Ought, Is, and a Game Called "Promise"Author(s): E. M. ZemachReviewed work(s):Source: The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 82 (Jan., 1971), pp. 61-63Published by: Wiley-Blackwell for The Philosophical QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2217570 .Accessed: 01/10/2012 18:33

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61

DISCUSSIONS

OUGHT, IS, AND A GAME CALLED "P PROMISE"

BY E. M. ZEMACH

Several years ago, when John Searle published his " How to Derive

'Ought' from 'Is' ",1 his views gave rise to a wide philosophical debate. Some attempted to show that Searle's proof (that the non-evaluative state- ment 'Jones uttered the words " I hereby promise to pay you, Smith, five dollars "' entails the evaluative statement 'Jones ought to pay Smith five

dollars') was fallacious; others defended it; but all agreed on its major significance for moral philosophy. Now that the said proof appears, in an

expanded form, in the context of a whole book which attempts to base it

upon a much wider philosophical ground,2 the time has come to take a fresh look at the Searle version of the is-ought issue. The results of this re-

examination, I believe, are quite surprising. Having read Searle's detailed account of promising, it became clear to me that Searle's critics went wrong in their original reaction. Searle's derivation is valid, but is completely trivial, and has no bearing whatever upon the traditional is-ought problem.

Searle's basic assumption is that promising is an institution involving a number of constitutive rules, some of which have to do with obligations and

responsibilities. Given a description of certain facts in terms of such consti- tutive rules (" institutional facts ") one can derive a statement saying what

ought to be done in this situation. Searle's example of such an institution is baseball :3 when you play baseball, and the situation is x, you have to do

y. Now this account, I think, is quite innocuous-and uniquely uninterest-

ing. What Searle wanted to derive from the purely descriptive statement was a categorical, not a hypothetical, ought statement.4 What he got instead is an obligation relative to a particular institution, with respect to which one has no obligations whatsoever.

Consider, for example, step four in Searle's derivation, 'John is under

obligation to pay Smith five dollars', but keep in mind that the obligation in question is relative to a particular game we may call "promise ", so that only inside it (i.e., while playing it) is Jones obligated to behave in the way specified by the rules of the game. Since, as Searle stresses,5 Jones is not committed to this game itself, Jones may quit at any time (e.g., by

1Philosophical Review 73 (1964), pp. 43-58. 2Speech Acts (Cambridge, 1969). 3Ibid., p. 185. 4Ibid., p. 181. 5Ibid., pp. 186, 189.

62 E. M. ZEMACH

saying in his heart "I quit ") thereby annulling all his intra-game obliga- tions. If, for example, I am playing chess and my king is checked, I have to move it or move another piece to defend it : this is a rule of chess which I am obligated to obey. However, if I stop playing rather than obey this

rule, I do not have to do any of the above-mentioned things; the rule does not apply to me any more.

Searle is indeed aware of the distinction between obligations which are

internal, and those which are external, to the institution of promising, but he does not realize the full significance of this distinction. The crucial result of this distinction is that each obligation incurred inside a certain institution is relative to that institution, and therefore has the form of a

hypothetical imperative: 'If you wish to continue to play this game, your next move has to be M '. As long as one is not playing some meta-game, in which one has undertaken an obligation to play the above game, one ought to make move M only in so far as this is what one has to do if one wishes to continue to play this game (or, to belong to this institution).

The last point has additional significance: Searle admits that internal

obligations may sometimes be outweighed by external ones. But this is not enough. Most of us would like to say that if Dr. Jones is (i) obligated to follow Smith's lead with a club card, and is also (ii) obligated to respond to an urgent call, just received, involving his patient's life, then Jones ought to stop his bridge game and rush to the hospital, i.e., his obligation is to meet obligation (ii) and not (i). But how can we say that ? Whence can this obligation come ? True, Dr. Jones has taken the Hippocratic oath, and is thus obligated to save the life of the patient. It is a rule of medical ethics that he should prefer his obligations as a doctor to his obligations as a player of bridge. But this rule itself is strictly game-dependent, and as such can

by no means override the obligation, incurred by Dr. Jones when he under- took to play bridge with the Smiths, to respond to a club lead by playing clubs. There is no rule of bridge permitting a player to quit when anybody's life is in danger. Thus although it may be a rule of one institution (e.g., medical ethics) that it is a meta-institution encompassing all others, this claim does not constitute an obligation to adopt this institution rather than

any of the other institutions which it claims to be its subordinates. No institution X, having a rule to the effect that Jones has to quit institution

Y, has more authority than Y itself. Institutional facts, says Searle, are what make obligations binding-and qua institutions there is no difference between the limited and the more encompassing ones. What we need here is the " absolute " kind of obligation, which is meaningless and void out- side the game boundaries.

One may try to save Searle's position by saying that if Jones decided not to go on with the promise game, he ought to tell Smith, and everybody else, that he disengages himself from this game; as long as he has not done so he is still playing, and hence has to keep his promise. This, however, is

OUGHT, IS, AND A GAME CALLED "( PROMISE " 63

wrong. We might have an intra-game regulation to the effect that whoever wishes to resign should inform the other players of his intentions. But this rule is again internal to the institution, and obligates one only as long as one belongs to it. Once one breaks with the institution, its rules cease to apply. At this point one may believe that Searle's account of obligation could be salvaged if there would have been one all-encompassing institution

(e.g., "the game of life ") from which we could not extricate ourselves. The regulations of this institution, by which we would have to abide, may obligate us to belong to secondary institutions, and so on further down. But even this radical (and far-fetched) supposition cannot render Searle's account of obligations adequate. According to Searle, obligation is " essen-

tially a contractual notion " and " is closely tied to the notion of accepting, acknowledging, recognizing, undertaking, etc."6 Thus, if the said all-

encompassing game is forced upon us such that we must participate in it rather than willingly undertake to join it and accept its rules and regula- ions, we can have no duty or obligation to abide by those rules.

Clearly on this analysis Jones is not blameworthy whether or not he

pays Smith after having promised to do so. What moral objection can one have to Jones's quitting this or that game ? There may be some consti- tutive rule specifying that quitting the game amounts to having lost it. But what of it ? Why should it be morally objectionable to lose a game ? This would be morally objectionable only if one had an obligation to play this particular game well, i.e., if unlike bridge, chess, or poker, this partic- ular game, the promise game, were one that one ought not to lose. Searle's

analysis, however, can show nothing of the sort. It only claims that you ought to keep your promises while you play promise. Nor does Searle's

analysis in any way limit Jones's right to repeat this trick of breaking his

promises with complete moral immunity any number of times. The rules of chess, for example, include no regulation as to the number of times a man may start a fresh match after having left a previous one unfinished. Searle's analysis of the rules of promising includes no such regulation, either.7

State University of New York at Stony Brook.

6Ibid., p. 189. 7I wish to thank my colleagues David Benfield, Ed Erwin and Sidney Gendin for

their helpful remarks on an earlier draft of this paper.