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Facts, Promising and Obligation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
John Searle attempts to show through a consideration of promising that at least some ‘ought’ statements can be derived from ‘is’ statements. He thinks (1) that you can determine on purely factual grounds that a person has made a promise, and (2) that it follows logically from the statement that a person has made a promise that he has at least a prima facie obligation to do the thing he promised to do. I agree with (2) but not with (1).
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1975
References
1 ‘How to Derive “Ought” from “Is”’, Philosophical Review, 73, 1964, pp. 48–58.Google Scholar
2 I follow Antony Flew in this, but my strategy is in other respects different (Flew, A. G. N., ‘On Not Deriving “Ought” from “Is”’, Analysis, 25, 1964).Google Scholar
3 Hudson, W. D. (‘The “is—ought” Controversy’, Analysis, 25, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar provides an alternative reply. He argues that the statement that a person has made a promise (or atio recta) is not evaluative because we can be forced by the facts to accept it, but that it does imply an evaluative statement, namely, that the person has a prima facie obligation to keep the promise. His response, like Searle's, would fail if it can be shown that we cannot be forced by the facts to acknowledge that a promise has been made.
4 For a more extensive defence of this point see Peter Singer, ‘The Triviality of the Debate over “Is-Ought” and the Definition of “Moral”’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 01 1973.Google Scholar