John E. Hare: Quotes about ideas and thoughts

John E. Hare is British philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on idea.

John E. Hare: 12 quotes0 likes

“To the extent that we are free we are like God, who has no need of an idea of a God over Godself or of an incentive other than the moral law itself. But to the extent that we are also natural beings, we desire our own happiness in everything else that we desire, and we need the practical postulate of God to bring that happiness together with morality.”

Source: “Ethics and Religion: Two Kantian Arguments” (2011), p. 165

“It is basically a bad idea to take some area of human thought and experience that has been the locus of careful analyses and subtle distinctions for centuries, and start again, as it were, from scratch. What in fact happens when this is done is that some ideas from that tradition re-emerge, but are isolated from the context in which they were embedded in the preceding conversation.”

Source: “Evolutionary Theory and Theological Ethics” (2012), p. 245

“The idea of obligation is rationally unstable without the accompanying idea of a sufficiently good and powerful obligator to give the command and sustain the order in which the command is observed.”

Source: “Evolutionary Theory and Theological Ethics” (2012), p. 250

“It is striking that the idea of a moral being without ordinary human limitations as the source of the moral demand survived in 20th century moral philosophy even in theories that do not posit the existence of such a being. … In R. B. Brandt’s Ethical Theory, there is a position for an ideal observer. In R. M. Hare, there is an archangel, with full command of the facts and of logic. In John Rawls, there is the person behind the veil of ignorance, who does not know what position she occupies in the situation for which she is prescribing. In all these last three cases, there is the postulation, as the source of the moral demand, of a being who is without ordinary human limitations, and it is plausible to suggest that these are all survivals of a worldview in which it was God who played this role.”

Source: “Ethics and Religion: Two Kantian Arguments” (2011), pp. 158-159