The Varieties of Normativity: an Essay On Social Ontology

III. Searle and Obligations

In one of his earliest articles, “How to Derive ‘Ought’ From ‘Is’”,[^14] Searle claims that he has found a way of showing that from purely descriptive premises we can derive normative conclusions. In other words, he has shown how to bridge the gap between “is” and “ought”, between matters of fact and judgments of value.

The best place to begin our discussion is Searle’s analysis inSpeech Acts of what he calls “The Naturalistic Fallacy Fallacy”: “the fallacy of supposing that it is logically impossible for any set of statements of the kind usually called descriptive to entail a statement of the kind usually called evaluative”.[^15] The thesis that Searle wishes to defend is, in his own words, that:

the view that descriptive statements cannot entail evaluative statements, though relevant to ethics, is not a specifically ethical theory; it is a general theory about the illocutionary force of utterances of which ethical utterances are only a special case.[^16]

How can I become obliged by merely uttering certain words, say, “I promise to mow your lawn”? Searle’s gambit, in embryo, is as follows. He wants us to see the traditional problem of the naturalistic fallacy as a particular case of a putatively more general problem in speech act theory. It is then this latter problem, of the normativity associated with speech acts, which Searle sets out to solve - not, as many authors have too quickly assumed, the traditional problem of moral normativity.

Searle himself is emphatic about the fact that whatever relevance his views might have regarding moral normativity would be a mere side-effect of his concern with alogical problem about the illocutionary force of certain utterances. As a propaedeutic warning, he tells us that we must avoid “lapsing into talk about ethics or morals. We are concerned with ‘ought’ not ‘morally ought’”.[^17] And again: “Let us remind ourselves at the outset that ‘ought’ is a humble English auxiliary, ‘is’ an English copula; and the question whether ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is’ is as humble as the words themselves”.[^18] The humble sense of ‘ought’ with which Searle is concerned is the same sense as that in which, when playing chess, youought to move your bishop diagonally. We note in passing that this sense of ‘ought’, interesting as it might be, is at best of indirect significance for moral philosophy.

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’sreductio But it is similarly irrelevant to ethics. For it merely tells us something about themeaning of the word ‘promise’. Promisingmeans undertaking an obligation, and undertaking an obligationmeans 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 amoral nature.

There is something odd, then, about Searle’s attempt to examine what he describes as thegeneral 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 thatif the State is authoritative , i.e. 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 lawis 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 thegeneral naturalistic fallacy.

In his famous article Searle states that he is going to show that the venerable view to the effect that ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is’ is flawed by presenting a counterexample to this view. He then says:

It is not of course to be supposed that a single counter-example can refute a philosophical thesis, but in the present instance if we can present a plausible counter-example and can in addition give some account or explanation of how and why it is a counter-example, and if we can further offer a theory to back up our counter-example - a theory which will generate an indefinite number of counter-examples - we may at least cast considerable light on the original thesis.[^28]

The needed theory has been long in the making.Speech Acts , in which “How to Derive ‘Ought’ From ‘Is’” was reprinted with minor modifications, was indeed the first step; but it is only with the publication of his two most recent major works -The Construction of Social Reality (1995) andRationality in Action (2001) - that we have Searle’s views on the ways in which speech acts contribute to the construction of social institutions. Indeed, Searle’s philosophy has gained in depth and in comprehensiveness with these recent works - but then for this very reason the neglect of morality within his total system is all the more striking.

The world Searle investigates in these two books includes “the world of Supreme Court decisions and of the collapse of communism”;[^29] it includes marriages, money, government and property rights, and discussions about altruism and egoism. And Searle expressly claims to be interested in the “basic ontology of social institutions” - ofall social institutions. Yet still he avoids tackling head on the problem of the normativity of social institutions. In these recent works he has emphasized above all the importance of promising. Promises, he tells us are present in “all” or “virtually all” speech acts.[^30] Marriages, money, property rights and contracts all contain promises. And promises create obligations. But how?

Searle’s answer is elegant and complex. As in Hart and Rawls, it revolves around a distinction between two types of rules, which in terms coined by Searle already inSpeech Acts , are called ‘regulative’ and ‘constitutive’. Regulative rules regulate forms of behavior that exist independently and antecedently.[^31] Constitutive rules - like Hart’s secondary rules and Rawls’ practice rules - create or define new forms of behavior.[^32] Thus when someone violates a constitutive rule, heeo ipso places himself outside of the institution to which the form of behavior defined by the rule belongs. Violating a regulative rule, in contrast, may give the violator a reputation for bad manners or reckless driving, but does notipso facto place him outside of any institutions.

Rules of etiquette are regulative. It is perfectly intelligible to say that someone acted in ways that satisfy such rules even if that someone is unaware of the fact that he was satisfying such rules. Contrast this case with a community in which a group of 22 people gather together and move about while kicking a ball in more or less the same way as would a group of people playing football; but they would not really beplaying football unless a set of rules defining football was already in existence, and unless they knew about these rules. The latter constitute the very possibility of the activity of playing football.