  What makes Hare arguably unique, though at the same time closer in approach to Kant than to the utilitarians whose ally he became, was that he combined this insistence upon the ineluctability of individual choice with an optimistic view of the possibilities of making choices rationally. (Indeed, he played with the idea that Kant could have been a utilitarian, 1993b.) What reconciles these two features of moral thinking, in his view, is nothing other than the logic of the practical “ought”. That this is crucial and central was already a claim within his early and unpublished monograph “An Essay in Monism”. There, criticizing “materialists” (among whom he counts utilitarians) for letting “the word ‘ought’ slip out of their vocabulary”, he remarks,