John E. Hare

John Edmund Hare (born 26 July 1949) is a British classicist, philosopher, and ethicist, and the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. He held the Noah Porter chair from 2003 until his retirement in 2023, with concurrent appointments in Yale's departments of Classics, Philosophy, and Religious Studies.

The son of the British utilitarian philosopher R. M. Hare, John Hare has worked on an ethical theory that integrates Kantian deontological ethics with divine command theory. Unlike his father's secular philosophy, Hare's work is specifically Christian and grounds moral obligation in God's authority. He is best known for his concept of the "moral gap"—the distance between the ethical demand placed on human beings and their natural capacity to meet it—and for his trilogy of works on ethics and Trinitarian theology: The Moral Gap (1996), God's Command (2015), and Unity and the Holy Spirit (2023).

The author of over sixty articles in scholarly journals, Hare has worked on ancient philosophy, medieval Franciscan philosophy, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, contemporary ethical theory, the theory of the atonement, medical ethics, international relations, and aesthetics.

Education Hare received a Bachelor of Arts with honours in Literae Humaniores from Balliol College, Oxford in 1971.

Divine command theory Hare is one of the foremost contemporary defenders of divine command theory, the position that moral obligations derive from God's commands. In God's Call (Eerdmans, 2001), he discusses divine command theory with attention to texts in Duns Scotus, Kant, and contemporary moral theory, and argues against J. B. Schneewind's secularized reading of Kant's philosophy. In God's Command (2015), he defends a prescriptive realist version of divine command theory, arguing that moral obligations are not merely subjective expressions but real prescriptions rooted in divine authority, and that this framework is compatible with human moral autonomy.

Philosophical history of ethics In God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Blackwell, 2007), Hare evaluates the ethical theories of Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant, and R. M. Hare, arguing that these four figures — representing virtue theory, divine command theory, deontology, and consequentialism respectively — share deeper theological premises than is typically acknowledged. Hare contends that their ethical theories are less opposed to one another than they appear when their original theological contexts are recovered.

Personal life Hare describes his lifelong project as an attempt to reconcile the deep personal piety of his mother and his father's commitment to the life of philosophical reason. He is a published composer of liturgical music for choir and organ, and has taught courses in theological aesthetics, using music — including works of Beethoven — to illustrate philosophical concepts. Following his retirement, he expressed an intention to write a non-academic book for "fellow pilgrims," inspired by walking a portion of the Camino de Santiago with his sister.

Selected bibliography

Books Ethics and International Affairs, with Carey B. Joynt (The Macmillan Press, 1982). Plato's Euthyphro (Thomas Library, Bryn Mawr College, 1985). The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2001). Why Bother Being Good? The Place of God in the Moral Life (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002). God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). God's Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Unity and the Holy Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Awards and fellowships Junior Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, Lehigh University, 1981 Honorary member, Phi Beta Kappa, 1979 Congressional Fellow, American Philosophical Association, 1981–82 Pew Evangelical Fellowship, 1991–92 Institute for Advanced Christian Studies Book Prize, 1997 Senior Fellow, Center for Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre Dame, 1998–99 and 2008–09 Calvin Lecturer, 1999–2000 Stob Lecturer, 1999 Gifford Lecturer, University of Glasgow, 2005 Plantinga Lecturer, 2008