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Thinkers

R. M. Hare

Analytic · Europe · 1919 to 2002

English philosopher who held that moral claims are like commands we must be ready to apply to everyone, ourselves included.

What it is

R. M. Hare (1919 to 2002) was a British moral philosopher, born near Bristol, who became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford in 1966 and held the post until 1983. He taught afterwards at the University of Florida. His ideas about the language of morality shaped debate in the second half of the twentieth century.

His central claim is that moral judgements do not describe facts but prescribe, telling us what to do. He also held that they must be universal: if I say that something ought to be done in one case, I am committed to saying the same about every relevantly similar case, including ones where I would be the one affected. On this foundation he built a form of utilitarianism based on preferences.

The main ideas

  • Moral words prescribe. To say that an act is wrong is to tell oneself and others not to do it, not just to report a feeling or a fact.
  • Universalizability. A moral judgement has to apply to all similar cases. This rules out making an exception for oneself without a real difference between cases.
  • A middle path. He agreed with the emotivists that moral talk is not about moral facts in the world, but denied that it is only a way of manipulating feelings. Moral argument, he held, can be reasoned.
  • Preference utilitarianism. Taking every person's preferences as seriously as one's own, and weighing them equally, leads to utilitarianism built on preferences, not pleasure alone.
  • Two levels. Everyday morality can run on simple principles, the intuitive level, which are justified at the critical level by imagining a fully informed, impartial thinker.
  • Possible people. He applied his framework to people who may come to exist, with consequences for questions about population, abortion and IVF.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine you are about to push ahead in a queue and you say it is fine because you are in a hurry. Hare would ask whether you would say the same if you were the one waiting at the back, with someone in a hurry pushing in. If not, your judgement is not a moral one. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • The Language of Morals (1952) sets out his account of moral language as prescriptive.
  • Freedom and Reason (1963) develops universalizability and the argument for utilitarianism.
  • Moral Thinking (1981) presents the two levels of moral thought and his full theory.

Questions and criticism

  • A problematic logic. His attempt to ground a logic of commands and orders was innovative, but it raised difficulties about what it covers and how it works.
  • How far do preferences reach? If you must take on board everyone's preferences, it is unclear how far that goes, to preferences a person never becomes aware of, or to those of people who might exist.
  • Can reason settle it? If moral judgements prescribe and are not about facts, it is fair to ask what makes one prescription better than another.

Close neighbours

Immanuel Kant is the thinker whose idea of the universal law Hare reworked, and the pages on Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill show the utilitarian tradition he drew on. The page on A. J. Ayer shows the emotivism he took up and criticised.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Peter Singer · Singer studied under him at Oxford and called his teaching a model for how to argue in ethics.

Influenced by

  • Immanuel Kant · His test of universal rules for moral claims echoes Kant.
  • John Stuart Mill · He argued that universal rules lead toward weighing all interests, as Mill's utilitarianism does.

Other Analytic thinkers

Sources we used

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