  There is further unclarity in the notion of a preference. Hare had long distinguished being in pain, to which one may be indifferent (if the pain is slight, or if one has undergone prefrontal lobotomy), and suffering, which entails having a desire (not necessarily overriding) to escape it. Now it is plausible to suppose that, of any variety of suffering, there is such a thing as what it is like to be subject to it. (So Hare can write of a group of sufferers, “I shall not know what it will be like for them … unless I know what it is like to suffer like that”; 1981: 92.) This applies so long as the desire that is an aspect of suffering is of a kind that is bound to be felt. Yet we all are subject to an indefinite range of desires that are dispositional; and even occurrent desires may be manifest in how we think or act without being felt. Hare appears to overlook such variations when he writes of preferences in general, “If I do not feel the preference with the intensity which the person in the situation feels it, I have not fully represented his situation to myself” (Seanor &amp; Fotion 1988: 288). And yet, when he considers failures to act as one prescribes (e.g., 1981: 21–2), he shows an awareness that how one chooses and acts can be equally indicative as anything one feels of what one prefers. No doubt this could be sorted out, and precisely by recognizing (as Hare doubtless could have, though the language is not his) that the criteria of preference are multiple. However, this would have for him two drawbacks. First, it multiplies the possible ways in which one might count as “identifying with” another. Hare has written, “In identifying myself with some person either actually or hypothetically, I identify with his prescriptions” (1981: 96–7). Yet another way might be imagining what it is like to be him at some time or in some situation—which is different, though it may (to the extent that his preferences come to his mind as objects of attention) be overlapping.  Secondly, it confirms a doubt that one is likely to have anyway about the comparability of preferences. If I feel like doing something but, for no compelling reason, fail to do it, whereas you do it without any prior or accompanying consciousness of the preference, who has the stronger preference to do it? The question is liable to be unanswerable.