Drawing heavily on recent empirical research to update R.M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism and expand Hare's treatment of 'intuitive level rules, ' Gary Varner considers in detail the theory's application to animals while arguing that Hare should have recognized a hierarchy of …
R.M. Hare was one of the most important ethical theorists of the 20th century, and one of his graduate students, Peter Singer, became famous for his writings on animals and personhood. Singer now says that he endorses Hare's "two-level utilitarianism," and he has invoked the the…
"[Varner] presents a new philosophical defense of two-level utilitarianism and its metaethical foundation (universal prescriptivism), and he significantly expands Hare's account of how 'intuitive level rules' function in moral thinking, based on recent empirical research. The bo…