Freedom and Reason
R. M. Hare

"This book is a major addition to the growing list of works which prove (by the doing) that analytical philosophy can be both rigorous and helpfully relevant to the 'big' issues of human existence. Mr. Hare, who has written this volume 'for all who are seriously troubled by moral questions,' constantly touches on such eminently concrete problems as Nazism, homosexuality, drug-addiction, contractual obligations, neighborly consideration, criminal law, truth-telling, toleration, war, and the like; and he devotes his final chapter to a currently topical examination of the moral issues of racial discrimination. What he has to say about these topics is seldom startling, at least to those of liberal views, but his remarks are unfailingly illuminating. Such new light as is cast on these problems, furthermore, is largely generated by the philosophical position that is worked out with considerable care in these pages.
The position thus thoughtfully developed and practically applied represents a natural outgrowth from the analysis of moral terms presented in Hare's earlier book, The Language of Morals (1952), where the concepts 'good' and 'ought' were shown to combine a prescriptive (roughly, an 'imperative') force with a descriptive content. Now, in Freedom and Reason, the same author moves on to an examination of the logic of moral judgments which employ concepts functioning with such meaning. Once again Hare offers us a bi-polar analysis: because of the prescriptive element in this domain of discourse we cannot simply deduce moral judgments from facts alone, which means that we are responsibly free to form our own moral opinions logically uncoerced (the 'Freedom' of the title); but because of the descriptive element always present in this language our moral judgments are always universalizable, which means that moral disputes are not at all merely private or unarguable (the 'Reason' of the title). In this way Hare hopes to thread his way between, on the one side, the fallacy of the 'descriptivist' who threatens our sense of personal accountability for the morality we adopt by his neglect of the element of commitment in all value judgments, and, on the other side, the arbitrary irrationalism of the 'emotivist' who makes our moral judgments trivial by his reduction of them to idiosyncratic expressions of individual taste. For his intermediary position Hare aptly chooses the label of 'universal prescriptivism'....
...Ethical theory can never hope single-handedly to make men good. But if men are ready to inquire into what they ought to do, the moral philosopher can offer increasingly powerful logical tools to aid and to shape that inquiry. These are precisely what this acute and concerned author has provided in his highly civilized book."