Abstract

R. M. Hare's two main contributions to contemporary ethical theory are his earlier analysis of the logic of moral discourse and his more recent account of moral argument. Of the two, it is the first which is both more fundamental and more viable, and the present study is a critical examination of it. Portions of that analysis, it is argued, are seriously defective and require to be recast, and two of particular importance are singled out for extended treatment. It is argued that Hare must abandon his claim that value judgments, to be action-guiding, must be held to entail imperatives, and that this claim, an important component of Hare's wider claim that value judgments are prescriptive, must be replaced by the proposal that value judgments be taken to entail "subscriptions to principle." It is also argued that Hare's prescriptivism underwrites an important assertion which Hare fails properly to acknowledge and develop, viz., that a value judgment may make reference not merely to an immediately relevant principle for choosing, but also to a number of other principles to which it is related. This segment of the present study has occasion to investigate Braithwaite's suggestion that in expressing one's subscription to a discrete moral principle, one at the same time expresses commitment to a larger set of principles which describes a way of life as a whole. Hare seeks to provide a logical foundation for his account of moral argument in his analysis of moral discourse, and it is argued that this foundation is left undisturbed by the several modifications of Hare's analysis that are proposed. The decisive defects in Hare's account of moral argument cannot be traced to Hare's analysis of the logic of moral discourse, but are instead to be located within the development of that account itself.