Searle’s treatment of the humble sense of ‘ought’ is...

Searle’s treatment of the humble sense of ‘ought’ is reminiscent of another treatment of these matters in the writings of A. N. Prior, who noted that, from the premise that “Tea drinking is common in England”, one could validly infer that “either tea drinking is common in England or all New Zealanders ought to be shot”.[^19] Of course, this inference constitutes no contribution whatsoever to the solution of the meta-ethical problem regarding the nature of moral propositions.

To be sure, Searle’s derivation of an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ is not as vacuous as Prior’s reductio But it is similarly irrelevant to ethics. For it merely tells us something about the meaning of the word ‘promise’. Promising means undertaking an obligation, and undertaking an obligation means that one ought to do whatever one has obliged oneself to do. The problem is that this sense of obligation falls short of the sort of obligation that involves moral normativity.

As Searle admits, “whether the entire institution of promising is good or evil, and whether the obligations undertaken in promising are overridden by other outside considerations are questions which are external to the institution itself”.[^20] Such external considerations are very often precisely of a moral nature.

There is something odd, then, about Searle’s attempt to examine what he describes as the general problem of the naturalistic fallacy, for the classical interest of philosophers in this fallacy has been focused precisely on its properly ethical dimension. So it was for Hume,[^21] for Moore,[^22] and for Popper.[^23] These authors leave no doubt that they are dealing with an ethical problem. The problem with Searle’s treatment of the naturalistic fallacy is brought out nicely by D. D.

Raphael writing on the justification of political obligations. Why does the citizen have a duty to obey the laws of the State? Raphael points out that there is an answer to this question which is “simple and obvious”: “It follows logically that if the State is authoritative , i.e.