Sorting Out Ethics, by R. M. Hare. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997. Pp. ix + 191. H/b £19.99, P/b £11.99.
Sorting Out Ethics is a curiously constructed
book. Neither a monograph nor a collection of independent papers, it includes a
series of five lectures that Hare gave in 1991, two papers already in print
elsewhere, and one chapter of previously unpublished teaching material. As Hare
explains in his disarmingly frank preface, he had hoped to incorporate the five
lectures, along with some other material, “into a full-length book giving my
considered views on ethical theory”, but this project was “defeated by a series
of strokes, which rendered me incapable . . . of thinking book-length thoughts”
(p. v). Some compromises had to be made, resulting in the present volume.
Hare aims for the first two
chapters to give an overview of his approach to moral philosophy, promising
that the opening chapter, “Philosophy of Language in Ethics”—a revised version
of his contribution to the 1996 Handbuch Sprachphilosophie—“gives a
conspectus of my entire thinking” (p. v). In it, Hare claims that philosophy of
language can make a “crucial contribution” to moral philosophy by clarifying
the meanings of moral words and, hence, by shedding light on the logical rules
that govern moral arguments (p. 1). This tack naturally leads Hare into a
sketch of the prescriptivity of moral judgments (pp. 10ff); in an especially
helpful passage (pp. 16–17), he sharply distinguishes prescriptivism and
emotivism (with which the former is closely linked and sometimes, to its
detriment, confused). Then Hare outlines the other key feature of moral
judgments, their universalizability (pp. 19ff). Towards the end of the chapter,
he acknowledges, and tries to dispel, the suspicion that his method involves some
kind of “conjuring trick” in which one produces “a substantial moral rabbit out
of a logical hat” (p. 24).
The second chapter, by far
the shortest of the book, is the introduction to a course Hare used to teach
(p. v). It’s “A Defence of the Enterprise”—the enterprise being moral
philosophy, as Hare conceives of it—against objectors who say that Hare’s
preoccupation with moral language impedes the study of substantive moral
questions. After rehearsing some of the arguments of the first chapter (about
how the study of moral words can shed light on moral arguments), Hare asserts
that moral philosophy is “the logical study of the language of morals”
(p. 39) and that “the moral philosopher’s distinctive contribution to the
discussion of the substantive moral questions is the investigation of
the words and concepts, and thus the logic, that are being employed”
(pp. 39–40). But the clarity Hare achieves on this point eludes him
earlier in the chapter as well as throughout the first; as an overview of
Hare’s approach to moral philosophy, these chapters are best read in concert
with some of the other synoptic papers Hare has written over the years, such as
“The Structure of Ethics and Morals” (first published in his 1989 collection Essays
in Ethical Theory).
In the next five chapters,
which form the “core of the book” (p. v), Hare offers “A Taxonomy of
Ethical Theories.” He begins by characterizing the things to be sorted: ethical
theories, as Hare uses the term, are not theories that address substantive moral
questions (such theories are moral theories—see p. 44); rather, they are
“theor[ies] about the meaning and logical properties of the moral words” (p.
45; see also pp. 43–44). And the taxonomic method Hare outlines is both “a
priori”, in that the resulting structure will include “not merely what species
of ethical theory there have been, but what theories there could be”,
and “exhaustive”, in that “at the end of the day we should have a complete
classification of possible ethical theories, with a demonstration that these
were the only possible ones” (p. 47). (Unfortunately, Hare later equivocates in
his use of the term “complete”, characterizing his classification as not
complete because “further subdivisions” may be incorporated into it (p. 117;
see also p. 97); but this admission does not bear on his earlier claim to
completeness as exhaustiveness.)
The first and broadest
distinction Hare makes separates descriptivist theories from non-descriptivist
theories. Whether a theory is descriptivist or not is, according to Hare, a
function of what it says the meanings of moral statements are determined by. A
theory that affirms that “moral statements get their meanings in just the same
way as ordinary factual statements” (p. 48)—i.e., that “Meanings of moral
statements are wholly determined by syntax and truth conditions” (p. 42, see
also pp. 48, 51, 52, 54–55, 63, and 116)—is descriptivist; while any theory
denying this—insisting that “there is an extra bit of input that goes into the
making of a moral statement which is not present in the making of an ordinary
purely descriptive statement” (p. 52)—is non-descriptivist. Hare goes on to
show that descriptivist theories (so defined) are inadequate because they
mistake cases of disagreement over substantive moral issues for cases of
disagreement over the meanings of moral words (pp. 52–55 and 58–60).
In chapters 4 and 5, Hare
divides descriptivist theories into naturalist ones and intuitionist
ones, depending on whether they affirm or deny that “Truth conditions of moral
statements are non-moral properties” (p. 42; see also pp. 64, 65, 82, and 83).
He sets out “to show that both these kinds of descriptivism . . . collapse into
relativism” (p. 65; see also, e.g., pp. 68, 76, 81, 91, 101, and 134), but
the sustained argument he gives (pp. 66–76) includes the additional assumption
that naturalists ascertain the truth conditions of moral statements by
“examining the linguistic usage of native speakers of the language” (p. 66; see
also pp. 75 and 91). In reply to the objection that his argument fails to touch
those naturalists who eschew this methodological commitment (Bentham might be
an example), Hare just says that his argument is “perfectly general” (p. 76)
and that for any naturalist, “the same difficulties will arise as before” (p.
77). But he does not substantiate this assertion; nor, for that matter, does he
defend another of his tendentious assumptions: that intuitionists ascertain the
truth conditions of moral statements through “a consensus of like-minded
people” (p. 87; see also p. 92). In the end, his attempt to portray
descriptivists as relativists is inconclusive; indeed he probably could have
discredited descriptivism more convincingly by simply elaborating the more
modest claim—ably established in the third chapter (pp. 52–55) and briefly
reiterated in these chapters (pp. 68 and 91–92)—that descriptivist theories are
inadequate because they systematically misdescribe moral disagreements as
merely verbal disagreements.
In chapters 6 and 7, Hare
returns to the more familiar territory of non-descriptivist theories. He begins
with a critique of emotivism, concluding that its “one serious fault” is
that it disallows “rational moral argument about fundamental moral questions”
(p. 117). In fact, so decisive is this flaw that Hare sets up as emotivism’s
distinguishing feature that it implies that “Moral statements are not governed
by logic” (p. 42). After an interesting interlude in which Hare outlines six
“requirements for an adequate ethical theory” (p. 42) and argues that naturalism,
intuitionism, and emotivism all fail to satisfy more than half of them (pp.
118–25), he turns to his favored variety of ethical theories, rationalistic
non-descriptivism. This includes, of course, his own “universal
prescriptivism” (p. 42), whose essential features Hare then summarizes.
The eighth and final chapter
of the book, “Could Kant Have Been a Utilitarian?”, reprints a paper first
published in Utilitas in 1993. Hare argues that although a great gulf is
thought to separate utilitarianism and Kantianism, they have actually have
significant common ground in the injunction to take everyone’s ends as
seriously as one’s own (p. 151). Indeed, Hare claims in an earlier chapter of
the book that “If the two doctrines are sympathetically formulated, they are in
agreement” (p. 26). What kept Kant from being a utilitarian, Hare says,
was his insistence on shoehorning his theory into the framework of moral views
with which his “rigorous puritanical upbringing had imbued him” (p. 148), along
with his belief that “maxims have to be very simple” (p. 154). But Hare
neglects to show how the absence of these influences would have left Kant in
the thrall of utilitarianism: in particular, how Kant could ever have endorsed
the trade-offs between individuals’ well-being that utilitarianism is notorious
for tolerating and, especially, requiring.
It is hard to reflect on Sorting
Out Ethics without lamenting the fact that it does not extend the series of
unified, free-standing, and increasingly sophisticated accounts of ethics that
Hare began in 1952 with The Language of Morals, continued in 1963 with Freedom
and Reason, and concluded (it now seems) in 1981 with Moral Thinking:
Its Levels, Method, and Point. Indeed the ambiguity of its very title—is
this “sorting out” going to be a comprehensive culmination, or mainly just an
exercise in classification?—makes the book itself a standing reminder of what
it could have been. Still, its three parts—the two essays on moral philosophy,
the survey of ethical theories, and the paper on Kant—do have a surprising
unity, at least in the context of Hare’s body of work. For Hare’s thought has
long been characterized by a distinctive and deliberate approach to moral
philosophy, one rooted in a study of moral language and with acknowledged debts
to Kant; and this book essentially offers commentaries on these important
themes (as well as a sixteen-page, purportedly complete, bibliography of Hare’s
writings). And given the enormous cumulative impact over the years of Hare’s
long campaign for his views, what Sorting Out Ethics also offers is a
new vantage point from which to better understand some of the most influential
ideas of recent moral philosophy.
Department of Philosophy BEN EGGLESTON
1001 Cathedral of Learning
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
U.S.A.