Richard Hare, 82; Influential British Philosopher

Richard Mervyn Hare, 82, an influential British philosopher who believed passionately that there are rational justifications for behaving morally, died Jan. 29 at his home near Oxford, England, of undisclosed causes.

Hare, a longtime professor of philosophy at Oxford University, was an advocate of “prescriptivism,” arguing that moral beliefs can be defended through objective reasoning.

He outlined his ideas rejecting the notion that moral statements are simply expressions of emotion in books such as “The Language of Morals” in 1952 and “Freedom and Reason” in 1963.

Prescriptivism--a term derived from Hare’s belief that moral judgments prescribe specific, universal courses of action--was influential through the 1950s and 1960s. It later fell from fashion, but Hare never wavered. His life’s ambition, he said, was to find a way of answering moral questions rationally.

Hare enlisted in the Royal Artillery during World War II, was captured after the fall of Singapore in 1942, and spent three years as a Japanese prisoner of war forced to help build the notorious Thai-Burma Railway.

After the war, he taught at Oxford, and from 1983 to 1994 was a research professor at the University of Florida.