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In this book Searle extends upon his argument in his essay "How to Derive Ought from Is", where he argued that the institutional fact of making a promise by definition places one under a moral obligation to fulfill it. I hoped that he would clarify his argument and answer objections (for example, that promises are only kept for the instrumental purpose of maintaining one's reputation). However, I was gravely disappointed because his analysis of institutional facts is self-consciously naturalistic. Under his analysis, an individual's obligation to keep a promise is analogous to, for example, a batter's obligation to stop batting after three strikes. Institutional facts are created by constitutive rules accepted by collective agreement, and the rights and obligations that individuals have are determined by those constitutive rules. This analysis, while normative, seems not only to add nothing to prove the existence of external reasons, but also has some rather problematic consequences for moral philosophy: 1. Rights exist only by virtue of collective agreement and convention. Individuals deserve, are entitled to, or are owed only what society grants them. 2. Obligations should only be followed if it serves some desire or purpose of the individual. While obligations may exist objectively as part of an institution, the individual's reason to fulfill the obligation is purely instrumental. At the very least, the book is successful at answering emotivist arguments that normative statements are incoherent. Searle provides a very clear alternative: To say, "You ought to keep your promises," is to say, "There is an institution of promise-keeping, and within this institution to make a promise is to place yourself under an obligation to keep them." However, altogether I am unimpressed.
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The Construction of Social Reality By: John R Searle ISBN: 0684831791 See detail of this book on Amazon.com
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Page 1 The Building Blocks of Social Reality The Metaphysical Burden of Social Reality This book is about a problem that has puzzled me for a long time: there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement. In a sense there are things that exist only because we believe them to exist. I am thinking of things like money, property, governments, and marriages. Yet many facts regarding these things are "objective" facts in the sense that they are not a matter of your or my preferences, evaluations , or moral attitudes. I am thinking of such facts as that I am a citizen of the United States, that the piece of paper in my pocket is a five dollar bill, that my younger sister got married on December 14, that I own a piece of property in Berkeley, and that the New York Giants won the 1991 superbowl. These contrast with such
Page 2 The Construction of Social Reality facts as that Mount Everest has snow and ice near the summit or that hydrogen atoms have one electron, which are facts totally independent of any human opinions. Years ago I baptized some of the facts dependent on human agreement as "institutional facts," in contrast to noninstitutional, or "brute," facts.' Institutional facts are so called because they require human institutions for their existence . In order that this piece of paper should be a five dollar bill, for example, there has to be the human institution of money. Brute facts require no human institutions for their existence. Of course, in order to state a brute fact we require the institution of language, but the fact stated needs to be distinguished from the statement of it. The question that has puzzled me is, How are institutional facts possible? And what exactly is