Section 8
Conclusion
Thus, I have to conclude that Hare, even for his simplest model case, has to assume analogues of all the three principles of Sidgwick. First of all, Hare's strong universalizability is non-tautologous and as strong as Sidgwick's Principle of Justice. Secondly, Hare's requirement of impartiality through time with respect to one's own preferences is nearly as strong as Sidgwick's Principle of Rational Self-Love; I say 'nearly' because Hare is not explicitly committed to a quantitative notion of good or utility, but the requirement of equal weight to the strength of each preference is quite distinct from the universalizability of 'ought' or any other evaluative words. This holds even if we pass over the problem of representing preferences at other moments now. Thirdly and finally, the requirement of equal weight to the strength of one's and other's preferences in critical thinking is also nearly as strong as Sidgwick's Principle of Benevolence, with the analogous proviso, applying to the representation of other's preferences within oneself. Briefly, it is one thing to represent other's preferences in oneself (by the Conditional Reflection Principle, which I did not question, for the sake of argument, in this paper), and it is quite another thing to treat them equally or impartially; the latter amounts to an essential evaluative principle for Sidgwick's utilitarianism.
Hare's use of the word 'universalizability' has tended to conceal these problems under the name of 'logic'. Reading Sidgwick anew, I came to this conclusion. However, since Hare's method of justification of moral judgment still seems clearer than Sidgwick's intuitionist way (though he adds some elaboration in Sidgwick 1879), I do not mean to abandon Hare's method altogether; only we need to notice where we are assuming substantive principles.
Note: Although my interpretation of Sidgwick's three principles and my criticism of Hare's theory based on it are original (it occurred to me during the summer of 1997, and was communicated briefly in the Sidgwick Mailing List, early September), Mariko Okuno has already written, on my suggestion, another version utilizing the same ideas in her Ph.D.Thesis; she named the interpretation 'Uchii-Okuno Interpretation' giving the main credit to me. Although I am happy with this name, and agree with most of what she says, I did not use that name in this paper. However, I wish to acknowledge that I had the benefit of examining her thesis and learning a great deal from her analysis of Sidgwick's view before I prepare this paper; and I wish to thank her for helpful comments on this paper. For her version, see Okuno 1998b, 7.2 and 9.3. She has also argued for the significance of Sidgwick's hedonism; see Okuno 1998a and 1998b, 10.1-10.4.
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R.M.Hare's Homepage (incomplete but with a complete bibliography)
Harsanyi Autobiography in the Nobel Foundation
July 20, 1998. Last modified April 17, 2006. (c) Soshichi Uchii
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