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‘Ought’ and Institutional Obligation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

J. R. Cameron
J. R. Cameron
Affiliation:
University of Dundee.
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Extract

An obligation may take either of two forms, each form being reported in a different way. For example, when we report the obligation of parents to care for their children, if it is the moral obligation we mean, we will say ‘Parents ought to look after their children’ but if we mean the legal obligation, we will say ‘Parents have to look after their children’. The law specifies that people shall do thus and so, not that they ought to do thus and so.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 46 , Issue 178 , October 1971 , pp. 309 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1971

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References

1 Searle, J. R., Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, 1969), ch. 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This discussion is based on his celebrated article, ‘How to Derive “Ought” from “Is” ’, Philosophical Review, vol. 73 (1964). I will refer solely to the Speech Acts discussion.

2 See Speech Acts, pp. 177–82 and 185–6.

3 Speech Acts, pp. 180–81.

4 But see further § 5 of the paper referred to in the next footnote. (There I argue that the derivation as a whole involves a type of reasoning which is quite unintelligible except on the basis of an ‘assumption of good faith’; given that assumption, these first two stages of the derivation are not only intelligible but valid.)

5 ‘The Nature of Institutional Obligation’, forthcoming in the Philosophical Quarterly.

6 Cf. Speech Acts, ch. 2, sections 5 and 7.

7 Speech Acts, p. 178.

8 Cf. Speech Acts, pp. 176–7; and also p. 188, top paragraph. (The latter passage provided the original seed of this paper: in what sense is Searle claiming here that a promised act ought to be performed? Has he simply failed to distinguish ‘ought to’ from ‘has to’?)

9 It could of course be that N ought to do A anyway, simply as the act A and not by way of complying with R. For example, it might be that Tom ought not to try to keep Dick out of his garden, even if he hadn't given him permission to come in— because, e.g., it would be discourteous, or a quick way of losing friends, or perhaps even dangerous, Dick being a nasty customer when crossed. But such an ‘ought-to’ requirement is manifestly unconnected with the institutional one, and can be ignored.

10 Even where there is an explicit code, as there is in many games, for example, not only do the practitioners give this code its authority by acknowledging it, but they also have to interpret it as the code for a given kind of institutional activity‘for a game, say, and not for a legal procedure. Cf. Speech Acts, p. 34, footnote, on this point.

11 If ‘has to’ and ‘ought to’ differ not in what they report but in how they present it, does my initial distinction between ‘has-to’ and ‘ought-to’ obligations collapse? The answer to this question is complex, because ‘man-made’ obligations at any rate are determined as to their nature by the way in which we conceive of them. But in any case, the distinction is not essential to the question I posed about institutional requirements; it could have been presented in other terms.