ABSTRACT
There has been a powerful stream of thought in the history of ethics since the Middle Ages which emphasises this essential freedom of the moral agent. Modern prescriptivism is usually associated with the work of Professor R.M. Hare, whose book The Language of Morals, with its successors, Freedom and Reason and Moral Thinking, is widely regarded as the most important ethical work of its time, and it is central to any discussion of modern moral philosophy. In this chapter, the author shall be dealing with objection in more detail later – the objection that according to prescriptivism just anything could be right or wrong – but let the author deal with it now by once again resorting to the analogy with science. The author shall now summarise the respects in which prescriptivism satisfies the conditions for an adequate moral theory.
