R. M. Hare
| Richard Mervyn Hare | |
|---|---|
| Born |
21 March 1919 Backwell, Somerset |
| Died | 29 January 2002 (aged 82) Ewelme, Oxfordshire |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Analytic |
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Main interests
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Ethics |
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Notable ideas
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Universal prescriptivism, two-level utilitarianism |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Richard Mervyn Hare (/hɛər/; 21 March 1919 – 29 January 2002), usually cited as R. M. Hare, was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida. His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century.
Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism as a meta-ethical theory, the analysis of formal features of moral discourse justifying preference utilitarianism.
Some of Hare's students, such as Brian McGuinness and Bernard Williams, went on to become well-known philosophers. Peter Singer, known for his involvement with the animal liberation movement, was also a student of Hare's, and has explicitly adopted some elements of Hare's thought, though not his doctrine of universal prescriptivism.
Richard Hare was born in Backwell, Somerset. He attended Rugby School in Warwickshire, followed in 1937 by Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Greats (Classics). Although he was a pacifist, he volunteered for service in the Royal Artillery and was taken as a prisoner of war by the Japanese from the fall of Singapore in 1942 to the end of the Second World War. This experience had a lasting impact on Hare's philosophical views, particularly his view that moral philosophy has an obligation to help people live their lives as moral beings (King 2004). His earliest work in philosophy, which has never been published, dates from this period, and in it, he tried to develop a system that might "serve as a guide to life in the harshest conditions," according to The Independent.
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