Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 13.07.1981, Page 248

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Páll S. Árdal
When one knows that a promise has been made, one has some reason
to believe that it ought to be kept, since most promises are not promises
to do what is immoral. No such presumption can be made about threats,
although some threats ought undoubtedly to be carried out. This is why
it seems correct to say that one ought to keep one’s promises, other
things being equal, but much less obviously proper to say that one ought
to carry out one’s threats, other things being equal.
The final step in Searle’s derivation is (5) ‘Jones ought to pay Smith
five dollars.’ We are told that this ‘ought’ is categorical, and that Jones
“ought to pay up period”. It seems that here we have derived a moral
obligation from factual premises, and this would be interesting. But in
his book Searle maintains “that the obligation to keep promises prob-
ably has no necessary connection with morality”.14 (This makes Searle’s
position closer to mine.) For, when replying to the charge that there is
an implicit conservatism in his account, Searle admits that a nihilist
could make the derivation. Referring to the nihilist’s argument, he
writes “In effect, it says that the obligation to keep a promise is always
overridden because of the alleged evil character of the institution. But
it does not deny the point that promises obligate, it only insists that the
obligation ought not to be fulfilled because of the extemal consideration
of self-fulfillment.”15 It thus turns out that in spite of the fact that Jones
ought to pay up period, he perhaps has no moral obligation to pay,
therefore, presumably it is not the case that he ought to pay, period.
Searle’s defence reveals that the ‘ought’ in “Jones ought to pay up,
period” is at best what I have called a theoretical ‘ought’. Fisher ought
to move the Queen, but of course it would be wrong for him to do this,
for he ought not to play chess. It is the latter ‘ought’ that could be the
moral ‘ought’. The statement that one ought morally to do something
has not been derived from an appeal to the rules of the practice. What-
ever one may say about Searle’s derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’, it does
not show how one may establish by logical steps actual moral obligation
by reference to an appeal to pre-existing social or linguistic conventions.
14 Speech Acts by John R. Searle, Cambridge, 1969, p. 188.
15 op. cit. pp. 188-89. Here, it seems, an agreement is reached between me and
Searle. For the nihilist, in thinking that one ought never to keep promises because
it is evil to do so, cannot maintain that there is a prima facie obligation to keep
promises. He can of course make use of the fact that other people think there is
such an obligation.