John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part IX, Prescriptive Realism

David Baggett

Hare finishes the first chapter of his book by laying out prescriptive realism as it connects with the concessions he’s listed (E1-3 and R1-3). He returns to the example of Peter and Sue. Peter judges that the relationship with Sue is worth saving and that this is what God wants from him. The judgment is not merely a report that he feels pulled towards reconciliation, but it expresses his acceptance of norms that prescribe that kind of response to his situation. He is judging that the situation deserves this kind of response.

There are three elements here: first, the initial construal of his situation as calling for reconciliation; next, the concern that is taken up into the construal; and then the endorsement of the construal in his judgment. He is claiming in this judgment a Kantian kind of objectivity (E1). He is judging that people like him should respond to this kind of situation in this kind of way.

He is also attending to the situation in a way that involves self-discipline, an “unselfing,” since his natural inclinations tend towards giving up (R1).

In making the judgment he is also claiming objectivity in a different sense, claiming that he is responding to a pull by the relationship that is really there outside his present imperfect attempts at evaluation (E2).

But this pull is not independent of him in the sense that it would be there whether he is there or not. This kind of pull is from relationships in which humans are embedded, and would not be there without them (R2). Suppose Sue is not a religious believer. Peter and Sue can still agree that reconciliation would be good, even though Peter will identify God’s call here and Sue will not. Prescriptive realism is not itself committed to theism.  

Finally, when Peter endorses the feeling of pull, he is endorsing not just his feeling on this particular occasion, but the whole set of norms that prescribe the kind of response (E3). In saying that God wants him to be reconciled, he is not merely claiming to report God’s mind, but claiming to be part of a structure that he accepts, a structure in which God calls people to the same kind of faithfulness that God has, and in which living that way is consistent with their happiness.

God’s call comes to Peter, Hare is supposing, through the pull of the relationship with Sue. In the same way magnetic force cn come to an iron ring through other iron rings that are attracted to the original magnet. This is Plato’s image in Ion 536a. So there are three levels of the analysis: first, the cosmic, where we talk about the call; next the level of the human species or the community, of nature or second nature, where we talk about the kind of felt response the norms prescribe; and last the individual, where we talk about the initial response and the endorsement by the agent himself, the endorsement not only of the particular attraction but of the whole structure in which people are attracted in this way.

Hare hopes to have shown that this three-level analysis also gives us promising conceptual space for an account of God’s authority in human morality. Roughly, we can say that God created us with an emotional and affective make-up, such that we feel the pull of God’s call. But value judgment is more than just feeling such a response; it requires us to endorse or to refuse to endorse this response. Unfortunately, we are now in a condition in which the response, both immediate and reflective, is skewed by self-preference. Having identified the source of the pull towards the good, however, as God’s call, we are now in a more promising position to identify when it is in fact operative. To this Hare turns in Chapter 2.

Part 8