The Limits of Kindness By CASPAR HARE

Abstract

In his The Limits of Kindness, Caspar Hare attempts to make progress in normative ethics by taking what he calls a foundational approach. This approach involves starting with the normative claims that are regarded as ‘prima facie obvious’ as our starting points. These claims will then be combined with minimal assumptions about rationality in order to reach conclusions about ‘the thing to do’ (222). Hare then proceeds in the three sections of his book to address issues about (i) saving others from harm when we know the identity of the persons in peril, (ii) saving others from harm when we do not know the identity of the persons in peril and (iii) the effect of distance and proximity on our reasons to aid persons in peril. There is no doubt that this is a sophisticated and innovative approach to normative ethics. Hare’s use of decision theory, counterpart theory and probability theory is quite impressive. But, of course, his use of these sorts of tools belies the impression that one gets from the introduction, namely, that this is a book that will be accessible, and that Hare will get surprisingly substantive results from minimal input. Rather, Hare starts with what he takes to be minimal normative assumptions and then uses quite technical and sophisticated philosophical machinery to derive normative results generally in line with some version of utilitarianism.