A British-born classicist and ethicist, John E. Hare, is the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. He is the author of The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (1996), a prize-winning book in which he develops an account of the need for God’s help in meeting the moral demands of which God is the source. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took first class honors, Dr. Hare studied at Princeton University on a Watkins Fellowship and earned his Ph.D. in classical philosophy in 1975. Before going up to university, he had taught for a year at a high school in Kashmir, and he began his collegiate teaching career at Lehigh University as a lecturer in philosophy in 1974. Named a full professor in 1987, he moved on to Calvin College as a professor of philosophy in 1989, a position he held until appointed to his Yale chair in 2003. He also has been a visiting member of the University of Michigan philosophy faculty, a visiting fellow in the humanities at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, an American Philosophical Association Congressional Fellow, and a staff associate on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa, Dr. Hare is the recipient of a Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, a Pew Evangelical Fellowship, and a senior fellowship awarded by the Center for Philosophy of Religion and Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He delivered the Stob Lecture at Calvin College, the first lecture in the college’s Calvin Lecture series, one of four 2005 Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, and the Plantinga Lecture at the University of Notre Dame in 2008. The author of some sixty articles published in scholarly journals, he is also the author or co-author of six books. In addition to The Moral Gap, which won the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies Book Prize, they include early works on Plato’s Euthyphro (1981) and (with Carey B. Joynt) Ethics and International Affairs 1982), as well as God’s Call (2001), a discussion of the divine command theory of morality, Why Bother Being Good? (2002), a non-technical apologetic for Christian beliefs, which argues that morality cannot be adequately grounded in reason alone but needs a firm basis in faith (or something that will do theology’s work), and God and Morality: A Philosophical History, which was published in 2007 by Blackwell and evaluates the ethical theories of Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Kant, and the author’s father, the utilitarian philosopher R.M. Hare, with close attention to the similarities among the philosophers and the relationship of their work to theism. Dr. Hare also has published liturgical compositions for choir and organ. He is currently writing a book comparing divine command theory and natural law theory in Christianity and Islam, with reference to some current work in evolutionary psychology.
