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Obituary

R.M. Hare (1919-2002)

by Piers Benn

Richard Mervyn Hare, who died on January 29th, was a prominent English moral philosopher noted for defending universal prescriptivism in ethics. He also wrote widely on applied ethics and public affairs, was the White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford for many years and then Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida. His first book, The Language of Morals (1952) attempted to show how moral concepts obey a logic that allows moral argument to be genuinely rational, even though moral predicates like ‘good’ are not fundamentally descriptive. Hare’s commitment to rationality in ethical argument, and to the indispensability of rigorous theory, was a central feature of his philosophy.

The theory of emotivism, defended in different ways by C.

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