[Richard Mervyn] Hare [1919–2002] was born in Backwell in Somerset (now Avon) in 1919. His upbringing and early life were conventionally English upper-middle class; he was a scholar at Rugby School, and from there went on, in 1937, to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was again awarded a scholarship, graduating in 1947 with a double first in Classics. The four-year degree was interrupted by the outbreak of war; in 1939, despite his pacifist views, he volunteered for service with the Royal Artillery. He served in the Indian Mountain Artillery until 1942, when he was taken by the Japanese as a prisoner of war for three years—first in Singapore, and then working on the Burma-Thailand railway. This experience marked him both personally and professionally, the main effect being to strengthen his belief that philosophy, and especially the field of ethics, had a central obligation to help with people's choices, to help them live their lives as moral beings—not only in the relatively benign world of the professional philosopher, but in the much more challenging world outside academia.

On returning to England in 1945 he finished his degree, and was elected to a Fellowship by Balliol College. In 1963 he was made Wilde Reader in Natural Religion, and in 1964 was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He remained at Balliol until 1966, when he was elected White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, which necessitated a move to Corpus Christi College. In 1983 he retired from his Oxford posts and became Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville until 1994, travelling regularly between Florida and his home at Ewelme in South Oxfordshire, where he died in 2002....

...Hare recognised that the primary rôle of moral judgements is to prescribe courses of action, and argued that these prescriptions are made distinctively moral largely by being essentially universalisable; that is, they don't refer to a particular individual, but apply to any and all moral agents... His approach has thus become known as prescriptivism.

Hare is also well known for his defence of a version of utilitarianism that draws upon both act and rule versions, and for his resulting two-level analysis of moral thinking. This involves the claim that people are capable of two types of moral deliberation, illustrated by two extreme characters. The "archangel" thinks critically and makes rational decisions using the (act-)utilitarian principle directly; archangels have "superhuman powers of thought, superhuman knowledge, and no human weaknesses"...

...The rule-utilitarian "prole", on the other hand, thinks intuitively and acts according to rule-like dispositions. Proles are "totally incapable of critical thinking..."...They have all the human weaknesses...lacked by the archangel, and to an extreme degree.

In real life, we are capable of (and need) both—though we are not very good at the archangel-type reasoning. Which we use, and when, depends upon circumstances and our individual abilities. (from information on the Philosophy around the Web site developed by Dr. Peter J. King, Pembroke College, Oxford)

His published work includes The Language of Morals (1952), Freedom and Reason (1963), Practical Inferences (1971), Moral Thinking (1981), Essays on Political Morality (1989), and Sorting Out Ethics (1997).