John Hare

Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School

John Hare is a British classicist, ethicist, and currently Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School. Educated at Oxford and Princeton, he was Professor of Philosophy at Lehigh University from 1975 to 1989. He was Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College from 1989 to 2003. He has been Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University since 2003. Hare's best-known book, The Moral Gap, develops an account of the need for God's assistance in meeting the moral demand of which God is the source. In God's Call he discusses the divine command theory of morality, analyzing texts in Duns Scotus, Kant and contemporary moral theory. In Why Bother Being Good? he gives a non-technical treatment of the questions, 'Can we be morally good?' and 'Why should we be morally good?'. He has also written a commentary on Plato's Euthyhphro in the Bryn Mawr series, and Ethics and International Affairs, with Carey B. Joynt. His interests extend to ancient philosophy, medieval Franciscan philosophy, Kant, Kierkegaard, contemporary ethical theory, the theory of the atonement, medical ethics and international relations (he has worked in a teaching hospital and for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives) and aesthetics (he is a published composer of church music).