Abstract
I have dedicated Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of this book to the evaluation of R. M. Hare’s moral theory, and, in particular, to his attempts to repair what he saw as the irrationalist defects of emotivism. The evaluation focuses on the two logical properties which Hare ascribed to moral judgements, namely, prescriptivity (this chapter) and universalisability (Chapter 4), and upon the necessary roles which imagination, sympathy and decisions of principle play in what Hare referred to as ‘critical moral thinking’.
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The action-guiding function of moral judgements was something which the emotivists took largely for granted: since moral judgements express attitudes and attitudes are associated with certain patterns of behaviour, moral judgements will be associated with certain patterns of behaviour. See Ayer (AMJ 238–41) and Stevenson (FV 13).
For Hare, the terms ‘logical’ and ‘rational’ are effectively interchangeable: by ‘rational’ he generally means’ with due regard for logic and the facts’. While it may be objected that this assumed semantic equivalence begs the question ‘But is being rational simply a matter of being logical?’, the equating of ‘cognitive’ and ‘rational’ or ‘cognitive’ and ‘logical’, which the labels ‘cognitivist’ and `noncognitivist’ presuppose, begs an even more fundamental question.
As Hare later acknowledged himselft, ‘[Stevenson] said that the attitude of approval is a disposition to act in the way approved of, and to encourage others to act in the same way’ (From a draft manuscript, Tax.Emot, 1993, which Hare kindly made available to me). After Kerner, 1964, p.138.
What he also had to show is that moral judgements are a different kind of prescription from commands or orders (a matter to which we will return in the following chapter).
Hare was a student of the influential linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin. s As we have already seen in Chapter 1, this was an aspect of Stevenson’s theory which he had abandoned as early as 1950.
Something which both the emotive and Harean accounts neglect in their common emphasis upon language is the fact that many people change their moral attitudes in the light of the experiences they actually live through, and not as a consequence of linguistic interaction with other persons; be that interaction of an emotive/persuasive or rational/advisory knd.
Hare, 1972, pp.3–7. Also see Brandt, 1959, p.222.
Kerner, op. cit., pp.182–3. And it would be fair to say that Hare has not since deviated from this view. Indeed, he claimed in his second book Freedom and Reason (1963) that it is the need for such ‘decisions’ or ‘commitments’ which preserves a place for freedom in the otherwise rational foundation of our moral thinking. Much the same view is echoed in Moral Thinking (1981) where he appeals to this same ‘need for decision’ in endeavouring to extricate himself from the charge of naturalism (MT 186).
For Hare, ‘supervenience’ is ‘a feature, not just of evaluative words, properties or judgements, but of the wider class of judgements which have to have, at least in some minimal sense, reasons, grounds or explanations (Hare, 1989).
‘Initial’ in the sense of ‘foundational’. I am not suggesting he replaced this initial understanding of prescriptivity with another, I am suggesting that he built upon it. In Moral Thinking, for instance, he states that prescriptivity is [basically] a matter of tying our sincere judgements to conduct (p.21), but later supplements this by stating that moral language is prescriptive in that it is expressive of motivational states and or preferences (p.107).
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Wilks, C. (2002). Prescriptivity. In: Emotion, Truth and Meaning. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9866-8_3
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