Richard M. Hare, the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University from 1966 to 1983, is famous as the inventor of universal prescriptivism. This is a metaethical doctrine, a thesis about what moral words mean. But Hare uses his metaethic to generate an ethic. Anyone who employs the moral concepts consistently in full awareness of the facts must wind up a utilitarian. Hare claims that his utilitarianism is the product of conceptual analysis rather than of moral intuition. To rely on intuitions is a philosophical sin, since it leads to relativism (Hare 1981). His theory is developed in three books, The Language of Morals (1952), Freedom and Reason (1963), and Moral Thinking (1981).

Prescriptivism is a variant of noncognitivism. Moral judgments are action guiding, and the explanation of this is that they are prescriptive: They are not primarily designed to state facts but to prescribe actions. They...