Abstract
Some philosophers have maintained that even if John R. Searle’s attempted derivation of an evaluative proposition from purely descriptive premises is successful, moral ought would not have been derived. Searle agrees. I will argue that if Searle has successfully derived “ought,” then, based on various approaches taken towards the content of “morality,” this is moral ought. I will also trace out some of the benefits of a successful derivation of moral ought in relation to natural law ethics. I sketch a possible derivation of moral obligations based on one of the basic goods in natural law ethics (i.e., friendship) that resembles Searle’s attempted derivation of an individual’s obligation to keep her promise to someone else. I also sketch a possible derivation of moral obligations based on another of the basic goods in natural law ethics – knowledge. This derivation may not parallel Searle’s attempted derivation as closely as the derivations based on friendship, but it seems to at least involve the derivation of moral obligations from all non-moral premises.
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Notes
John R. Searle, “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’” The Philosophical Review, Vol.73, No.1 (1964), pp.43–58.
The following represent only some of the philosophical responses to the attempted derivation: James Thomson & Judith Thomson, “How not to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’” The Philosophical Review, Vol.73, No.4 (1964), pp.512–16; R. M. Hare, “The Promising Game,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, No.70 (1964), reprinted in W.D. Hudson, ed., The Is-Ought Question: A Collection of Papers on the Central Problem in Moral Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1969,79), pp.144–56; A.C. Genova, “Institutional Facts and Brute Facts,” Ethics, Vol.81, No.1 (1970), pp.36–54; Ken Witkowsi, “The ‘Is-Ought’ Gap: Deduction or Justification?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol.36, No.2 (1975), pp.233–45; T.D. Crawford, “On the Uses of ‘Is’ and ‘Ought,’” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol.39, No.4 (1979), pp.592–94.
For a reformulation of the attempted derivation, and responses to some of the criticisms, see John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp.175–198.
To be sure, Searle is not the only philosopher who has attempted to derive “ought” from “is.” See, for example, Alan Gewirth, “The Basis and Content of Human Rights,” The Philosophy of Human Rights, ed. Morton E. Winston (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989), pp.181–201. Gewirth’s attempted derivation is certainly another worthwhile project, but I cannot pursue that investigation in this paper.
Ralph McInerny, Aquinas on Human Action: A Theory of Practice (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 1992). John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis, “Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence,Vol.32 (1987).
Searle, “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’” p.54–55.
Ibid., p.57.
Ibid.
Searle, Speech Acts, p.185.
Ibid.
Ibid., p.187.
Ibid.
Searle, “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’” pp.43–49.
Searle, Speech Acts, pp.179–80, 188.
Ibid., pp.180–81.
Ibid.
Searle, “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’” p.44.
Ibid., pp.44–45.
Ibid., p.45.
Ibid., p.46, n.5, p.47.
Ibid., pp.46–48.
Ibid., p.48.
Searle, Speech Acts, p.188.
Ibid., p.187.
Ibid., p.188.
Ken Witkowski, “The ‘Is-Ought’ Gap: Deduction or Justification?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol.36, No.2 (1975), pp.233–34.
Ibid., p.234.
Ibid.
Ibid., p.241.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp.241–42. Searle, Speech Acts, p.188–89.
Witkowski, “The ‘Is-Ought’ Gap: Deduction or Justification?,” p.243.
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, pp.59–80, 87. Grisez, Boyle, and Finnis, “Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends,” pp.105–07. “Knowledge,” it would seem, implies a standard of truth. To break one’s promise is to act contrary to the assurance that one has provided the recipient of the promise. If X assures Y that he will do Z, and, without good reason, fails to do Z, then the proposition that “X will do Z” is false, and the assurance hollow. It looks like some natural law ethicists would say that an aspect or property of X’s promise (i.e., knowledge) has intrinsic worth and provides a criterion for moral judgments. When X makes a promise (and gives Y assurance that “X will do Z” is true) that implies a standard of truth. Also notice that if some aspect or property of promising has intrinsic value, then that aspect or property would have intrinsic value, whether or not a full-blown ethical theory has been developed based exclusively on that value, or one based on that and other values. The point, here, is that the act of promising itself [or some aspect(s) of it] could have intrinsic value, and that could be sufficient to ensure that a successfully derived obligation to keep a promise is a moral obligation. Let us not be too hasty in concluding that the object of Searle’s derivation cannot be moral ought. Depending on the nature of morality, it could very well be moral ought.
A.C. Genova, “Institutional Facts and Brute Values,” Ethics, Vol.81, No.1 (1970), p.37.
Ibid., p.40.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p.41.
Ibid., p.44. Original emphasis.
Ibid., pp.43–44.
Ibid., pp.44, 46.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp.44–45. Original emphasis. Searle, Speech Acts, p.194–95.
Genova, “Institutional Facts and Brute Values, “ pp.44–45.
Ibid., p.44–45.
See n.5, above.
A contemporary Thomist, McInerny, disagrees with Grisez by maintaining that the self-evident basic goods and first principle of practical reason are moral principles. Ralph McInerny, Aquinas on Human Action, pp.113–14, 119–21, 123–24. See, also, Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, Revised Edition (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), pp.35, 41, 44–45. Grisez and Finnis, on the other hand, maintain that basic goods such as “knowledge,” “friendship,” etc., as well as the first principle of practical reason are only basic practical principles, and that the first principle of morality is “integral human fulfillment,” which is said to be logically posterior to the basic goods and other basic practical principles. See Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis, “Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol.32 (1987), pp.107–08, 121–22, 125, 128, 148. In his paper “A Critique of Russell Hittinger’s Book, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory,” The New Scholasticism, Vol.62 (1988), pp.445–46, Grisez seems to be suggesting, in response to Hittinger, that moral good can be located prior to Grisez’s own first principle of morality. This claim by Grisez is a bit mystifying, and it does not seem to be supported by, or even consistent with, his accompanying reference to the paper that he co-authored with John Finnis and Joseph Boyle entitled “Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends,” VIII B., pp.126–27.
Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, p.88.
Germain Grisez and Russell Shaw, Beyond the New Morality: The Responsibilities of Freedom Third Edition. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p.81.
Searle, Speech Acts, pp.175–76. I believe that this important point is overlooked by Witkowski, who appears to be suggesting that no evaluative statements can be justified on the basis of purely factual statements.
Ibid. Original emphasis.
See Ibid., pp.131–49.
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I would like to thank an anonymous referee for Philosophia for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Wall, E. Searle’s Derivation, Natural Law, and Moral Relativism. Philosophia 36, 237–249 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9104-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9104-6