  Hare never said that ethical statements are imperatives; however, it is striking that non-descriptive or evaluative meaning is defined in terms of imperatives. This at once gave a clear sense to his endorsement of Hume’s denial that one can derive an “ought” from an “is”. It also coincided, at least in appearance, with Kant, and was to become essential for later developments that brought results comparable to Kant’s. However, a Humean who lacked Kant’s belief in a purely rational will might prefer to make ethical statements more loosely expressive of wish or desire, or even aspiration; and this could avoid what is everyone’s first objection to prescriptivism, that, intuitively, “I ought to φ” does not entail “I will φ” (expressing intention). Hare took courage from the fact that Socrates and Aristotle incur much the same objection; as he liked to urge, Socrates wasn’t simply making a mistake. His initial reply was that cases of failing to try to do what one admits one ought to do may involve psychological incapacity, or an off-color use of “ought” that sheds its full prescriptive meaning. He was to return more fully to the issue in a chapter of his second book, Freedom and Reason (1963), and again in a late encyclopedia article, “Weakness of the Will” (1992). In this last piece he acknowledges that different things go wrong in different cases. At times, the true story may even involve something like Plato’s partition of the soul (which was designed to accommodate conscious self-contradiction).