has the right to issue orders to its citizens and the right...

has the right to issue orders to its citizens and the right to receive obedience from them, the citizens are obliged to obey those orders”.[^24] Raphael rubs home the downright platitudinous character of this sort of answer: “the citizen is legally obliged to obey the law because the law is that which imposes legal obligations”.[^25] And then he compares this sort of answer with the passage in which Hamlet is asked by Polonius, “What do you read my lord?” and Hamlet replies, “Words, words, words”.

Though both answers are “formally correct”, as Raphael puts it, they tell us “virtually nothing”.[^26] Something similar happens with Searle’s derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’. The very meaning of promising is that one ought to do what one has promised to do. But this sense of ought is indeed humble, and it is dramatically different from the sense of ‘ought’ that has preoccupied moral philosophers throughout the ages.

In spite of his reminding us of the humble nature of the problem he seeks to solve, toward the end of his derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’, Searle asks: “what bearing does all this have on moral philosophy?” His answer deserves to be quoted in full, with emphasis added: At least this much: It is often claimed that no ethical statement can ever follow from a set of statements of fact.

The reason for this, it is alleged, is that ethical statements are a sub-class of evaluative statements, and no evaluative statements can ever follow from a set of statements of fact. The naturalistic fallacy as applied to ethics is just a special case of the general naturalistic fallacy. I have argued that the general claim that one cannot derive evaluative from descriptive statements is false.

I have not argued, or even considered, that specifically ethical or moral statements cannot be derived from statements of fact .[^27] Clever as Searle’s manoeuvre is, it nonetheless misrepresents the case that has traditionally been made by those who believe that there is an is/ought gap.

Classical moral philosophers have not subsumed the ethical problem under the general speech act problem in order then to show that, since there is a gap concerning that general problem, the gap must extend to the particular ethical version of the problem. It has been enough to point out that there is no way to bridge the gap in the particular case of morality. Searle is rather alone in his interest in the general naturalistic fallacy.