ETHICS R M Hare (1919–2002), an Oxford tutor who later became White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, was anxious to make room in ethics for logic In The Language of Morals (1952) and in Freedom and Reason (1963) Hare pointed out that there is a logic of imperatives no less than a logic of assertion, and he drew on this to expound a theory of moral reasoning He distinguished between prescriptive and descriptive meaning A descriptive statement is one whose meaning is defined by the factual conditions for its truth A prescriptive sentence is one that entails, perhaps in conjunction with descriptive statements, at least one imperative To assent to an imperative is to prescribe action, to tell oneself or others to this or that Prescriptive language comes in two forms: there are straightforward imperatives, and there are value judgements Value judgements may contain a word like ‘good’ or a word like ‘ought’ To call something ‘good’ is to commend it; to call something a good X is to say that it is the kind of X that should be chosen by anyone who wants an X There will be different criteria for the goodness of Xs and the goodness of Ys, but this does not amount to a difference in the meaning of the word ‘good’, which is exhausted by its commendatory function ‘Ought’ statements—which Hare, following Hume, thought could never be derived from ‘is’ statements—entail imperatives ‘A ought to Ö’ entails an order to Ö addressed not only to A but to anyone else in a relevantly similar situation, and the addressees include the utterer of the sentence himself The utterer’s willingness to obey the order, if the occasion arises, is the criterion of his sincerity in uttering the sentence Ought-sentences are not just prescriptive, but unlike common or garden commands they are universalizable Hare distinguished between ethics and morals Ethics is the study of the general features of moral language, of which prescriptivity and universalizability are the most important; moral judgements are prescriptions and prohibitions of specific actions In principle, ethics is neutral between different and conflicting moral systems But this does not mean that ethics is practically vacuous: once an understanding of ethics is combined with the desires and beliefs of an actual moral agent, it can lead to concrete and important moral judgements The way in which prescriptivity and universalizability enter into actual moral argument is explained thus by Hare Though nothing other than my own choices gives authority to my moral judgements, my choices in 244