The Language of Morals

Hare describes his book as "an introduction to ethics" for beginners (p. v), but it is more ambitious than that. Prospective readers should not take the author's modest claim too seriously, for the book is not an "introduction." It is a perceptive contribution toward the solution of many fundamental problems of ethics. The book is very compact (Hare informs that the original material was reduced to half its length), and it deals with so many specific issues that the contents do not lend themselves to brief summary. This is especially true of Part II, called "Good," and Part III, called "Ought," where a wealth of illuminating material is laid out before the reader like so many pearls, with not a string on which they may be strung. But in the light of what Hare regards as "one of the chief purposes of ethical inquiry" (p. I97), which is to show how moral decisions are justified, this material, however valuable in its own right, may be regarded, for the purposes of a review, as serving a tactical purpose. Hare's strategic aims are to show that philosophers who do not believe that there is any rational justification for moral judgments have "despaired prematurely" (p. 45), and to show "how it is that moral judgments provide reasons for acting in one way rather than another" (p. I97). In Ethics and Language, C. S. Stevenson said that he sought to free the early emotive theories of Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer "from any seeming cynicism." Hare's general aim may be described as an effort to do the same thing for more sophisticated versions of the emotive theory and kindred ones. To this end, Part I, "The Imperative Mood," is, as Hare says, "the most fundamental" (p. vi), and the fourth chapter, "Decisions of Principle," is crucial. According to Hare, the function of moral judgments is to provide answers to questions of the form, "What shall I do?" Since it tells us what to do (e.g., "Do not make this false statement"), not that something is the case, a moral judgment is like a simple imperative, though not reducible to one. A moral "principle" has the force of a universal imperative (e.g., "Never make false statements"). A principle guides conduct by serving as the major premise of a practical syllogism, whose conclusion is a moral judgment, and whose minor premise is an indicative statement (e.g., "This statement is false"). Hare argues convincingly that if a moral principle were without an imperative component, one could not derive from it, together with an indicative premise, a conclusion which tells us, "Do so-and-so." A "purely factual" moral principle, therefore, would not provide, when made a premise in a practical syllogism, a reason for doing something; and the ultimate premise or "reason" for a moral judgment could not be some factual statement such as the naturalists look for. Could the ultimate premise be some self-evident moral principle? Hare argues as follows that it could not. Suppose that I am wondering, in the particular case K

I have set out in this book to write a clear, brief, and readable introduction to ethics which shall bring the beginner as directly as possible to grips with the fundamental problems of the subject. .........I shall be less disturbed if my readers disagree with me than if they fail to understand me. ...I must confess that I have learned as much from those writers with whom I may appear to disagree, as from those whom I applaud.

The Language of Morals is a central text in twentieth-century metaethics, and it should be read by everyone studying the subject. This the first step in Hare's attempt to develop a form of noncognitivism that accounts for the phenomena of ordinary moral language and argument, and it's been a major influence on all subsequent forms of noncognitivism. But the methods and concerns here are somewhat different than those of contemporary meta-ethicists. This is a text from the high tide of linguistic philosophy, and so Hare is of the opinion that metaethics has one subject--the nature and structure of moral language. The central contention of this book is that moral language should be understood as one form of prescriptive language. What is characteristic of prescriptive language is its connection to action: there is a conceptual connection between how an agent uses prescriptive language and her motives to act in certain ways. The book starts with the least complicated form of prescriptive language: the language of imperatives. In the first part Hare discusses the proper analysis of imperative language, how we can see it as meaningful, how we can reason about imperatives, how imperatives can stand in logical relations to one another, etc. By showing us certain things about the logic of imperatives, Hare hopes to suggest that a noncognitivist can meet certain traditional objections to her view: that it cannot allow for any sort of moral reasoning, that it cannot allow for logical relations between moral sentences, that it turns ethical language into mere irrational "sounding off," etc. In the second (on "good") and third (on "ought") parts of the book he moves on to his substantive account of evaluative language. Here Hare offers a purely formal account of moral language according to which there are no content restrictions on what can count as a moral claim. What is the relevant form? According to Hare, moral claims are 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 because sincere moral claims always imply imperatives and sincerely accepting an imperative involves being motivated to act on it. Hare thinks this purely formal account of moral language has some major benefits. First, understanding moral language as prescriptive allows us to understand the connection between morality and action. This allows us to account for the fact that we can explain people's actions by appealing to their moral opinions, and it allow us to account for the fact that we think people are being insincere if their own behavior is inconsistent with the moral views they express. Second, it allows us to interpret people with very different moral views as disagreeing with one another. If moral claims were partially defined by their descriptive content, people with radically different views would be talking past one another

This book was my introduction to moral philosophy. I was referred to it by the BBC program "Men of Ideas", a monumentally valuable series of thirteen television programmes for the tyro in philosophy. As an introduction to clear thinking about moral philosophy I found the book immensely valuable. It clarified my ideas and gave me a basis for discussion that has served me well in more than twenty years of subsequent thinking and argument.The writing is clear, unpretentious and fairly pleasant, with pedantry showing rather in the precision of phraseology than in academic bombast.I recommend the book as a fairly painless introduction to the basic ideas and techniques of thinking and talking about moral philosophy.