bilateral case]... if I have full knowledge of the other person's preferences, I shall myself have acquired preferences equal to his regarding what should be done to me were I in his situation ; and these are the preferences which are now conflicting with my original prescription. So we have in effect not an interpersonal conflict of preferences or prescriptions, but an intrapersonal one ;”
Moral Thinking , 1981, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 110