WILLIAM E.

TOLHURST

ON H A R E ' S ' P R O M I S I N G G A M E '

(Received 8 September, 1975)

One of the more widely reprinted contributions to the is/ought controversy

generated by J. R. Searle's attempt to derive a normative statement from
descriptive premises is R. M. Hare's article, 'The Promising Game') In this
discussion I hope to show that there is a serious logical flaw in the argument
Hare uses in this article to refute Searle. Hare concentrates his attack on the
following section of Searle's derivation.

(1) Jones uttered the words "I hereby promise to pay you, Smith,
five dollars".
(la) Under certain conditions C anyone who utters the words
(sentence) "I hereby promise to pay you, Smith, five dollars."
Promises to pay Smith five dollars.
(lb) Conditions C. obtain.
(2) Jones promised to pay Smith five dollars.
(2a) All promises are acts of placing oneself under an obligation to do
the thing promised.
(3) Jones placed himself under an obligation to pay Smith five
dollars.
In particular Hare wishes to show that one or both of premises (la) and (2a)
are evaluative. In order to simplify the argument Hare combines (la) and (2a)
into (la*). Under conditions C anyone who utters the words (sentence) "I
hereby promise to pay you, Smith, five dollars" places himself under an
obligation to pay Smith five dollars. However, Hare does not clarify the sense
in which (la*) is a combination of the two premises. He then proceeds to give
an elaborate argument involving an analogy with the game of baseball to show
that (la*) is evaluative. Hare takes it to be obvious that if this is so, then one
of Searle's premises must be evaluative. Although this might seem initially
plausible, an analysis of the relationship of the two actual premises of Searle's
derivation to Hare's (1 a*) will show that this is far from obvious.

Philosophical Studies 30 (1976) 277-279. All Rights Reserved

Copyright 9 1976 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
278 WILLIAM E. TOLHURST

Although ( l a * ) is a consequence of two of the premises of Searle's

argument, it is not itself a premise of that argument. Since Searle himself
claims to derive evaluative conclusions from these premises, the mere fact
that ( l a * ) is evaluative does not seem to be sufficient to refute Searle. One
must go on to show how ( l a ) or (2a) or b o t h are themselves evaluative.
However, it seems that Hare thinks that the relationship between the two
premises and ( l a * ) is somewhat stronger; that ( l a * ) is in some sense
equivalent to one or both of the premises. If this were true, it would make his
inference from the evaluative nature of (1 a*) to the evaluative nature of the
premises more plausible. Hare states his position as follows.
I conclude, for these reasons, that (la*) cannot be tautologous or a statement about
word-usage, but must be a synthetic constitutive rule of the institution of promising. If
the constitutive rules of the institution of promising are moral principles, as I think they
are, then (la*) is a synthetic moral principle: It follows that, if Searle sticks to it that
(2a) is tautologous, he must allow that (la) either is or implicitly contains a synthetic
moral principle. But this would destroy his argument; and indeed he says that it is not;
for, after introducing it, he says "As far as I can see, no moral premises are lurking in the
logical woodpile" (p. 122). He says this, in spite of the fact that he is going immediately
to make (la) by definition equivalent to (la*) which we have seen to be a synthetic
moral principle. (p. 151)

Let us grant for the sake o f argument that ( l a * ) is a synthetic moral principle
and hence evaluative. Let us also assume that (2a) is a tautology. The problem
with Hare's argument is his assertion that (2a) implies that ( l a ) is equivalent
to ( l a * ) , and hence that if one is evaluative the other must be. It is not
entirely clear just what Hare means by saying that ( l a ) i s made equivalent to
( l a * ) by definition; however, at the very least he must be saying that given
the truth o f (2a) the relationship between ( l a ) and ( l a * ) is one of mutual
entailment, i.e. (2a)-+((la)~(la*)). This is just to assume that if a statement
makes two statements equivalent in the sense Hare requires, it makes them
logically equivalent. However, this is not the case here. Although it is true
that (2a)-~((la))~(la*)), it is false that (2a)-+((la*)-+(la)). In other words,
from the fact that all promises are undertakings o f obligations, (2a), and that
under conditions C anyone who utters the words "I hereby promise ..."
undertakes an obligation, ( l a * ) , it does not follow that under conditions C
anyone who utters the words "I hereby promise ..." promises. This is so
because the entailment in (2a) only goes from being a promise to being an
undertaking of an obligation and not the other way. Having seen that it is
false that (2a)-+((la*)-+(la)), we can also observe that by 'combining' ( l a )
and (2a) into ( l a * ) Hare has gotten a statement which is not even logically
 ON HARE'S PROMISING GAME 279

equivalent to the conjuction of Searle's premises. In other words, although

((2a).(la))--ffla*), the entailment does not go the other way.
Thus we must conclude that Hare has spent most of his time examining
one of the consequences of Searle's premises and that the evaluative nature o f
this consequence can only show that the premises are evalutative if one
assumes the kind of is/ought dichotomy that Searle is questioning, i.e. if one
begs the question.

University o f Connecticut

NOTE

1 Originally published in Revue Internationale de Philosophie 70 (1964), Reprinted in

The Is~Ought Question, W. D. Hudson, ed., Macmillan, 1969, London, pp. 144-156.
References in parenthesis refer to the latter printing.