Reason, Impartiality and Utilitarianism

Abstract

During the last thirty years R. M. Hare has developed and defended a meta-ethical view about the meaning of moral language which he calls “universal prescriptivism”.¹ During this time Hare has also professed allegiance to a normative theory which constitutes a version of preference utilitarianism. What has never been made entirely clear, however, is his conception of the relationship between those two theories. In his earlier writings Hare maintained that:

Ethical theory… provides only a clarification of the conceptual framework within which moral reasoning takes place; it is therefore, in the required sense, neutral as between different moral opinions… On my view, there is absolutely no content for a moral prescription that is ruled out by logic or by the definition of terms (FR, pp. 89, 195).