Abstract

PATINO ARANGO, Alejandro. Rational justification of moral imperatives. discus.filos [online]. 2010, vol.11, n.16, pp.81-98. ISSN 0124-6127.

In this paper, I examine Hare's rational conception on moral judgements. For this, he criticizes sharply the emotivist conception of Logical Positivists and of Stevenson. He also aparts himself from Moore's moral intuitionism, as expounded in Principia Ethica. To develop moral rationalism, Hare starts from the principle that moral language is apart of the general language, from which it cannot be separated since when we do moral reasonings these are ruled by the different rules of classical logic. For this reason, Hare applies classical logic to his theory of imperatives and considers ethics as the logical study of moral language. I also show the similarities and differences between Austin's and Hare's conceptions, emphasizing the evolution of the thought of the later. When Hare wrote The language of morals, he was not under the influence of Austin's tricotomic view of speech acts: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary, influence that we can see in later works. While Hare locates moral judgments in the locutionary, Austin does it in the illocutionary. This controversy leads us to think on the importance of pragmatics in moral judgements as well as on its rationality.

Keywords : Logic; human actions; moral principles; imperatives; verificationist; pragmatics; rules.

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