The Language of Morals

Congratulations to the publishers of this book on its modest price. Congratulations also to Mr. Hare, who succeeds in bringing alive for the general reader a number of topics in moral philosophy at present exercising the academic world. His subject-matter is a little limited for a book setting out "to bring the beginner [to ethics] to grips with the fundamental problems of the subject": also his style is uneven, lapsing rather often into the donnish and occasionally, on the rebound, into the over-jolly. But the book is excellent value all the same, and readers of PHILOSOPHY should show their gratitude to publishers and author alike by buying it and reading it. i. The argument is divided into three sections: The Imperative Mood, 'Good' and 'Ought.' The first of these (pp. 1-78) is the most technical and also the most contentious. Its purpose is to show (a) that sentences in the imperative mood are related one to another in logical ways and formally analysable on the Aristotelian patterns, no less than sentences in the indicative mood, and (b) that it is illuminating for philosophers, when construing statements about the morality of conduct, to take imperatives rather than indicatives as their model. The two-stage argument is necessary, because imperatives have so often been regarded as a grammatical lumpen-proletariat, from which one can hope for nothing rational, or even articulate: by advancing thesis (b) alone Mr. Hare would accordingly have been doing ethics a disservice which he himself condemns in others. And indeed, the most impressive thing about the whole book is the way in which a moral seriousness and concern manifestly beyond question are brought to the defence of an "imperative" analysis of moral judgments. No longer will there be any excuse for thinking that "imperative" analyses are the jeux d'esprit of moral Philistines. This suggestion, which may have been plausible as applied to the early Ayer, must now be abandoned entirely, and the analyses given the prejudice-free attention they deserve.