Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T05:27:35.439Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

External and Now-For-Then Preferences in Hare's Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Mane Hajdin
Mane Hajdin
Affiliation:
University of Waikato
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Intervention
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 1990 , pp. 305 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 104, 105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Seanor, Douglas and Fotion, N., eds., Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 234, 266.Google Scholar

3 To be sure, excluding these preferences may also appear to have some consequences that would be difficult to accept, but Hare has argued that they can be avoided by some additional manoeuvers (Hare and Critics, p. 265–266).

4 Allan Gibbard, “Hare's Analysis of ‘Ought’ and its Implications,” in Hare and Critics, p. 57–72; R. M.Hare, “Comments on Gibbard,” in Hare and Critics, p. 229–234.

5 Hare, Moral Thinking, p. 99.

6 Ibid., p. 91, italics mine.

7 Alternatively, it could be argued that one does not fully understand what it is like to have a certain preference unless one has imagined what it is like to have it frustrated. More about that towards the end of this paper.

8 Strictly speaking, the formulation “sufferings and, in general, motivations and preferences” which appears in Hare's statement of the Conditional Reflection Principle, therefore, embodies a category mistake because sufferings are not a species of motivations or preferences; they are a species of preference-frustrations.

9 One could be tempted to respond to this by saying that the rule that one should leave one's own shoes behind, when putting oneself into the shoes of others, applies only to one's preferences and not to one's knowledge, that it is always permissible to bring in any bit of knowledge that might be available. But if this were accepted, then critical moral thinkingwould be incapable of giving us any plausible precepts on how to deal with people's ignorance.

10 Hare neutralizes the latter by introducing the requirement that “we should always have a dominant or overriding preference now that the satisfaction of our now-for-now and then-for-then preferences should be maximized” (Moral Thinking, p. 105). But the manoeuvre of introducing this requirement can easily appear to be ad hoc.

11 This consequence of the account could be rendered fairly plausible if one also argued that the preferences that are genuinely external or now-for-then (and so, according to the account, genuinely ill-formed) are in fact extremely rare, and that most of the apparent expressions of such preferences can be interpreted as misleading expressions of other, perfectly well-formed preferences. For example, one could argue that most of the apparently external preferences against homosexuality are actually non-external preferences for the experience of living in a certain type of social order which is inarticulately believed to be threatened by homosexual practices.