Hare's Prescriptivism and Universalizability

Richard Mervyn Hare's The Language of Morals (1952) proposes universal prescriptivism as an alternative non-cognitivist theory that aims to preserve much of the rigor and rational structure of moral argument that emotivism, in Hare's view, could not adequately capture. Hare agrees with Ayer and Stevenson that moral judgments are not descriptive, fact-stating assertions but belong instead to the broader logical category of prescriptive language — language whose primary function is to guide action, of which ordinary imperatives ("Shut the door!") are the paradigm case. But Hare insists that moral judgments are a distinctive species of prescription, marked off from mere commands or expressions of personal preference by an additional formal property: universalizability.