Richard M. Hare

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Richard Mervyn Hare , often called RM Hare for short (born March 21, 1919 in Backwell , Somerset ; † January 29, 2002 in Ewelme , Oxfordshire ), was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1966 to 1983 at Oxford University . His metaethical theories were particularly influential in the second half of the 20th century.

Some of Hare's disciples, such as Brian McGuiness and Bernard Williams , also later became great philosophers. Perhaps the best known among them outside of philosophical circles is Peter Singer . Singer became known, among other things, for his work on the moral rights of animals, in which he explicitly takes up and further develops many of the positions and theses of his teacher Hare.

biography

Richard M. Hare was born on March 21, 1919 in Backwell, Somerset . He attended rugby school in Warwickshire and from 1937 then Balliol College in Oxford , where he studied the great classics intensively. Although pacifist , he volunteered with the Royal Artillery. In 1942 he was captured by the Japanese and then remained a prisoner of war until the end of World War II . This experience had a lasting influence on Hare's philosophical views, in particular on his thesis that moral philosophy has the task of supporting man in his life as a moral being (King (2004)). His first philosophical work, which was never published, dates from this period. In it he tries to develop a system that can serve as a guide through life even under the most adverse circumstances.

After the war he returned to Oxford and married Catherine Verney in 1947. Her marriage resulted in a son and three daughters (the son, John Hare, is also a philosopher). From 1947 to 2002 he was an elected fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Balliol College, where he was also an honorary fellow from 1974 to 2002 . In 1963 he was appointed Wilde Lecturer in Natural Religion , a position he held until 1966, and eventually he taught as White Professor in Moral Philosophy at Corpus Christi College , Oxford from 1966 to 1983 . In 1983 he left Oxford to teach as Graduate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida , a position he held until 1994. In 1964, Hare was elected to the British Academy and in 1975 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

He died on January 29, 2002 in Ewelme, Oxfordshire after a series of strokes .

Influences

Hare was strongly influenced by the then influential emotivism A. J. Ayers and Charles L. Stevensons , furthermore by the philosophy of normal language, which was essentially founded by JL Austin and the late Wittgenstein . In the field of moral philosophy, utilitarianism and the practical philosophy of Immanuel Kant can still be seen as essential models. He has also said he valued Leonard Nelson's writings on ethics .

RM Hare advocated the thesis that ethical rules cannot be based on the principle of utility alone, although he himself incorporated utilitarian considerations into his own approach. This sets him apart from classic utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill . In fact, Hare was arguably as much a Kantian as he was a utilitarian, a view that he himself affirms in his book Sorting out Ethics .

Universal prescriptivism

In a number of works, notably The Language of Morals, Freedom and Reason and Moral Thinking, Hare developed his own moral theory, which he termed Universal Prescriptivism. According to this, moral concepts such as “good”, “should” and “right” have two decisive logical or semantic properties: universality and prescriptivity . The first property leads to the fact that, in moral judgments, the situation dealt with therein can be identified with a finite set of universal concepts. The proper names occurring in them are omitted , but not identifications . The second property of prescriptivity means that every morally acting actor must consider himself bound by his own judgments so that he must carry them out whenever he is physically and psychologically able to do so. In other words, according to Hare, there is no point in saying “I should do X” and then failing to do so. On the one hand, this seems to explain the authority attributed to moral judgments, on the other hand, this was described by Hare's critics as one of his greatest mistakes, since the question now arises, how one then the occurrence of weakness of will (Greek akrasia ) should be able to explain.

Hare himself recognized that the combination of universality with prescriptivity leads to a certain form of consequentialism , preferential utilitarianism .

An example

The following is an example of Hare's thesis:

Suppose someone needs a large amount of money and asks a friend to lend them to them. The friend refuses. The supplicant replies that it is wrong of him to refuse such a request. “Wrong” is a moral term, so it must be maintained in any comparable situation based solely on its logical properties. The first, universality, requires that the situation in which one wants to use it can only be described in terms of universal terms. In the example, the supplicant could formulate as follows:

Whenever I ask a friend for a large amount of money, it is wrong for him to refuse me.

As is easy to see, such a formulation would violate the universality requirement, since it contains the expressions “I” and “me”, which do not refer to a universal property, but rather designate an individual one. Hence the next attempt:

Whenever someone asks a friend for a large amount of money, it is wrong for them to refuse the request.

This new formulation now fulfills the universality requirement, since all terms that appear in it are now universal. Next, what has been said must also fulfill the second commandment, that of prescriptivity. This means that our supplicant must now determine whether he would act according to this formulation himself.

First of all, one may object here that the formulation does not apply here at all to the supplicant himself: in the example, the friend fails to help, not himself; therefore it should act according to what has been said, and not the supplicant.

Such an objection overlooks the combined effect of the two commandments on the supplicant: universality requires that the same judgment should also be made by him in (in the present case only hypothetical) situations where he is the one being asked for money; and the prescriptivity is supposed to guarantee that the same action follows from it - namely to give money to any supplicant. In other words, with the exclusion of all non-universal expressions from the judgment made, it becomes impossible for the speaker to exculpate himself from the required action with reversed roles when it is up to him to commit the view expressed in his own judgment of a duty fulfill.

If the supplicant himself were not prepared to undertake the same act against others, he would accordingly violate the rules on which the moral judgments are based and thus no longer make a moral judgment in the actual (Hareian) sense.

In order to participate in the moral discourse again, the speaker would have to change his judgment to such an extent that he would support its universalized form, ie would act in the same way in the corresponding situation. Through a series of self-tests, in which new universal formulations are constantly being created and possibly (partially) discarded because they do not meet the speaker's preferences in certain situations, ideally one arrives at a point where there are no contradictions there is more between one's own wishes and what is required in any situation. According to Hare's approach, one would then be able to make a moral judgment.

The importance of the details

With his view that the consequences of an action are highly significant in the evaluation of the same, Hare deviates significantly from a position more oriented towards Kant: In some passages of his practical philosophy he gives the impression that only maxims as general as possible (à la “I want stealing ”) are subject to the test of the categorical imperative , omitting all consequences of the actions evoked thereby. According to Hare, this is absurd: Of course, it should be generally forbidden to steal from someone, but in individual cases this may very well be allowed, for example to prevent terrorists from detonating a bomb in a high-rise building. For Hare, on the contrary, it is precisely the specific situation in which our actions take place that represents the starting point for our moral considerations: All of the universalisable details that can be found in it can play an important role in their moral evaluation.

Relativism?

Hare believed that the content of our moral judgments was not truthful and that therefore morality could not be the subject of universal objectivity either. This seems at first to suggest that Hare advocated a moral relativism ; however, he emphasized that there is at least one objective yardstick by which all moral statements must be measured: logic. Even a relativist has to obey his moral convictions, if he wants to be taken morally seriously; Hare's universal prescriptivism is intended to guarantee that morality is not subject to the pattern of arbitrariness and the (changing) tastes of the individual, but can be discussed about and in it.

effect

While Hare taught and researched primarily in meta-ethics , some of his students have also used his universal prescriptivism in applied ethics. Peter Singer uses it to evaluate behavior, although, unlike Hare, it is more based on the principle of usefulness. In Germany, Georg Meggle and his students brought the work into the philosophical discussion. Bernard Williams primarily dealt critically with Hare's systematic moral philosophy.

literature

  • Anton Hügli , Poul Lübcke (Ed.): Philosophielexikon. People and concepts of occidental philosophy from antiquity to the present. Adult and full rev. (6th) edition. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-55689-0 : Hare, Richard Mevyn (representation on 2 pages with bibliography)
  • PJ King: One Hundred Philosophers. Barrons, 2004.
  • Michael Quante: Introduction to General Ethics. 4th edition. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011, ISBN 978-3-534-24595-6 , p. 51 f. (Presentation and criticism of his noncognitivism.)
  • AW Price: Richard Mervyn Price, 1919-2002 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 124 , 2004, pp. 117-137 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ the Independent in an article that is available in the Philosophy at Oxford - Obituary of RM Hare ( Memento of May 18, 2006 in the Internet Archive ).
  2. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 6, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Richard M. Hare: The Language of Morals. Translated by Petra von Morstein. Frankfurt am Main 1983.
  4. ↑ Christoph Fehige and Georg Meggle (eds.): To moral thinking. 2 volumes. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1995, ISBN 3-518-28722-2
personal data
SURNAME Hare, Richard M.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hare, Richard Mervyn; Hare, RM
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English moral philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH March 21, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Backwell , Somerset
DATE OF DEATH January 29, 2002
Place of death Ewelme , Oxfordshire