Citation
Hare, R. M. The Language of Morals. OUP Oxford, 1952. Google Books Link
Excerpts
| Page | Quote | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | ”Thus if, in a society whose standards are markedly utilitarian, we say ‘the Health Service has done a lot of good’, everyone knows that we are implying that the Health Service has averted a lot of pain, anxiety, &c.” | |
| 18 | ”to write a sentence without inverted commas is like signing a cheque; to write it within inverted commas is like drawing a cheque without signing it” | |
| 39 | ”a piece of genuinely evaluative moral reasoning must have as its end-product an imperative of the form ‘do so-and-so‘“ | |
| 43 | ”it is the function of general moral principles to regulate our conduct […] [therefore] these general moral principles cannot be self-evident” | |
| 49 | Position Hare is critiquing: “the Communist should use the term for the concept governed by his [sic] rules of verification, and I should use for my concept. But the point is that there is a dispute, and not merely a verbal misunderstanding, between the Communist and me; we are differing about what I ought to do (not say)“ | |
| 7 | H. G. Bohnert: “shut the door” = “Either you are going to shut the door, or [something bad will happen to you]“ | Re-read 12/2025 |
| 46 | ”by no form of inference, however loose, can we get an answer to the question ‘What shall I do?’ out of a set of premisses which do not contain, at any rate implicitly, an imperative.” | |
| 60 | To learn at all is to learn principles: “Thus, in learning to drive, I learn, not to change gear now, but to change gear when my engine makes a certain kind of noise. If this were not so, instruction would be of no use at all; for if all an instructor could do were to tell us to change gear now, he would have to sit beside us for the rest of our lives.” | Education |
| 193 | Rich sentence showing descriptive/“information-conveying” use of “ought”: “At the very moment when he ought to have been arriving at the play, he was grovelling underneath his car five miles away.” “Thus because everyone agrees in a particular evaluation, there grows up a secondary use of ‘ought’ in which it can be used to give information” | |
| 196 | Conclusion/summary/tldr of everything! “That the principle is well-established (i.e. that everyone would agree with it) and that I have feelings of compunction if I break it, are facts; but when I subscribe to the principle, I do not state a fact, but make a moral decision. Even if I make it by default — even if I just accept without thinking the standards in which I have been brought up — nevertheless I am, in an important sense, making myself responsible for the judgement. And this means that, if it is an evaluative judgement at all, I cannot just take it as given.” |
Zotero Metadata
Abstract
Part I. The imperative mood — Prescriptive language — Imperatives and logic — Inference — Decisions of principle — Part II. ‘Good’ — ‘Naturalism’ — Meaning and criteria — Description and evaluation — Commending and choosing — ‘Good’ in moral contexts — Part III. ‘Ought’ — ‘Ought’ and ‘right’ — ‘Ought’ and imperatives — An analytical model — Index.
Metadata
FirstAuthor:: Hare, R. M.
Title:: The Language of Morals ShortTitle:: Year:: 1952
Citekey:: hare_language_1952
itemType:: book
Publisher:: OUP Oxford
ISBN:: 978-0-19-881077-3