In his paper, How to Derive ‘Ought’ From ‘Is,’ John R. Searle made a valiant attempt to derive an ought-statement from purely descriptive statements. In a recent issue of Philosophia, Scott Hill has offered criticisms of that proposed derivation. I argue that Hill has not established any errors in Searle's proposed derivation.

This article is concerned with the interconnection between three arguments: the Moral Explanatory Dispensability Argument, the Epistemic Explanatory Dispensability Argument, and the Companions in Guilt Argument. Silvan Wittwer has recently argued that the Epistemic EDA is self-effacing, whereas the Moral EDA is not. This difference between them is then leveraged by Wittwer to establish that there is a significant disparity between these arguments and that this disparity undermines attempts to use the CGA as a means of refuting the Moral EDA. (...) After explaining the connections between these arguments, I provide three different responses to Wittwer’s analysis. First, I develop a plausible case in favor of the conclusion that the Moral EDA is also self-effacing. Second, I defend the Epistemic EDA from the charge of self-effacement and respond to Wittwer’s assertion that my preferred method of escaping his argument is dialectically inappropriate. Finally, I explain how some arguments recently articulated by Richard Rowland and Ramon Das support my objections to Wittwer’s self-effacement argument. (shrink)

The main guiding assumption of this paper is that there is need for a taxonomy of ethical sentences that does not overgenerate, yet can make useful contributions to debates about certain controversial sentences . After surveying the recent literature and concluding that no extant taxonomy that satisfies both of these conditions is available to us, I propose and explain a novel taxonomy which does satisfy them. I then defend my proposal from five potential objections.