Professor Hare maintains that the principal function of moral judgments is to furnish a guide to choices and conduct, and that to perform this function they must be interpreted, not as indicatives, whose function is said to be merely that of stating what is taken to be the case, but as imperatives, i.e. as prescriptsJ In his article "Imperative Sentences ''2 he argues that on this interpretation they can still be treated of logically, and so given a rightful place in philosophy. In reply to the criticism that imperative sentences are not applicable to past times, and thus, as different from moral principles, lack universality, he argues in a later article entitled "Universal and Past-Tense Prescriptives ''3 that some prescriptions are to be taken as fiats, and that fiats, unlike imperatives, are independent of person, place, and times. He states that it is as a prescription of this type that a moral judgment is to be understood. This, it may be noted, modifies an earlier position of his in regard to the nature of moral judgments, for it takes a command to be a particular, and a moral judgment to have the force of a command. 4 The position that a moral judgment containing "ought" entails a command is, however, retained. When "ought" is used evaluatively, "I ought to do X" is said to entail the (alleged) command "Let me do X, ''s and, to generalize from the illustration given, 6 "You ought not to do X" (with "X" being, of course, understood to symbolize only such action in regard to which "ought" or "ought not" would be considered properly evaluatively used), "Do not do X." I shall argue that (1) "Let me do X" as a verbal response to the moral judgment "I ought to do X" is not to be taken as an imperative sentence that is entailed by that judgment, and (2) Hare's position that "You ought not to do X" entails as a command "Do not do X" is, at least for those of a certain moral conviction, incompatible both with what he takes to be the negation of an imperative sentence, and with the implication of his position that "You may (in the permissive sense) do X" is correctly renderable as "I don't tell you not to do X. ''7 To avoid repetition, it will be understood throughout the rest of the paper that "ought" will be used only in the moral sense.