R. M. Hare

Richard Mervyn Hare (21 March 1919 – 29 January 2002) was a British moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida. His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century.

Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism as a meta-ethical theory, which he argues is supported by analysis of formal features of moral discourse, and for his defence of preference utilitarianism based on his prescriptivism.

Some of Hare's tutorial students, such as Brian McGuinness, John Lucas, and Bernard Williams, went on to become well-known philosophers. Hare's son, John E. Hare, also became a philosopher. Peter Singer, known for his involvement with the animal liberation movement (who studied Hare's work as an honours student at the University of Melbourne and came to know Hare personally while he was an Oxford BPhil graduate student), has explicitly adopted some elements of Hare's thought, though not his doctrine of universal prescriptivism.

Life and career

Richard Hare was born on 21 March 1919 in Backwell, Somerset. He attended Rugby School in Warwickshire, followed in 1937 by Balliol College, Oxford, where he read greats (classics). Having joined the officer training corps whist still at Rugby, on the outbreak of World War II, he volunteered to serve with the Royal Artillery.