Grice in the Lab: Tropic-Clistic-Phrastic-Neustic

Hare's claim to fame is his discovery of subatomic particles of logic -- just as explosive. He wrote about them for a festschrift for Urmson (whose "On Grading" and other papers Hare had found fascinating). He typed the whole thing. The editors objected: "These typings are too monstrous". Hare thus published the thing in Mind.

Grice was often seen in the lab -- experimenting with radicals, and ionised phrastic. The phrastic is the basic thing -- the 'saying' of the Greeks -- the former 'dictor' of Hare. The neustic is your attitude in saying it. "Play!". The tropic is the MODE in which you say it, imperative, or friendly, "Sugar?". The clistic is the lowering intonation to mark that the whole thing is ready to explode. Here in conversation with a man who loved Oxford more than Oxford loved him:


MAGEE. What is your favourite moral word, then?

HARE. Well, there's no one big simple answer. Irish
Murdoch in _The Sovereignty of Good_ is implying,
I suppose, that 'good' is her favourite moral word.
Kant found 'duty' especially nice. Rawls is enamoured
with 'fair' and 'just'. I've known people who like
'kind'. My all time favourite is 'ought' which is
simple, direct, and euphonic. [...]

MAGEE. Who are the more important philosophers who
disagree with you?

HARE. Should I name them! [chuckle]. Well one such man
is John Rawls, of Harvard. His _Theory of Justice_
has been much admired. And I'm as certain as can be
that he belongs to the opposite side. That is, he
does think that judgements of value can be derived
from statements of fact.

MAGEE. The cheek.

HARE. Indeed. Now. If you look at his book and ask, does
he _ever_ employ any valid deductive argument from
facts to values in order to show the truth of some
moral conclusion, I don't think he does. What he does
is appeal to intuitions, which is just as well for him,
I guess. Having brought up the way some of us have been,
we _are_ bound, admittedly, to *share* some of Rawls's
prejudices, as I would rather call them.

MAGEE. Can you give an example of his trickery here?

HARE. Well, he is talking of distribution of riches.
Like Nozick does, in _Anarchy, State, and Utopia_.
He works at Harvard too. Now, ain't it curious
that two people with such a similar background
should produce two books which are apparently
politically poles apart?

MAGEE. It is.

HARE. Well, it only goes to show that you can't depend
on the intuitions of an 'arvard prof, can you. And
both Rawls and Nozick appeal to intuitions. And
they reach almost opposite conclusions. Well, not
_really_ opposites. The polar opposite of Nozick is
that of Egalitarianism. And Rawls has not gone
completely egalitarian _yet_. Nozick says that we
have a right to accumulate as we wish, UNTIL, IF
IT SO HAPPENS, HUGE INEQUALITIES ARE PRODUCED BY
THE CUMULATIVE EFFECT of commercial exchanges. Rawls
comes in between. He says that if a position of
the least advantaged is "as good as it can be",
then he doesn't seem to mind much what happens to
the rich. We we have these three positions (for the
record, I don't agree with any of them -- but then
I'm Oxford). And the real funny thing is that
there's bound to be no argument (of the sort deployed
by Rawls and Nozick) that will settle the issue.
Sad, perhaps.

MAGEE. What ought one to do about that then?

HARE. Well, one ought to _think_. To be fair to Rawls,
he's got a nicey way of moral _thinking_. I wish
he used it sometimes, and not rely on intention as
he does. As Brian Barry said in his book on Rawls,
the 'moral' method of Rawls's is very similar
(in its _logical_ properties) to my own. If only
Rawls would _abjure_ intentions and use the method,
he'd do much better. The reason he doesn't is that
he thinks that if he did, he would end up as some kind
of an Utilitarian. And to him, this is fate worse than
death. His intuitions tell him he mustn't be a
Utilitarian. Them Americans bore me, some of them...
Intutions ain't enough. We need a _higher_ level,
as I call it, of moral thinking. One which can
_criticise_ intuitions. A critical level at which
we can take various opposing intuitions and work from
there.

MAGEE. It all looks pretty complicated to me.

HARE. Well, it would, wouldn't it. Which brings us back to
where we started. Take Rawls's 'fair'. We must first
elucidate what 'fair' means, or what _we_ mean when
we say that something (_anything_) is fair. Note quite
in the sense of 'my fair lady, mind! Or the fair sex
-- for as Ackerley wrote, which sex is that? All the
political and moral questions in people like Rawls
are bound to come to us in an amalgam, or melange,
of several different kinds of questions (semantical,
factual, and properly ethical).

Cheers,

JL