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Ought and Is
Is it possible to find a counterexample?

Ought and Is

Makarismos
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Posted 09/22/09 - 04:50 PM: Subject: Ought and Is	#1
Professor John Searle, May I first just say what an honour it is to have you visit our humble forum. I do hope you enjoy your brief stay, and perhaps find some of what is asked interesting. I look forward to what you have to say with some anticipation. For this post I would like to discuss the ‘is/ought’ problem, with reference to your article “How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'” (1964). It has long been a contention of mine that it is impossible to argue from the physical facts of the universe toward a thesis of what ought to be. It has seemed to me that there is simply nowhere to look in the world that can describe what we ought to do. Our own actions have seemed a more fruitful place to look for such evidence, but I find that these very actions can be quite contradictory, and so insufficient for any kind of evidence. Of course, I hope that you can shed some light on the matter, as you obviously have far more experience and expertise in this area. You have famously put forward the argument that a promise can be used to derive what ought to be from what now is. Your argument can be seen to begin with the idea that part of the observable physical universe is mankind itself. As mankind can be objectively observed, so can our behaviour: our promises can be observed as physical fact. We can vow to take a course of action, either explicitly or tacitly, and this vow is one case where what is can be used to show what ought to be. In short, our promises can be used to show one instance where ‘ought’ can be deduced from ‘is’. I find myself wondering if this language really has this power. The power to bind us morally? I will attempt to explain this rather cryptic comment. Language, to me at least, does not usually seem to be such a matter of black and white, and often people say or promise one thing when they mean quite another. Let us look at the example given in your essay, and I will see if I can show you my view using this: Professor John Searle wrote: 1) Jones uttered the words 'I hereby promise to pay you, smith, five dollars'. 2) Jones promised to pay smith five dollars. 3) Jones placed himself under (undertook) an obligation to pay Smith five dollars. 4) Jones is under an obligation to pay smith five dollars. 5) Jones ought to pay Smith five dollars. This example seems most black and white. Jones has clearly promised to pay smith five dollars, and I would agree that he ought to pay that money, given what we know of the situation. The situation is of course very important. What if Jones was threatened when he made the promise? What if Jones, or the social group that Jones belongs to, has no concept of 'promise?'. It seems to me that the argument here outlined relies upon the concept of 'promise' and our own moral feeling that promises ought to be satisfied. It seems to me that this is how an ethical standpoint in imported in to this seemingly objective situation. Of course you have already answered this criticism in your essay. You use the term "all things being equal", meaning presumably, that Jones was not coerced, and that the society he belonged to did believe in promises. I understand that this adequately defends your point from contradiction, but now I am left a nagging doubt about the point you were making: Is it any longer substantive? To say that we value promises and that if we make a promise then we ought to fulfil it, seems to put ‘ought’ further from ‘is’: the force of the moral argument comes from our own feeling that a promise ought to be fulfilled. If we did not feel like this (and presumably such a feeling would be possible), then it would no longer follow that we ought to do as we promised. It seems to me that our feelings are not subject to empirical enquiry, and it seems that we must still accept how things ought to be before we can derive that from how they are. My thanks for the time taken to read this post, I hope sincerely that I am not retreading old ground. Cheers M Edited by Makarismos on 09/26/09 - 10:19 AM. Reason: Clarity upon reflection

John Searle
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Posted 10/23/09 - 03:34 PM:	#2
There is a certain metaphysical conception, which I think can hardly be wrong, that brute facts in the world do not themselves contain any values. Values are not discovered in the world of brute facts, they are imposed on the world by humans. In the period of linguistic philosophy, this metaphysical truth was couched as a thesis about language. But the thesis about language is false. The metaphysical thesis says that there is a distinction between brute facts that exist independently of any human beings, and values that exist relative to humans. The linguistic thesis tries to turn this into a thesis about logical relations in language. It says no set of statements describing facts in the world can ever entail a statement about what we ought to do. The reason this claim is false is that the very notion it uses are already evaluative notions in that they contain norms of assessment. Such notions as “statement”, “entailment”, “true”, are already loaded with norms. I pointed that the fact that somebody made a promise already implies that he undertook an obligation to do something. So the truth metaphysical thesis was confused with a false linguistic thesis, and I was concerned to point out the falsity of the linguistic thesis. The argument for the claim that brute facts cannot themselves contain values is that nothing lying around in the world such as mountains or stones could have the consequences of values. It is just a false philosophical theory.

rigelrover
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Posted 10/26/09 - 06:55 PM:	#3
Prof. Searle, if you wouldn't mind helping clarify, it seems that there is only one 'brute' fact that is taken as true without imposing a subjective sense: that something is the case (i.e. something exists). This seems to be the only fact that can be assumed as a basis for a thought, and for a language. The rest of the atomic propositions, though highly agreeable, seem to be subject to relativistic interpretation (e.g. 'a rock exists' is subject to what we each imagine a rock is, or for one that is less clear: 'time exists' is what we each imagine time is). That is, it is not clear exactly what is the case, only that something is. It seems that what we do in the sciences, philosophy, math, etc. is to discern the nature of 'what is' as opposed to 'that it is'. Would you (or someone else) mind helping wipe the mud off? Also, it is not clear whether that something exists is intentional or if it is consequential/necessary, given the brute fact that something is the case, rather than nothing. It seems that intentionality would imply objective morality, but would necessity also, perhaps? It is important, it seems, to say 'something is the case' vs 'something exists' because it is easier to see that by the former an agent is implied. How would something be the case w/out an awareness of this fact. That is to say that consciousness seems to be a special condition of something being a case. In light of this one might be inclined to think that there is objective morality inherent in this state of things (i.e. given that it is the state of things, rather than it is not). How should one handle this line of thinking? Edited by rigelrover on 10/27/09 - 11:41 AM. Reason: added a further question...
I am more interested in questions than answers; dialog than dictation. If we can reasonably believe that there is not just a breach, but a fundamentally unclosable gap between the individual mind and the ultimate nature of the reality; the primordial thing in itself, then 'true' mystery does exist.

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