  An early contribution to the debate was made by Richard Hare (1952, esp. 146–149, but see also Stevenson 1963, and Blackburn 1984 and 1993, ch. 11). He imagined a scenario with two facts which he assumed could co-exist. The first is the fact that different sets of speakers systematically apply “good” to different persons and actions and on the basis of different criteria of application with little overlap. The second is the fact that they all use “good” as, in Hare’s phrase, a “general adjective of commendation”. According to Hare, the first fact implies that there is no single property which “good” is used to refer to by all speakers in the scenario. That is, supposing that the term is used to refer at all, the fact suggests that it refers to different properties for different speakers. This in turn means that their disputes about how to apply “good” need not reflect any conflicts of belief, as the belief that an item has one property is compatible with its lacking some other property (provided that the properties are appropriately distinct). Hare’s point, however, was that, in virtue of the second fact, it would still be plausible to interpret those speakers as being in in a genuine moral dispute when arguing about whether to apply “good” or not. Hare took this conclusion to suggest that moral disagreements are best seen as clashes of commands rather than as conflicts of belief and provided the argument in support of his non-cognitivist view that the (“primary”) function of moral terms and sentences is to express such commands.