News-Info-Alerts

Re: R.M. Hare Passes

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: March 20, 2002

"R.M. Hare

LONDON (AP) — Richard Mervyn Hare, an influential philosopher who believed passionately that there are rational justifications for behaving morally, died Jan. 29 at his home near Oxford. He was 82.

Hare, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, was an advocate of prescriptivism, arguing that moral beliefs can be defended through objective reasoning.

He outlined his ideas — which rejected the notion that moral statements are simply expressions of emotion — in books including "The Language of Morals" in 1952 and "Freedom and Reason," published in 1963.

Prescriptivism — so called because Hare held that moral judgments prescribe specific, universal courses of action — was influential through the 1950s and 1960s.

Hare enlisted in the Royal Artillery in World War II. Captured after the fall of Singapore in 1942, Hare spent three years as a Japanese prisoner of war and was among the forced laborers who built the notorious Thai-Burma Railway. Throughout his time as a prisoner, he kept a diary of philosophical writings.

After the war Hare taught at Oxford and was a research professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville between 1983 and 1994."