The Language of Morals (Oxford Paperbacks) Reprint Edition

This book was my introduction to moral philosophy. I was referred to it by the BBC program "Men of Ideas", a monumentally valuable series of thirteen television programmes for the tyro in philosophy.
As an introduction to clear thinking about moral philosophy I found the book immensely valuable. It clarified my ideas and gave me a basis for discussion that has served me well in more than twenty years of subsequent thinking and argument.
The writing is clear, unpretentious and fairly pleasant, with pedantry showing rather in the precision of phraseology than in academic bombast.
I recommend the book as a fairly painless introduction to the basic ideas and techniques of thinking and talking about moral philosophy.

The Language of Morals is a central text in twentieth-century metaethics, and it should be read by everyone studying the subject. This the first step in Hare's attempt to develop a form of noncognitivism that accounts for the phenomena of ordinary moral language and argument, and it's been a major influence on all subsequent forms of noncognitivism. But the methods and concerns here are somewhat different than those of contemporary meta-ethicists. This is a text from the high tide of linguistic philosophy, and so Hare is of the opinion that metaethics has one subject--the nature and structure of moral language.
The central contention of this book is that moral language should be understood as one form of prescriptive language. What is characteristic of prescriptive language is its connection to action: there is a conceptual connection between how an agent uses prescriptive language and her motives to act in certain ways.
The book starts with the least complicated form of prescriptive language: the language of imperatives. In the first part Hare discusses the proper analysis of imperative language, how we can see it as meaningful, how we can reason about imperatives, how imperatives can stand in logical relations to one another, etc. By showing us certain things about the logic of imperatives, Hare hopes to suggest that a noncognitivist can meet certain traditional objections to her view: that it cannot allow for any sort of moral reasoning, that it cannot allow for logical relations between moral sentences, that it turns ethical language into mere irrational "sounding off," etc.
In the second (on "good") and third (on "ought") parts of the book he moves on to his substantive account of evaluative language. Here Hare offers a purely formal account of moral language according to which there are no content restrictions on what can count as a moral claim. What is the relevant form? According to Hare, moral claims are universalizable prescriptions. They are universalizable in that an agent must be willing to apply them to all cases that are alike in all the relevant respects. They are prescriptive because sincere moral claims always imply imperatives and sincerely accepting an imperative involves being motivated to act on it.
Hare thinks this purely formal account of moral language has some major benefits. First, understanding moral language as prescriptive allows us to understand the connection between morality and action. This allows us to account for the fact that we can explain people's actions by appealing to their moral opinions, and it allow us to account for the fact that we think people are being insincere if their own behavior is inconsistent with the moral views they express. Second, it allows us to interpret people with very different moral views as disagreeing with one another. If moral claims were partially defined by their descriptive content, people with radically different views would be talking past one another and we'd be unable to understand some genuine moral disagreements as disagreements.
Nevertheless, Hare does not think there is a total disconnect between moral and non-moral language. One way the moral and non-moral are connected is that moral evaluations are made in response to non-moral facts. People appeal to non-moral facts as a reason to hold certain moral evaluations, and thus must do so since there is a supervenience requirement that universalizability places on moral judgments: necessarily, if you judge that something is good, you must judge that anything similar in all relevant non-moral respects is good. Still, though, Hare denies that we can infer the moral facts from the non-moral facts; he denies that a person's judgments about the non-moral facts ever entail judgments about the moral facts. In addition to certain views about the non-moral facts, a person has to accept certain principles about the connection between the moral and the non-moral in order to draw a moral conclusion.
And there is also a connection between the descriptive and evaluative meaning expressed in moral claims. Given widely accepted standards, the use of moral language will often convey non-moral information. There can be a close connection between making certain moral claims and making non-moral claims, and this is something people know. So, at least in particular groups, there are descriptive criteria for the application of moral language. Part of the information conveyed in moral discussion, then, is descriptive meaning--but it is secondary to the evaluative meaning. And it is always possible for the moral language to retain its evaluative meaning, the primary component, through a change in its descriptive meaning.
Hare develops lots of interesting arguments as he presents and defends this conception of moral language. I don't have the space to discuss much here, but I'll mention one thing. Hare makes an attempt to resurrect something like Moore's open question argument. He wants to argue that there cannot be an analysis of claims about goodness into non-moral terms. Why not? Claims about goodness have a commending function that is lost in such analyses. To say that something is good is to commend this, but naturalistic theories cannot explain this. These are theories according to which "good" is defined in terms of natural language (e.g. "is good" means "leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number"). The problem with all such theories is that it remains possible to think the naturalistic description fits and yet not find this a commendation of the object. So the element of commendation in uses of "good," which is central to its meaning, drops out. Hence all such analyses of "good" are unacceptable.
Despite Hare's avowed intention of writing a book that introduces the subject of ethics, this isn't a book I'd suggest to someone without some background in meta-ethics. This book is clearly written and covers a lot of ground, but it's primarily composed of the sort of painstaking linguistic analysis that tends to be extremely dry, and even pedantic, as well as slow to get to the point. Indeed, I don't even think this is the best place to start if you want to study Hare's own views. For the newcomer to Hare, I'd recommend beginning with his more recent Sorting out Ethics and then reading Freedom and Reason, which is more interesting and wide-ranging in its discussions of issues in meta-ethics.

Hare describes his book as "an introduction to ethics" for beginners (p. v), but it is more ambitious than that. Prospective readers should not take the author's modest claim too seriously, for the book is not an "introduction." It is a perceptive contribution toward the solution of many fundamental problems of ethics.

The book is very compact (Hare informs that the original material was reduced to half its length), and it deals with so many specific issues that the contents do not lend themselves to brief summary. This is especially true of Part II, called "Good," and Part III, called "Ought," where a wealth of illuminating material is laid out before the reader like so many pearls, with not a string on which they may be strung. But in the light of what Hare regards as "one of the chief purposes of ethical inquiry" (p. I97), which is to show how moral decisions are justified, this material, however valuable in its own right, may be regarded, for the purposes of a review, as serving a tactical purpose.

Hare's strategic aims are to show that philosophers who do not believe that there is any rational justification for moral judgments have "despaired prematurely" (p. 45), and to show "how it is that moral judgments provide reasons for acting in one way rather than another" (p. I97). In Ethics and Language, C. S. Stevenson said that he sought to free the early emotive theories of Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer "from any seeming cynicism." Hare's general aim may be described as an effort to do the same thing for more sophisticated versions of the emotive theory and kindred ones. To this end, Part I, "The Imperative Mood," is, as Hare says, "the most fundamental" (p. vi), and the fourth chapter, "Decisions of Principle," is crucial.

According to Hare, the function of moral judgments is to provide answers to questions of the form, "What shall I do?" Since it tells us what to do (e.g., "Do not make this false statement"), not that something is the case, a moral judgment is like a simple imperative, though not reducible to one. A moral "principle" has the force of a universal imperative (e.g., "Never make false statements"). A principle guides conduct by serving as the major premise of a practical syllogism, whose conclusion is a moral judgment, and whose minor premise is an indicative statement (e.g., "This statement is false"). Hare argues convincingly that if a moral principle were without an imperative component, one could not derive from it, together with an indicative premise, a conclusion which tells us, "Do so-and-so." A "purely factual" moral principle, therefore, would not provide, when made a premise in a practical syllogism, a reason for doing something; and the ultimate premise or "reason" for a moral judgment could not be some factual statement such as the naturalists look for.

Could the ultimate premise be some self-evident moral principle? Hare argues as follows that it could not. Suppose that I am wondering, in the particular case K, whether it is right to tell a lie. I could not reach a rational decision by appealing to a self-evident principle, for if "Do not lie in this case of kind K" is doubtful, the principle from which I might hope to derive it, "Never lie in cases of kind K," must be doubtful, too. The principles which justify moral judgments, then, are not themselves justified by an appeal to fact or to self-evidence. According to Hare, they are justified "by reference to" (p. 68) or "by bringing in" (p. 69) the effects of observing them by their consequences, as pragmatists say. Does the "reference to" or the "bringing in" presuppose a covert appeal to some further principle? "'Ought'- sentences," he writes, "can only be verified by reference to a standard or set of principles which we have by our own decision accepted and made our own" (p. 78).

Philosophers can hardly disagree with Hare's point that if ultimate decisions are made only after reflection, after giving careful consideration to what, to the best of our knowledge, the facts are, and in the light of what experience teaches are the results of living by one moral principle as compared to another, they are not in the same class as ultimate decisions made impulsively. If there is this agreement about the facts, any dispute as to whether ultimate decisions should be called "rational" or "arbitrary" seems relatively trivial.

I have set out in this book to write a clear, brief, and readable introduction to ethics which shall bring the beginner as directly as possible to grips with the fundamental problems of the subject. .........I shall be less disturbed if my readers disagree with me than if they fail to understand me. ...I must confess that I have learned as much from those writers with whom I may appear to disagree, as from those whom I applaud.

The book was advertised as near fine and it was.