It is not easy to be original when fashioning an ethical theory. For that reason, it would not be surprising if the contractual theory John Rawls set forth in A Theory of Justice turned out, as R. M. Hare and others have maintained, to be practically equivalent with the prescriptivist theory Hare developed over a decade ago in Freedom and Reason. 1 Throughout his work, Rawls himself acknowledges his debt to many different people and in fact in his preface modestly disclaims any originality for his views. Nevertheless, I wish to argue that Hare's and Rawls' theories do not provide the same solutions to specific moral problems and that it is Rawls' ideal of fairness which serves to distinguish his contractual theory from Hare's prescriptivism.
Central to Hare's ethical theory is his account of the logical properties of moral judgements, that is, their universalizability and their prescriptivity. 2 A moral judgment is said to be universalizable in the sense that it "logically commits the speaker to making a similar judgement about anything which is exactly like the subject of the original judgement or like it in the relevant respects. The relevant respects are those which formed the grounds of the original judgement." In virtue of their prescriptivity, moral judgements are said to entail imperatives and normally lead to action. From which it follows that, "If a man does what he says he ought not to, though perfectly able to resist the temptation to do it, then there is something wrong with what he says, as well as with what he does." Thus on Hare's view a moral judgement not only presupposes a principle (the universalizabih'ty requirement) it also leads to action (the prescriptivity requirement).
This explicit account of the logical properties of moral judgements, however, does not reveal all that Hare thinks is built into the ordinary