R.M. Hare

Richard Mervyn Hare lived from 21 March 1919 to 29 January 2002 and 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, subsequently teaching for a number of years at the University of Florida; his metaethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century. He is best known for developing prescriptivism as a metaethical theory, which he argued is supported by analysis of formal features of moral discourse, and for his defence of preference utilitarianism based on that prescriptivism. Several of his tutorial students, including Brian McGuinness, John Lucas and Bernard Williams, went on to become well known philosophers, his son John E. Hare also became a philosopher, and Peter Singer, who studied Hare's work as an honours student at the University of Melbourne and came to know him personally as an Oxford BPhil graduate student, has explicitly adopted some elements of Hare's thought though not his doctrine of universal prescriptivism.