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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Varieties of Normativity: an Essay On Social Ontology III. Searle and Obligations In one of his earliest articles, “How to Derive ‘Ought’ From ‘Is’”,[^14] Searle claims that he has found a way of showing that from purely descriptive premises we can derive normative conclusions. In other words, he has shown how to bridge the gap between “is” and “ought”, between matters of fact and judgments of value.

The best place to begin our discussion is Searle’s analysis in Speech Acts of what he calls “The Naturalistic Fallacy Fallacy”: “the fallacy of supposing that it is logically impossible for any set of statements of the kind usually called descriptive to entail a statement of the kind usually called evaluative”.[^15] The thesis that Searle wishes to defend is, in his own words, that: the view that descriptive statements cannot entail evaluative statements, though relevant to ethics, is not a specifically ethical theory; it is a general theory about the illocutionary force of utterances of which ethical utterances are only a special case.[^16] How can I become obliged by merely uttering certain words, say, “I promise to mow your lawn”?

Searle’s gambit, in embryo, is as follows. He wants us to see the traditional problem of the naturalistic fallacy as a particular case of a putatively more general problem in speech act theory. It is then this latter problem, of the normativity associated with speech acts, which Searle sets out to solve - not, as many authors have too quickly assumed, the traditional problem of moral normativity.

Searle himself is emphatic about the fact that whatever relevance his views might have regarding moral normativity would be a mere side-effect of his concern with a logical problem about the illocutionary force of certain utterances. As a propaedeutic warning, he tells us that we must avoid “lapsing into talk about ethics or morals.

We are concerned with ‘ought’ not ‘morally ought’”.[^17] And again: “Let us remind ourselves at the outset that ‘ought’ is a humble English auxiliary, ‘is’ an English copula; and the question whether ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is’ is as humble as the words themselves”.[^18] The humble sense of ‘ought’ with which Searle is concerned is the same sense as that in which, when playing chess, you ought to move your bishop diagonally.

We note in passing that this sense of ‘ought’, interesting as it might be, is at best of indirect significance for moral philosophy.