Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 13.07.1981, Síða 246

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Páll S. Árdal
injunction. He ought perhaps not to be going on with the game, because
there are other more pressing demands upon him. Thus, his wife might
be getting so bored that his relations with her are being endangered.
The ‘ought’ is binding only, on condition that it is accepted that Fischer
ought to go on playing, and play to win. But the obligation cannot be
derived from any strategic rules of a game. If the ‘ought’ that can be
derived from the alleged rules of the ‘promising game’ is the theoretical
‘ought’, then it does not help us to answer the moral questions ‘what
ought I to do?’ If, taken as an attempt to show that one can derive a
moral obligation in a manner analogous to the way in which one derives
ought statements of this kind within a game, Max Black’s attempt is
thus unsuccessful.
To think that one can solve the problem of what morally to do on a
particular occasion, by appealing to rules similar to rules of games, one
must presuppose the existence of these rules as determinate enough to
enable one to establish that a particular action ought to be done. This
is much more nearly true of certain legal contracts than of most ordi-
nary promises, and it seems to me to lead to an unduly conservative
assessment of the nature of morality if this difference between largely
rule-governed contracts and promises is not stressed. For it seems to
assume that the means for deciding what one ought to do are already
incorporated in the conventions ruling our moral practices. Even Rawls,
who, as I have indicated, is alive to this problem, seems to me to over-
emphasise the general obligation to keep promises in quite an unaccept-
able fashion. He allows that one may refrain from keeping a promise
if the consequences of keeping it “would have been very severe”.12 But
this entirely overlooks the fact that the obligation derives not so much
from the practices goveming promises in general as from the point of
the particular promise in question, which may be relatively trivial.
V
Searle, in his article How to Derive an ‘ought’ jrom an ‘is’,13 fails early
in his derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’ because he overemphasises the
power of purely linguistic conventions for imposing obligations upon
people. He fails in that article to stress sufficiently what I have called the
12 Rawls, op. cit.
13 The Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXIII, 1964.