Freedom and Reason

My position concerning the relative quality of Freedom and Reason and The Language of Morals is diametrically opposed to that of the previous reviewer. I consider this Hare's best book. And, as a matter of fact, the first part of this book summarizes the main conclusions about moral language that Hare reached in the first part of The Language of Morals. But I think this is the better presentation of Hare's position. The most important difference is that his interests here are broader: he summarizes his views about moral language, he attempts to account for moral reasoning, and he moves toward the normative ethical position he defends in Moral Thinking. The book opens with a section summarizing Hare's purely formal account of moral language. He argues that claims are moral if and only if they take the form of universalizable prescriptions. They are universalizable in that an agent must be willing to apply them to all cases that are alike in all the relevant respects. They are prescriptive in that they provide guidance about how to act and they are necessarily connected to motivation. Hare then considers a single issue--the nature of moral arguments--in the remainder of the book. This is an extended response to a problem that noncognitivists are usually alleged to face: that they rule out the possibility of any sort of rational moral debate because their views don't allow a notion of good reasons for making a moral judgment. Hare argues that he can account for the rationality of moral argument. His fundamental move is to appeal to the universalizability of moral claims, and to argue that this provides us with a way to criticize people for a sort of inconsistency. If you make a judgment about a person in one situation, then you have to make the same judgment about anyone else in a situation that is alike in all relevant respects. And, importantly, you must make the same judgment about yourself if you were in that person's situation. Hare thinks this is important since it provides us with a way to argue with people about moral issues. We can discover and remove inconsistencies in our own views and in the views of others, and this will involve a sort of rational discussion that can lead to progress. Crucially for Hare, this is supposed to be a logical feature of moral language; it is not based on some substantive moral view, but on what moral language means. How is this supposed to work? In the simplest case (i.e. a case where we're dealing with only two people), the person making the moral judgment about the other is supposed to use her powers of imagination to place herself in the position of the person she's judging. Now, these judgments are universalizable, and so they apply to everyone in the very same situation. So, in assuming she's in the situation, she would have to be willing to have the same judgment applied to herself. She would have to say about the imagined case that she would prescribe that she receive the punish