  Hare was aware that such an inference goes through unproblematically (and uninterestingly) once we limit ourselves to the descriptive meaning of “bad” that is spelled out in B*; but, of course, we want to have an inference to a prescriptive, and not just a descriptive, conclusion. Eriksson now draws on a point that is already recurrent in Hare: in virtue of universalizability, S faces a problem if he wishes to mean 1. prescriptively while refusing to mean 3. prescriptively. If he is to forbid A’s lying to him, but not his lying to A, he will need to identify some relevant alternative to B* that fits A’s lying to him, but not his lying to A; this is where descriptive meaning becomes crucial. What here defines “relevance”? A mere difference of identity between S and A is excluded from counting as relevant by universalizability. Yet no doubt S is also distinguishable from A by various general features, and any of these might serve to make a permissible distinction between the two cases. Here we need to appeal to the full force of the Golden Rule Argument that we shall come to in the next section: what is likely to exclude the speaker from making some artificial distinction that permits him to lie to A, but not A to lie to him, will be his inability sincerely and prudently to select his prescriptions in accordance with it.