Online research in philosophy

In Moral Thinking R. M. Hare offers a very influential defense of utilitarianism against "intuitive" objections. Hare's argument is roughly that utilitarianism conflicts with defensible moral intuitions only in unusual cases and that, in such cases, even defensible moral intuitions are unreliable. This paper reconstructs Hare's arguments and argues that they presuppose the success of his problematic "proof" of utilitarianism. Contrary to what many have thought, Hare's negative defense of utilitarianism against intuitive objections is not separable from his "proof". In the second part of the paper I argue that Hare does not succeed in defending utilitarianism against the objection that it is "too demanding". The final section of the paper sketches a substantially revised version of Hare's reply to intuitive objections. So revised, the argument is independent of Hare's proof and affords a plausible answer to the objection that utilitarianism is "too..

These remarks are offered as a celebration of Peter Hare as a philosopher. Stressed here is the astute character of Hare's philosophical commentary.

R. M. Hare's Nora/ Thinking is surely one of the most compelling defenses of utilitarianism to appear in many years. Hare defends utilitarianism at some length against the objection that it has consequences that are inconsistent with our common-sense or intuitive moral judgments. Hare also offers a positive argument for utiTitarianism. In this paper I shall only concern myself with the latter argument. In the first part of the paper, I shall set out Hare's argument in some detail. In the second part of the paper, I shall suggest criticisms of Hare's argument. I shall argue that two of the assumptions upon..

A synthetic glance about the basic outlines of Hare's Meta-ethics is offered in this paper to support the idea that Hume's law is still a productive resource for ethical studies. Hare accepted the emotivist premise that moral judgments do not, in the same way as ordinary statements do, state matters of fact that are either true or false, but denied that therefore they must be forms of exclamation. The essential character of moral discourse consisted, not, as the emotivists had held, in its links with subjective attitudes, but with action; moral judgments were prescriptive, in that they expressed commitments to action on the part of the person uttering them, and at the same time their rationality was assured by their universalisability, i.e. their property of applying not merely to the person uttering them, but to all similar persons in similar circumstances.

We compare fork arrow logic, an extension of arrow logic, and its natural first-order counterpart (the correspondence language) and show that both have the same expressive power. Arrow logic is a modal logic for reasoning about arrow structures, its expressive power is limited to a bounded fragment of first-order logic. Fork arrow logic is obtained by adding to arrow logic the fork modality (related to parallelism and synchronization). As a result, fork arrow logic attains the expressive power of its first-order correspondence language, so both can express the same input–output behavior of processes.