R. M. Hare

R. M. Hare FBA
Hare in 1957
Born	Richard Mervyn Hare (1919-03-21)21 March 1919 Backwell, England
Died	29 January 2002(2002-01-29) (aged 82) Ewelme, England
Spouse	Catherine Verney ​ (m. 1947)​
Children	John E. Hare et al.
Academic background
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Thesis	Books: "The Language of Morals" (1952)
Doctoral advisor	Gilbert Ryle
Other advisors	Gilbert Ryle, H.H. Price
Influences	J. L. Austin A. J. Ayer Immanuel Kant Gilbert Ryle Henry Sidgwick Ludwig Wittgenstein
Academic work
Discipline	Philosophy
Sub-discipline	Moral philosophy political philosophy
School or tradition	Analytic philosophy
Institutions	Balliol College, Oxford Corpus Christi College, Oxford University of Florida
Doctoral students	Denys Turner
Notable students	John Lucas Brian McGuinness Peter Singer Bernard Williams
Main interests	Applied ethics meta-ethics
Notable ideas	Moral particularism preference utilitarianism two-level utilitarianism universal prescriptivism
Influenced	Allan Gibbard John E. Hare Brian McGuinness Derek Parfit Aaron Sloman Gary Varner Bernard Williams

Richard Mervyn Hare^[a] FBA (21 March 1919 – 29 January 2002), usually cited as R. M. Hare, 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. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida. His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century.

Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism as a meta-ethical theory, which he argues is supported by analysis of formal features of moral discourse, and for his defence of preference utilitarianism based on his prescriptivism.

Some of Hare's students, such as Brian McGuinness,^[1] John Lucas,^[2] and Bernard Williams^[3] went on to become well-known philosophers.^[4] Hare's son, John E. Hare, also became a philosopher. Peter Singer, known for his involvement with the animal liberation movement (who studied Hare's work as an honours student at the University of Melbourne and came to know Hare personally while he was an Oxford BPhil graduate student),^[5] has explicitly adopted some elements of Hare's thought, though not his doctrine of universal prescriptivism.

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