Logic and Morality: The Ambiguities of Universal Prescriptivism

Dissertation, University of Exeter (United Kingdom) (1988)
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Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;The present thesis is concerned with examining critically Hare's moral philosophy and with assessing its position in the contemporary British moral thought. I argue that his moral theory not only is not as coherent as it might have first appeared to be but also when appreciated as a whole is not susceptible to the kind of interpretation it usually is. Certain internal inconsistencies of his moral account have been at various times noticed but the standard interpretation of his theory is that he offers a kind of rational Non-Descriptivism. In this thesis I contend that if the implications of the inconsistencies implicit in his moral account are brought home, then his moral theory would seem to differ very little from the kind of moral theory the Descriptivist philosophers suggest. Accordingly, the present thesis proceeds in a twofold manner. After I have set the background against which Hare's thought and philosophy developed in Part I, in Part II I offer an exposition of the main features of Hare's moral theory, while in Part III I discuss them critically. In Part IV I continue the exposition of his moral theory, of the way this leads to a particular normative ethical theory and the ethical theory itself; while in Part V I consider the ethical thesis which he thus reaches, raise certain doubts about its practical applicability and conclude with the reasons for which I think that Hare has failed to give us the kind of ethical theory he set out to do.

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