Royal Institute of Philosophy

Review
Author(s): Roger Scruton
Review by: Roger Scruton
Source: Philosophy, Vol. 48, No. 186 (Oct., 1973), pp. 395-399
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3749692
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 New Books

Practical Inferences
By R. M. Hare
London: Macmillan, I97I, Viii+ I35 pp., 41.95
Essays on Philosophical Method
By R. M. Hare
London: Macmillan, '97I, viii+ I35 pp., ?'.95

Essays on the Moral Concepts

By R. M. Hare
London: Macmillan, I972, X+ I09 pp., ,I95

Applications of Moral Philosophy

By R. M. Hare
London: Macmillan, 1972, x+ II5 PP., ?'195

Professor Hare's collected papers-spread over four expensive little volumes-do

not contain all his published articles, but they include most of his celebrated
replies to the critics of Prescriptivism. And while it is possible to think that
Hare's urge to defend his own views is at times excessive, one cannot fail to
admire the cleverness and clarity with which he accomplishes the task.
There can be no doubt of Hare's importance as a moral philosopher, and the
current widespread criticism of his influence is only further testimony to this
fact. Whatever the shortcomings of Hare's approach it must be conceded that
he is one of the few philosophers to have presented an account of the contrast
between fact and value that is not obviously mistaken or absurd. And his achieve-
ment is all the more impressive for its simplicity. Without recourse to any
comprehensive theory of meaning (such as that embraced to his cost by Steven-
son), and without any battery of technicalities, Hare showed how the contrast
between descriptive and non-descriptive uses of words might be described in
terms of the distinction between indicatives and imperatives. The essence of
Hare's view is that the meaning of a sentence determines what it is to assent to,
or agree with, some utterance of the sentence. Thus a command, or a sentence
with 'imperative force', is assented to when the person to whom it is addressed
makes a decision to act. A descriptive statement, on the other hand, is assented
to when the person to whom it is addressed acquires or expresses a belief in the
truth of a proposition. Hare argues that this condition of assent to a judgment
determines its logic, so that moral judgments, which have 'imperative force',
since they are accepted in action, must share the logic of commands. In defending
this point of view Hare has made what must now be considered a substantial
contribution to the philosophy of deontic logic.
One of the most interesting objections to this theory is barely mentioned in
these articles: namely, that while assent to a command involves a decision or an
intention, assent to a moral principle may involve only a desire. This seems to be

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New Books

suggested (as Professor Williams among others has argued) by the fact of moral
conflict. It is possible sincerely to accept two moral principles that conflict in a
particular case. On the other hand, it is logically impossible knowingly to form
incompatible intentions. The point is obscured by Hare's adherence-in the
article 'Wanting: Some Pitfalls', reprinted in Practical Inferences-to Kenny's
suggested analysis of desire in terms of the mental utterance of a command. The
existence of conscious conflicts of desire is surely enough to refute Kenny's view,
and enough to indicate that assent to a moral principle is after all more a matter
of desire than intention. This objection is surely not trivial. For it is precisely
the logical impossibility of forming incompatible intentions that enables us to
give sense to the idea of a contradiction between commands, and hence to develop
a logic of commands parallel to the logic of indicatives (a logic derived from the
principle of non-contradiction). Once we reject the analysis of assent to a moral
principle in terms of intention, we move away from the theory that 'evaluative'
sentences have 'imperative force'. We find ourselves looking elsewhere for an
explanation of the logic of moral discourse, and it no longer seems so easy to
dispense with the general theory of meaning which Emotivism sought to provide.
The objections that interest Hare in these papers fall into roughly two classes:
objections to the theory that moral judgments are not descriptions, and
objections to the apparent triviality of his whole philosophy. Hare attempts
to rebut the first group through detailed and often subtle analysis, and he succeeds
in showing that many of the criticisms of his theory have been extremely shallow.
He attempts to rebut the second group of objections through a demonstration
that Prescriptivism is not, as it appears, 'morally neutral'. He presents a 'deduc-
tion' of Utilitarianism from the premises of his theory, a deduction that seems
to rely on precisely the kind of equivocation between universal and general
judgments that Hare himself exposes in the article 'Universalizability', re-
printed in Essays on the Moral Concepts. From this Utilitarianism Hare goes on
to derive certain moral conclusions, the banality of which can only serve as an
encouragement to his critics.
It is impossible to review here all the many and varied arguments that Hare
brings in defence of the idea of prescriptive meaning. Since this is the interesting
part of Hare's philosophy, I shall try to identify some of the lacunae in his
admirable discussion. First of all, Hare produces no proof of his dogma that there
is a logical gap between fact and value; the alleged existence of this gap must
therefore be considered only as a consequence of prescriptivism and not as an
independent argument in support of it. Hare refers at several points to Hume's
remarks in Treatise, III, i, I, and to Moore's supposed discovery of the Naturalis-
tic Fallacy, but it is notorious that neither Hume nor Moore produced any
conclusive argument, or indeed any genuine argument at all, for the view that
evaluative judgments cannot be derived by logic from judgments of fact. Hare
rightly says in 'Descriptivism' (reprinted in Essays on the Moral Concepts) that
the question of the gap between facts and values is of a piece with the controversy
over the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, but unfortunately
he does not develop this point. Without some clarification of the concept of
analyticity it is hard to see how we can establish in advance that no sentence of
the form 'If x has properties F, G, etc., then x is good' can be analytically true.
The only argument that Hare gives is not an argument at all. He asserts (in

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 New Books

'Descriptivism' and elsewhere) that for any x, F, G, etc., a man may acknowledge
that x has F, G etc., and yet dissent from the corresponding evaluation of x.
For x may not appeal to him. But this assumes two things which we could fairly
suppose to be precisely the points at issue:
(i) For all x, F, G, etc., a man may agree that x has F, G, etc., and yet not be
in favour of x.
(2) The evaluation of x is constituted not by the description 'x is F, G, etc.', but
by the expression of a preference.

In effect Hare assumes both that moral judgments (and evaluative judgments
generally) are non-descriptive in that they express (or are assented to by) desires,
intentions or preferences rather than beliefs, and, more importantly, that a
belief cannot determine any particular intention or desire. Indeed his whole
'proof' of the gap between 'is' and 'ought' rests on an unexamined thesis in the
philosophy of mind, the thesis that it cannot follow logically from the statement
that A believes p that A desires y (for any A, p, or y). It is this assumption,
combined with the unargued premise that assent to an evaluation logically
requires intention or desire (in the appropriate circumstances), that leads to the
conclusion that there is no derivation of an 'ought' from an 'is'. For the logical
relations of a judgment-in particular the relation of 'entailment'-are governed,
on Hare's view, by what it is to assent to it.
This unargued premise in the philosophy of mind lies behind Hare's discussion
in 'Pain and Evil', also reprinted in Essays on the Moral Concepts. Hare attempts
to prove that it is a contingent and not a necessary truth that human beings
dislike pain. He asserts that there seems to be 'a phenomenologically distinct
sensation or group of sensations which we have when we are in pain, and that
there could be (whether there actually is or not) a word for this group of sensa-
tions which did not imply dislike'. The idea is that, even if the general terms
of our public language are such as to imply that no sensation can be called
painful if it is not disliked, nothing prevents us from inventing, in our own case,
words which, while denoting the same class of sensations, carry no implication of
dislike. The argument, with its emphasis on 'phenomenological distinctness' and
on the first-person use of psychological predicates, is surprisingly unsophisti-
cated. For suppose that Wittgenstein is right, and that our words for sensations
must be attached to (and hence applied on the basis of) publicly observable
criteria, such as the behaviour and actions of those who have sensations. Could
we then so confidently assume that words for sensations may be given the same
reference that they now have, and yet be applied irrespective of the likes and
dislikes of those who have sensations? Clearly, Hare's arguments only scratch
the surface of a deep and important problem, and one suspects that were he to
pursue his investigations further into the philosophy of mind, then he might also
find his simple view of the relation between belief and action undergoing
considerable modification.
It is this indifference to the philosophy of mind that has given rise to the charge
that Hare treats morality in a trivializing way. His philosophy seems to by-pass
many of the substantial issues that have interested moral philosophers in previous
times: the nature of happiness and freedom, the relation between reason and the
passions, the question of the good life itself (which gives way, under the stress of

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New Books

Hare's bland Utilitarianism, to a grotesquely philistine vision of moral experi-

ence). It would be unfair to reproach Hare with indifference to these questions
were it not for his assumption that Prescriptivism lays the foundation for a
complete theory of practical reason. According to Hare, moral reasoning is
essentially about the means to a common end of maximum satisfaction: morality
is 'universalized prudence' ('Wrongness and Harm', printed for the first time in
Essays on the Moral Concepts). But we do not reason only about the means to the
achievement of our ends. We also bring reasons in support of these ends them-
selves. Indeed, if there is practical or moral reasoning which is distinct from
theoretical reasoning it must be manifest in the decisions that lead us to choose
our ultimate ends of action. Hare says nothing about this kind of reasoning, and
indeed, without a philosophy of mind, there is nothing of interest to be said. It
has been rightly argued that a philosophy whose contribution to the theory of
practical reason is typified by the proof that the logical form of 'Nothing matters'
differs from that of 'Nothing chatters' ('Nothing Matters', reprinted in Applica-
tions of Moral Philosophy) bears a relation to life that is at best only comic.
The important part of Hare's philosophy is that which has no obvious practical
consequences: the theory of prescriptive meaning.1 But it has been objected to
this theory that grammatically similar sentences cannot have radically different
kinds of meaning (entailing radically different modes of assent). In particular, the
so-called prescriptive meaning of a sentence cannot be embodied in an adjective
(such as 'good') which it contains. Thus 'x is good', unlike 'Do x!', has a logical
grammar determined by its indicative structure. It makes sense to say 'If x is
good then you ought to approve of it', while it is doubtful that any command
can enter into conditional sentences in a similar way. But if, as Hare suggests,
'x is good' has the meaning that is assigned to it by its commendatory force,
then we lack an explanation of the fact that it means the same when occurring, as
here, in the protasis of a conditional, where it cannot be used to commend. A
distinct 'illocutionary force', determining a distinct mode of assent, seems to
require a distinct grammatical form, such as the imperative mood, a grammatical
form that will resist the formation of conditionals altogether.
Hare's reply to this objection ('Meaning and Speech Acts', reprinted in
Practical Inferences), is perhaps the most interesting of his recent articles. It is
addressed primarily to Professor Searle, whose statement of the objection
concedes, I think, too much to his opponents. Hare replies that we have no better
explanation of the function of 'x is good' in the protasis of a conditional than we
have of the function of any descriptive sentence, such as 'The cat is on the mat'.
This latter sentence is not asserted when it is hypothesised, even though, as
Searle would agree, it acquires its meaning from its assertoric use. How then does
its meaning, which is that of an assertion, remain the same both when it is
asserted and when it is not? Hare suggests that we understand the hypothetical
sentence form just so long as we understand how to operate with modus ponens,

1 Hare is not of the opinion that the question whether moral judgments have prescriptive
meaning is irrelevant to practice. In an unconsciously amusing passage he describes the
evils of the 'descriptivist family', evils consequent on the failure of misguided parents to
persuade their children that 'right' and 'wrong' are prescriptive and not descriptive terms.
('The Practical Relevance of Philosophy', Inaugural Lecture published for the first time in
Essays no Philosophical Method).

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 New Books

and we can do this without knowing how to describe what a sentence says when
occurring in the protasis of a conditional. That is, to know the meaning of the
hypothetical 'If the cat is on the mat it is purring' is to know, Hare says, that 'if
we are in a position to affirm the categorical "The cat is on the mat", we can go on
to affirm the categorical "It is purring" '.
Hare's argument is developed further than this, but it already sounds
implausible. Hare has explained what it is to understand one hypothetical in
terms of our knowledge of the truth of another hypothetical: 'if we are in a
position to affirm the categorical "The cat is on the mat" (then) we can go on to
affirm the categorical "It is purring"-an hypothetical in which an evaluative
sentence might have replaced the sentence 'The cat is on the mat'. It may be
that this air of circularity is only apparent, but it is still not clear that we have to
accept Hare's explanation of how we understand hypotheticals as equally neces-
sary for both descriptive and non-descriptive sentences. Hare is led to his view
that an explanation is equally necessary in either case by his (and Searle's)
emphasis on speech acts at the expense of semantics. But there are good reasons
for saying that to understand an indicative sentence involves knowing the
conditions for its truth. In this sense, we can easily indicate how we understand,
on the basis of our understanding of 'p' and of 'q', at least the material implication
'p D q', the truth-conditions of which are given by a simple function of the truth-
conditions of its components. In other words, our understanding of complex
sentences can be explained semantically without raising the question of the
speech acts that sentences are standardly used to perform. But if this is so then
there is a genuine difficulty for Prescriptivism. For if the meaning of a sentence
is given by its 'illocutionary force', and hence by its mode of assent, rather than
by the conditions for its truth, how does our understanding of 'p' and 'q' together
with our understanding of the connective 'D' enable us to understand the com-
plex 'p D q'? It is interesting that Hare does not raise, in these articles, the
question of the truth of moral judgments. The theory of Prescriptivism seems to
entail that our language might contain infinitely many sentences which can under-
go all the syntactic transformations that are subordinate to truth-value, and yet
which may have no conditions for their truth (since there is no derivation of an
'ought' from an 'is'). Hare is surely right in assuming that this kind of objection
cannot be fatal. But he is equally wrong in thinking that he has given any answer
to it.
Roger Scruton

Sympathy and Ethics: A Study of the Relationship between Sympathy

and Morality with Special Reference to Hume's Treatise
By Philip Mercer
Oxford: Clarendon Press, T972, 138 pp., ?2.40

Sympathy is a fascinating concept, much neglected by moral philosphers who,

from the Stoics onward, have been too busy disentangling the Individual from
his neighbours to pay proper attention to the links that bind them. The emotional
interdependence of human beings has come out, on the whole, as a contingent
and possibly a shameful weakness, and it has been hard to ascribe any moral
significance to feeling. Because there is something arrogant and unrealistic here,

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