Richard Mervyn Hare, 1919–2002
Richard Mervyn Hare, 1919–2002
Richard Hare's ambition was to have united elements from Aristotle, Kant and Mill in a logically cogent way that solved the fundamental problems of ethics (though with unfinished business); and he usually believed himself to have achieved this. For much of his career, his ‘prescriptivism’ formed an important part of the curriculum, certainly in Britain. His disappointment was not to have persuaded others (an occasional ‘we prescriptivists’ was always uncertain of reference), and to have left no disciples; he once told John Lucas that this made his life a failure. Yet he leaves behind generations of pupils grateful for the transmission not of a doctrine but of a discipline; and posterity, while unlikely to ratify the logical validity of his theory, will admire it for its uniting of apparent opposites: freedom and reason, tradition and rationalism, eclecticism and rigour.
Keywords: ethics, prescriptivism, freedom, reason, tradition, rationalism, eclecticism, rigour
British Academy Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
