What prescriptivists claim




Hare originally proposed prescriptivism as a kind of amendment to emotivism. Like emotivists, Hare believes that moral discourse is not primarily informative or fact-stating. But whereas emotivists claim that moral language is mainly intended to express feelings or to influence behavior, Hare believes that the central purpose of moral talk is to guide behavior by telling someone what to do. Its main purpose is to "prescribe" (recommend) a certain act, not to get someone to do that act or to express one's personal feelings or attitudes.

To illustrate the prescriptivist view, consider the moral sentence "Suicide is wrong." According to moral realism, such a sentence claims there to be some objective property of "wrongness" associated with the act of suicide. According to some versions of emotivism, such a sentence merely expresses an attitude of the speaker; it only means something like "Boo on suicide!" But according to prescriptivism, the statement "Suicide is wrong" means something more like "Do not commit suicide." What it expresses is thus not primarily a description or an emotion, but an imperative. General value terms like "good", "bad", right", "wrong" and "ought" usually also have descriptive and emotive meanings, but these are not its primary meanings according to prescriptivists.

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