Using a sample of over 700 business people and students, this study tested the premise of promise-keeping as a core ethical value in the work place.The exercise consisted of in-basket planning for layoffs within an organization. Only one of the five employees within the group had been given an express commitment/promise of continued employment for a two year period. The layoffs were being considered six months after the two year promise had been made. All five employees (...) were performing their jobs adequately, and each had either personal or work attributes representing competing values that would have made it difficult to choose among them. (shrink)

Using a sample of over 700 business people and students, this study tested the premise of promise-keeping as a core ethical value in the work place.The exercise consisted of in-basket planning for layoffs within an organization. Only one of the five employees within the group had been given an express commitment/promise of continued employment for a two year period. The layoffs were being considered six months after the two year promise had been made. All five employees (...) were performing their jobs adequately, and each had either personal or work attributes representing competing values that would have made it difficult to choose among them.Clearly, promise-keeping does not matter most in the workplace: subjects overwhelmingly ignored their promises even when legally bound to keep them. Further, promise-keeping consistently was found to rank last in a hierarchy of workplace values. The legal system was suggested as a viable mechanism for encouraging promise-keeping in the workplace. Although the possibility of legal sanctions increased the frequency with which promises were kept, overall fewer than one-third (30%) of the subjects kept their word. Of those respondents who expressly were told that the promise was legally enforceable, the number who stated that they would keep their promise increased to 57%. (shrink)

An important test of any moral theory is whether it can give a satisfactory account of moral prohibitions such as those against promise breaking and lying. Act-utilitarianism (hereafter utilitarianism) implies that any act can be justified if it results in the best consequences. Utilitarianism implies that it is sometimes morally right to break promises and tell lies. Few people find this result to be counterintuitive and very few are persuaded by Kant’s arguments that attempt to show that lying is (...) always wrong, even if it is necessary to save someone’s life. One thing that makes Kant’s view about lying so implausible is that he is committed to the view that the duty not to lie is always more important than any conflicting duties. Even if we agree with utilitarianism that lying and promise breaking are sometimes morally permissible, we may still be inclined to think that utilitarianism is too permissive about lying and promise breaking. Ross gives the definitive statement of this criticism. He holds that there is a strong, but overrridable, moral presumption against telling lies and breaking promises that is independent of utilitarian considerations. Almost all utilitarians claim that there is a strong moral presumption against telling lies and breaking promises on account of the direct and indirect bad consequences of those actions. However, utilitarians cannot say that there is any moral presumption against lying and promise breaking that is independent of their bad consequences. Many philosophers think that Ross’s theory constitutes a kind of reasonable middle ground in ethics between Kant’s absolutism and utilitarianism. Ross’s theory is arguably the major ethical theory that is closest to most people’s commonsense moral beliefs. It is noteworthy that the two most important defenders of rule-utilitarianism/rule-consequentialism. (shrink)

Promises to perform supererogatory actions present an interesting puzzle. On the one hand, this seems like a promise that one should be able to keep simply by performing some good deed or other. On the other hand, the only way to keep it is to do something that exceeds one’s duties. But any good deed that one performs, which might otherwise have been supererogatory, will not go above and beyond what one is morally required to do in such a (...) case because one has an obligation that one does not normally have—namely, an obligation to do something supererogatory. Thus, some scholars have argued that promises of this sort cannot possibly be kept and so are wrong to make. I show that, far from being impossible, keeping promises to supererogate is easy, and so there is nothing wrong with making promises of this sort. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

A promise to do some action seems to create a binding obligation to do that action. And yet, paradoxically, an obligation seems not to be a fact that we can create or bring into existence; we can create an obligation only by creating or bringing into existence something else. The only way to avoid the paradox is to show that the act of promising creates something other than an obligation, which nonetheless binds us to perform the action in question. (...) After considering and rejecting various options such as the promisee's expectation and the promisor's resolve, Prichard locates the bindingness of a promise in a prior general promise, which allows the noises we make when promising to generate an obligation to perform the promised action. (shrink)

This paper offers a new account of reflective knowledge’s value, building on recent work on the epistemic norms of speech acts. Reflective knowledge is valuable because it licenses us to make guarantees and promises.

In response to Morningstar’s release of carbon risk (CR) scores in May 2018, (environmentally) sustainable mutual funds in the U.S. showed a greater reduction in their portfolio CR relative to conventional funds. The observed causal impact of this third-party disclosure is consistent with the funds’ primary investment objectives. Differences in fund names, potentially driven by marketing considerations, appear irrelevant to the behavior of sustainable funds. Conventional funds that are signatories to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) or those with (...) secondary sustainability mandates behave more like other conventional funds rather than sustainable funds. These funds appear relatively insensitive to disclosures as their sustainability considerations are superseded by other primary investment criteria. Fiduciary and legal bonding influences fund managers’ response to sustainability disclosures. Sustainable funds lower their CR score by reducing exposure to fossil fuels, not by increasing exposure to renewables. (shrink)

D. W. Hamlyn; X—The Obligation to Keep a Promise, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 179–194, https://doi.org/10.10.

Do the conditions under which promises are made determine whether they ought to be kept? Philosophers have placed a number of conditions on promising which, they hold, must be met in order to make promise‐keeping obligatory. In so doing, they have distinguished valid promises from invalid promises and justified promises from promises that are not justified. Considering such conditions, one by one, we argue that they are mistaken. In the first place, the conditions they lay down are not (...) necessary for either valid or justified promise‐making. In the second place, promises need not meet such conditions in order to create moral obligations. In general, such analyses of promising fail because they suffer from a confusion between promise‐making and promise‐keeping. Philosophers have wrongly supposed that obligations to keep promises are dependent upon, or derivable from, the quality of the promises themselves, at the time they are made, instead of focusing on conditions that must be satisfied at the time when promises are supposed to be kept. It is not the quality of a promise that determines an obligation to keep it but the rightness or wrongness of performing the promised act. (shrink)

According to Joseph Raz, the fact of making a valid promise creates “promissory reasons”: it constitutes for the promisor a reason for performing her promise and a reason for not acting for at least some of the reasons that recommend something different than performing. In his latest work on promising, Raz provides a novel account of the grounds of promissory reasons—an account which is different in important respects to the one he defended decades ago. In this paper, I (...) argue that, as his previous one, his latest account of the grounds of promissory reasons faces significant difficulties. (shrink)

In my article, “Why Psychology Hasn’t Kept Its Promises” , I argued that psychology hasn’t become the science its practitioners had hoped because psychologists continue to focus on mentalistic constructs and they adhere to a methodology that emphasizes statistical inference over experimental analysis. I concluded that in order to better keep their promise of a psychological science, psychologists should return to studying the relationship between observed behavior and its context with the type of experimental analysis that characterizes the other (...) experimental sciences. In his reply, Lana suggests that there may be aspects of human social and verbal behavior that are so complex that we may not be able to carry out a solid experimental analysis, thus limiting what we can discover about our own nature. Lana concludes that the methodologies needed to understand these more complex social relationships are hermeneutic and historical rather than experimental in nature. I concur with Lana both that an experimental analysis of much of human behavior may not be possible and that psychologists must, therefore, rely on complementary descriptive, interpretive, and historical analyses. I argue, however, that the interpretive language and the historical hindsight must be based on a foundation of basic principles derived from the systematic experimental analysis of behavior. (shrink)

If promises are binding there must be a reason to do as one promised. The paper is motivated by belief that there is a difficulty in explaining what that reason is. It arises because the reasons that promising creates are content-independent. Similar difficulties arise regarding other content-independent reasons, though their solution need not be the same. -/- Section One introduces an approach to promises, and outlines an account of them that I have presented before. It forms the backdrop for the (...) ensuing discussion. The problems discussed in the paper arise, albeit in slightly modified ways, for various other accounts as well. It is, however, helpful to use a specific account as a springboard leading to one explanation of promissory reasons, namely of the reasons that valid promises constitute for performing the promised act (Section Two). We can call it the bare reasons account. Sections Three and Four will raise difficulties with that account, leading to its abandonment in favour of an alternative in Sections Five and Six. (shrink)

The dominant conventionalist view explains the wrong of breaking a promise as failing to do our fair share in supporting the practice of promise-keeping. Yet, this account fails to explain any unique moral standing that a promisee has to demand that the promisor keep the promise. In this paper, I provide a conventionalist response to this problem. In any cooperative practice, participants stand as both beneficiary and contributor. As a beneficiary, they are morally required to follow (...) the rules of the practice. As a contributor, they have claims on other participants to follow the rules. According to the rules of promise-keeping, a promisee has a unique claim on the promisor, and the personal wrong of breaking a promise should be understood as the violation of this unique and practice-dependent claim. (shrink)

To promise someone to do something is to commit oneself to that person to do that thing, but what does that commitment consist of? Some think a promissory commitment is an obligation to do what’s promised, and that while promising practices facilitate the creation of promissory obligations, they are not essential to them. I favor the broadly Humean view in which, when it comes to promises (and so promissory obligations), practices are of the essence. I propose the Practice Reason (...) Account of promises, according to which a promise is basically to give oneself a self-interested practice reason to do what’s promised. One achieves this feat by invoking self-enforcing independent practice rules thanks to which one’s doing what’s promised preserves one’s promissory trust(worthiness) and promising power. However, nothing in this account supports the Hume-Rawls claim that promise-keeping or promise-breaking is right just when and because it conforms to practice rules that are justified by their good- or right-making properties. (shrink)

It is widely held that to break a promise that one made to a person who is now dead would be to wrong her. This view undergirds many positions in bioethics, ranging from those that concern who may access a person’s medical records after she has died, to questions concerning organ procurement and posthumous procreation. Ashley Dressel has argued that there is no reason to believe that promissory obligations can be owed to people who are dead. Although her arguments (...) are unsuccessful, others establish that neither of the promissory obligation accounts that she considers (the “Authority Account” and the “harm-based view”) can justify the standard view that directed posthumous promissory obligation is possible. However, this does not mean that the received view that we should keep our promises to the dead is mistaken. First, the theoretical commitments and argumentative strategies of those who endorse the possibility of posthumous promissory obligations preclude them from grounding such on either of these accounts of directed promissory obligation. They are thus already committed to justifying such obligations in other ways. Second, the obligation to keep promises to the dead could be justified on the grounds that not to do so would adversely affect the living. (shrink)

I explore the debate about whether consequentialist theories can adequately accommodate the moral force of promissory obligation. I outline a straightforward act consequentialist account grounded in the value of satisfying expectations, and raise and assess three objections to this account: that it counterintuitively predicts that certain promises should be broken when commonsense morality insists that they should be kept, that the account is circular, and Michael Cholbi’s argument that this account problematically implies that promise-making is frequently obligatory. I then (...) discuss alternative act consequentialist accounts, including Philip Pettit’s suggestion that promise-keeping is an intrinsic good and Michael Smith’s agent-relative account. I outline Brad Hooker’s rule consequentialist account of promissory obligation and raise a challenge for it. I conclude that appeals to intuitions about cases will not settle the dispute, and that consequentialists and their critics must instead engage in substantive debate about the nature and stringency of promissory obligation. (shrink)

The explanation of promising is fraught with problems. In particular the problem that promises can be valid even when nothing good comes of keeping the promise , and the bootstrapping problem with explaining how the mere intention to put oneself under an obligation can create such an obligation have been recognized since Hume’s famous discussion of the topic. In part 1, I showed that two main views of promising which attempt to solve these problems fall short of explaining (...) the promissory obligation nonetheless. In this second part, I will explain what it takes to show that there is such an obligation to keep one’s promises, and discuss a further account of promissory obligation – the normative powers account – which perhaps stands a chance to solve both the bootstrapping and the bare wrongings problem , and to successfully explain promissory obligation. It comes in at least two different forms: one which regards the normative power to promise as based on our ability to form special relationships, and another which regards the promisee’s ‘authority interest’ as the basis. (shrink)

For many students, success or failure hinges on their ability to locate logic within the context of everyday thought. One way of accomplishing this task is to emphasize the connections between natural and symbolic language. Many students, however, find that symbolic logic occasionally deviates from their expectations. In particular, they commonly have difficulty understanding the rationale behind the false antecedent conditional and the inclusive disjunction. In this article, I outline a teaching strategy that employs promise keeping as an (...) analogy for these standard interpretations of the propositional operators. (shrink)

When you offer your promise you expect to be taken at your word. In this paper I shift focus away from more familiar questions about the ground of promissory obligation, concentrating instead on the familiar way that making a promise involves claiming another’s trust. Borrowing an idea from Nietzsche, I suggest that we understand this in terms of a “right to make promises” – that is, a right to “stand security for ourselves,” held and exercised by those who (...) possess the foresight and self-control to make only promises they can keep, and the strength of will required to keep the promises they make. Others recognize a person's right to promise precisely by taking her at her word i.e. by treating her promise itself as a sound and sufficient basis for the belief that she will do as promised. The main aim of the paper is to explicate and defend these ideas. At the end of the paper, I suggest how focusing on this aspect of promising brings to the fore some neglected problems of social justice, concerning the actual distribution of the right to give one’s word in our society. (shrink)

In his recent and suitably provocative book on The Object of Morality G. J. Warnock argues that the fundamental moral concern is with what he sums up as the ‘amelioration of the human predicament’, a predicament which is made even more pressing by the natural limitations of our human sympathies. The distinctively moral virtues, Warnock concludes, will be those dispositions which tend to countervail these natural limitations, especially non-maleficence, fairness, beneficence, and non-deception; and from these fundamental moral virtues we can (...) derive, in turn, four fundamental moral standards or principles. The theory of morality—and it is thank heaven a theory of morality, not of moral language—which I have crudely summarised here seems to me correct as far as it goes, but it also seems to me that Warnock’s concentration on the predicament of the individual human being leads him to ignore what is at least as fundamental, the essentially social and interpersonal aspect of much morality. (shrink)

Why have philosophers since Hume regarded promising as problematic? I distinguish two problems raised by Hume. The problem of the bare wrong is the problem of how it can make sense to avoid a wrong when the wrong does not affect any intelligible human interest. The problem of normative power is the problem of how something can be a wrong simply because it has been declared to be a wrong. I argue that the problem of the bare wrong is more (...) basic. I then examine the attempts of practice theorists like Hume and Rawls to overcome the problem of the bare wrong by arguing that whenever breach of promise seems like a bare wrong, in fact human interests are adversely affected because a socially valuable practice is damaged. I argue that their various explanations cannot cover all the cases. I then formulate an assumption which is shared by all practice theorists (and others) namely the assumption that we take promises seriously because they serve our interest in social co-ordination. I argue that if this assumption were true, there need be no practice of promise-keeping for promises to bind. Furthermore, were this assumption true, promising would be a social tool that we could largely do without. And so long as promising intelligibility is in doubt (because of the problem of the bare wrong) an adherent of the social co-ordination hypothesis should assume that we largely do do without it. So anyone who gives promising a key role in human social life must reject the social co-ordination hypothesis. (shrink)

Considering that getting along in civil society is based on the expectation that people will do what they say they will do, i.e., essentially live up to their explicit or implicit promises, it is amazing that so little scientific attention has been given to the act of promising. A great deal of research has been done on the moral development of children, for example, but not on the child’s ability to make and keep a promise, one of the highest (...) moral achievements. What makes it possible developmentally, cognitively, and emotionally to make a promise in the first place? And on the other hand, what compels one to keep a promise when there seems to be no personal advantage in doing so, and even when harm can be predicted? How do we know when a promise is offered seriously to be taken at face value, and how do we understand that another is only a polite gesture, not to be taken seriously? In _Promises, Oaths, and Vows: On the Psychology of Promising_, Herbert Schlesinger addresses these questions, drawing on the literature of moral development in children; the psychotherapy of a patient who regularly broke promises that were unnecessary in the first place; those who were regarded as "promising youngsters" who did not fulfill their "promise"; and those who feared making a promise, a commitment, or a threat out of fear that, once made, the utterance would take on a life of its own and could never be taken back. Furthermore, he illustrates his conclusions by examining the widespread use of promising in classical literature, such as Greek drama and the plays of Shakespeare, as well as the motivating and reifying power of the promise in Western religious traditions. With a style honed over the penning of two previous books, Schlesinger once again produces a work grounded in a firm analytic sensibility, but which also retains the wit and candor of the seasoned analyst. His seminal investigation of this all but neglected topic in the clinical literature is as timely as it is scholarly, and – with the title firmly in mind – _Promises, Oaths, and Vows_ is assured to be a worthy addition to any clinician’s library and a provoking investigation into Nietzsche’s notion of man as "the animal who makes promises.". (shrink)

This paper addresses two questions. First can a binding promise conflict with other binding promises and thereby generate conflicting obligations? Second can binding promises conflict with other non-promissory obligations, so that we are obliged to keep so-called ‘wicked promises’? The answer to both questions is ‘yes’. The discussion examines both ‘natural right’ and ‘social practice’ approaches to promissory obligation and I conclude that neither can explain why we should be unable to make binding promises that conflict with our prior (...) obligations. There is also consideration of the parallel case of ‘wicked commands’. (shrink)

Many people attempt to give meaning to their lives by pursuing projects that they believe will bear fruit after they have died. Knowing that their death will preclude them from protecting or promoting such projects people who draw meaning from them will often attempt to secure their continuance by securing promises from others to serve as their caretakers after they die. But those who rely on such are faced with a problem: None of the four major accounts that have been (...) developed to explain directed promissory obligation (the Authority View, the Trust View, the Assurance View, and the Reliance View) support the view that we are obligated to keep our promises to persons who are now dead. But I will provide hope for those who wish to use such promises to protect the meaning with which they have endowed their lives. I will argue that while we cannot wrong a person who is now dead by breaking a promise made to her during her life, we could wrong the living by so doing. We thus (might) have reason to keep the promises that we made to those who are now dead. (shrink)

In order to form a contract at least one of the parties to the bargain must give an undertaking or commitment of the appropriate kind to the other; that is, she must perform a commissive speech act of the right kind. It is widely assumed that the speech act in question is a promise. Indeed it is standard textbook fare that a contract is a promise (or an exchange of promises) that the law will enforce. This assumption underlies (...) the venerable tradition in contract theory of arguing that the morality of promise-keeping bears or ought to bear importantly on the content of the law of contract. In this paper I argue that this assumption is false. By way of a critical examination of Seana Shiffrin's impressive recent contribution to this theoretical tradition, I argue that the commissive speech act by means of which a contract is formed is not the same speech act as that by means of which we voluntarily undertake moral obligations to others. (shrink)

I outline four conditions on permissible promise-making: the promise must be for a morally permissible end, must not be deceptive, must be in good faith, and must involve a realistic assessment of oneself. I then address whether promises that you are uncertain you can keep can meet these four criteria, with a focus on campaign promises as an illustrative example. I argue that uncertain promises can meet the first two criteria, but that whether they can meet the second (...) two depends on the source of the promisor's uncertainty. External uncertainty stemming from outside factors is unproblematic, but internal uncertainty stemming from the promisor's doubts about her own strength leads to promises that are in bad faith or unrealistic. I conclude that campaign promises are often subject to internal uncertainty and are therefore morally impermissible to make, all else being equal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:176 HUME ON PROMISES AND THEIR OBLIGATION This discussion of Hume's account of promises pursues certain issues raised by William Vitek in his paper "The Humean Promise: Whence Comes Its Obligation?" The question I consider first is what, for Hume, it is for someone to make a promise. I then go on to consider Hume's view of promisekeeping as an artificial virtue and the distinction which Hume (...) makes between two kinds of obligation in relation to promises: a natural and an artificial obligation. The issue with which I am principally concerned is how far Hume succeeds in explaining our recognition of the obligation to keep promises. The Humean Promise There is implicit in Hume's "Of the Obligation of Promises" an account of what it is for someone to make a promise, i.e., of the conditions which are at least necessary for this to occur. It is worthwhile making these conditions explicit in order to bring out points of similarity with the celebrated account of promises provided in recent 4 philosophy by John Searle. We find in both Hume and Searle a recognition that promising is a social institution which depends upon certain conventions, and that the conditions for promising reflect these conventions. Among the conditions which appear to be common to their different accounts are the following: 1.That a certain form of words is used (typically, of the form ' I promise...'). 2.That these words are understood by the speaker. 177 3.That they predicate an act of the speaker which will be performed for the interest or advantage of another. 4.That the action is not one which the speaker would undertake in the normal course of events. 5.That the speaker's utterance expresses a serious intention or resolution. 6.That in making this utterance the speaker wills the obligation to act accordingly. Let me comment briefly on these conditions. 1.The condition that a certain form of words is used in effect acknowledges that promising involves a distinctive type of speech act: namely, one which can, in itself, bind the speaker to the performance of an action (T 522). Presumably, however, this does not necessarily require the actual use of the words · I promise' — the context may determine that a promise has been made, even without the use of these words. We should note that language itself is, for Hume, the product of a convention (T 490); so also, therefore, must be the institution of promisemaking and promise-keeping. 2.The condition that these words are understood by the speaker is implicit in Hume's comment that while "the expression makes on most occasions the whole of the promise," someone who makes use of the expression without understanding its meaning "wou'd not certainly be bound by it" (T 523). It is a condition which relates to what Searle describes as the normal 'input' and 'output' conditions, i.e., the conditions which govern "serious and literal linguistic communication." It is presupposed, for example, that the speaker (and perhaps also the hearer) knows how to speak 178 the language, that he is not play-acting or speaking in jest, and so on. 3.The condition that these words predicate an act of the speaker for the interest or advantage of another is obviously implicit, at least, in Hume's account of promise-keeping as an artificial virtue (of which I will say more later). But it should be emphasised that a promise is not simply an undertaking to act in a certain way towards another person: it is a matter of undertaking to do something for that person. 4.That the action is not one which the speaker would normally undertake, again, is a condition for which Hume caters: indeed, it is an essential part of his account that an action which a person promises to perform is not one which would occur in accordance with his natural passions or inclinations (T 519). There may, nevertheless, be possible exceptions to this, as where someone promises to do something which self-interest would incline him to do anyway. But in this kind of case promising has for Hume the special function of increasing the... (shrink)

In a Recent paper to The Joint Session of the AristotelianSociety and Mind Association Professor Neil MacCormick makes some interesting observations about the nature of promises and the source of the obligation to keep them. He rejects the view that an act can count as a promise only because a certain practice exists in a society. One may on the contrary well understand what promises are and know how to make them without there being any special convention making possible (...) the speech act of promising which amounts to no more than …“an utterance of the speaker's about his own future conduct which is essentially characterized by the speaker's intending his addressee to take it as being intended to induce the addressee to rely upon the speaker's taking the action in question.” One needs no special rule to explain why promise-breaking is wrong for …“the fact of the addressee's reliance on the promisor is sufficient ground for asserting that the promisor has an obligation to keep his word.” To bring home the point, MacCormick contrasts promising with divorcing by the simple utterance of 'I divorce thee, I divorce thee.' This is intelligible as an act of divorcing only by presupposing a convention that allows a divorce to be effected in this way. In performing the act by the appropriate formula the person is invoking the conventional rules that must obtain in the society if the act is to be successful. Searle, we are told, fails to see that promises are quite different in that they …“are explicable in terms of an intention to bring about a specific perlocutionary effect, and an intention that that intention be recognized” It is neither here nor there to point out, as Searle does, that ‘I predict’ and ‘I intend’ like ‘I promise’ tend to create expectations for the effect a promise is intended to achieve is reliance and not simply an expectation. (shrink)

Conventionalists about promising believe that it is wrong to break a promise because the promisor takes advantage of a useful social convention only to fail to do his part in maintaining it. Anti-conventionalists claim that the wrong of breaking a promise has nothing essentially to do with a social convention. Anti-conventionalists are right that the social convention is not necessary to explain the wrong of breaking most promises. But conventionalists are right that the convention plays an essential role (...) in any satisfactory account of promising. A new conventionalism can explain this by appealing to special features of social conventions. Two of these special features have important implications for any moral requirements they mediate, such as the requirement to keep one's promises and the moral requirements attached to social or occupational roles. First, these requirements will not depend on features of a situation that are inaccessible to typical participants in the convention. Second, these requirements often cannot be tailored to fit the overly unusual circumstances of participants. (shrink)

Wedding vows seem to be promises. So they go: I promise to love, honour, and cherish .... But this poses a problem. Divorce is not widely seen as a serious moral wrong, but breaking a promise is. I first consider, and defend against preliminary objections, a ‘hard-line’ response: divorce is indeed prima facie impermissible promise-breaking. I next consider the ‘hardship’ response—the hardship of failed marriages overrides the prima facie duty to keep promises. However, this would release promisors (...) in far too many cases. I resolve the triad by considering the content of the vows. Vows concerning love are not promises at all. We cannot promise to do acts the performance of which is outside our control, and love involves states of mind outside our control. Vows concerning spousal roles are complicated by diverse social understandings of marriage and the centrality of emotion to the roles. (shrink)

Why do human beings make and accept promises? What human interest is served by this procedure? Many hold that promising serves what I shall call an information interest, an interest in information about what will happen. And they hold that human beings ought to keep their promises because breaches of promise threaten this interest. On this view human beings take promises seriously because we want correct information about how other human beings are going to act. Some such view is (...) taken for granted by most philosophical accounts of promissory obligation.1 I agree that human beings do want such information and that they often get it by accepting promises. But I doubt that promising exists because it serves this information interest. (shrink)

The explanation of promising is fraught with problems. In particular the problem that promises can be valid even when nothing good comes of keeping the promise (the problem of ‘bare wrongings’), and the bootstrapping problem with explaining how the mere intention to put oneself under an obligation can create such an obligation have been recognized since Hume’s famous discussion of the topic. There are two influential accounts of promising, and promissory obligation, which attempt to solve the problems: The (...) expectation account and the practice account. While those accounts solve both the bootstrapping problem and the problem of bare wrongings, it turns out that they encounter numerous problems of their own. (shrink)

The relatively new discipline of risk analysis promises to provide objective guidance in some of the most controversial issues in modern high‐technology societies. Four conditions are discussed that must be satisfied for this promise to be fulfilled. Since none of these conditions is satisfied, risk analysis does not keep its promise. In its attempts to reduce genuinely political issues to technocratic calculations, it neglects many of the factors that should influence decisions on risk acceptance. A list of tentative (...) guidelines is given for numerical decision support that encourages democratic decision‐making instead of trying to evade it. (shrink)

Does it make sense, and is it at all plausible, to view the moral obligation to keep particular promises and do what is called for by particular agreements such as contracts as being founded on a general "Social Contract" -- i.e., to give a contractarian account of promise-keeping? This paper argues that it does. Borrowing from Hume, David Lewis, Gilbert Harman, and David Gauthier, I provide a sketch of what the "social contract" is (not, e.g., either a real (...) or a hypothetical meeting of all with all) -- namely, a form of commitment, makable by any individual, but with commitment likewise to social reinforcement. Then it is argued that Searle's familiar thesis is in error in that it leaves out the latter factor as well as implicitly calling for a version of the former. Then it is argued that this general understanding of morality can reasonably issue in a specific rule about agreements that would be one among others in a contractarian moral platform. (shrink)

The possibility of promising requires a determined obligation that distinguishes breaking a promise from merely failing to keep it, thus enabling both parties to know what the promise entails. In addition, a recognizable commitment must bind the promiser and justify the promisee’s reliance. It is widely accepted that fulfilling these functions requires a rule of promises – either a convention or a moral principle. The paper criticizes this common view and presents an alternative. I introduce the concept ‘quamise’. (...) Quamises are particular expressions of intentions to act, made within personal relationships which involve normative requirements. Given these requirements, quamising determines an obligation and justifies reliance sans rule. I argue that promises within relationships are in fact quamises. Consequently, a unified account of promises is available only if quamises can be made to strangers, without implicitly appealing to a rule. I show that an attempt to quamise can, under appropriate conditions, create the relationship needed for quamising. The conditions that enable quamising to strangers include the social emotion of shame, which provides the accountability to strangers required for reliance, as well as various salient precedents and practices the parties can designate in order to determine an obligation. Thus, a rule of promises is unnecessary. According to this view, the moral nature of promises resembles that of personal commitments: fidelity to promises is a virtue in the sense that friendship is. (shrink)

The duty to keep promises has many aspects associated with deontological moral theories. The duty to keep promises is non-welfarist, in that the obligation to keep a promise need not be conditional on there being a net benefit from keeping the promise—indeed need not be conditional on there being at least someone who would benefit from its being kept. The duty to keep promises is more closely connected to autonomy than directly to welfare: agents have moral powers (...) to give themselves certain obligations to others. And these moral powers, which enable promisors to create agent- relative obligations to promisees, correlate with rights the promisees acquire in the process, such as rights to waive the duty or insist on its performance. As a result of promises, promisees acquire (not only rights but also) a special status: the promisees are the ones wronged when promises to them that they have not waived are not kept. One more aspect of the duty to keep promises that is associated with deontological moral theories is that what actions the duty requires is at least partly backward-looking: what actions the duty requires depends on facts about the past, namely facts about what promises were made and then waived or not. This paper surveys these aspects of the duty to keep promises and then explores whether rule-consequentialism can be reconciled with them. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relationship between promise and gesture, in order to understand how they co-participate in the configuration of our life-histories. I start by noticing the role played by promise in establishing a dialogical pact of trust, through which an experiential cohesion is maintained through time. Reflecting on the variable conditions of mutual trust, I focus on crisis-situations when we cannot keep the promises we make to others and to ourselves. Relying on the thesis of (...) an “original forgiveness”, I argue that our promises operate beyond the initial intention that animates them and even beyond their failure. I then show that failed promises reveal a broader state of self-fragmentation, engaging the other as a mediator between segments of experience that remain otherwise difficult to bring together and to reconcile by oneself. I close by highlighting the role played by gestures in cultivating this mediation. (shrink)

Studies of the practice of promising have concentrated on the reasons for keeping promises. This article focuses on promise-making and argues that the making of promises is typically supererogatory. It then addresses the question whether we can promise to perform supererogatory acts. Although once given, the promisor is under an obligation to perform the promised act, there is no paradox in describing the act as supererogatory. The proposed analysis is based on the distinction between the content of (...) the promised act and the deontic status of its performance. In contrast to Jason Kawall and Claire Benn, I propose that there is no difficulty in the idea of promising to supererogate. (shrink)

In this piece, I argue that promises need not be kept just because they were made. This is not to say, however, that unwise, unhappy, and unfortunate promises do not generate obligations. When broken promises will result either in wrongful gains to promisors or wrongful losses to promisees, obligations of corrective justice will demand that such promises be kept if their breach cannot be fully repaired. Thus, when a broken promise will constitute a deliberate loss transfer for personal gain, (...) the duty not to exact unjust enrichment will require a promisor either to honor her promise or craft a means of ensuring that the promisee’s impoverishment is not traded for her enrichment. And when a broken promise will constitute the culpable imposition of a reliance-based injury on a nonculpable promisee, the duty to make others whole when one has purposefully, knowingly, or recklessly injured them will require one either to keep one’s promise or to fashion a remedy for its breach that ensures that the promisee is left no worse off than he would be had the promise not been made. This account explicitly parts ways with normative powers theories of promising. It places no weight at all on the raw fact that a promise has been made. Instead, it locates the gravamen of a promissory violation in the harm that is caused to a promisee who nonculpably relies upon and changes her position in anticipation of the prediction about the promisor’s future conduct that is embedded in his promise. Absent any adverse reliance on the part of a promisee, there is nothing that gives rise to an obligation of performance or repair on the part of the promisor. But this account is also to be distinguished from utilitarian theories that take promises to be instruments of wealth maximization that properly give way whenever the reason for honoring them speaks in favor of violating them. On my account, the balance of reasons for action that determines the morality of performance includes deontological rights and duties, agent-relative permissions, and Hohfeldian liberties. As I shall argue, even if one rightly concludes that one has no duty either to keep a promise or to craft a remedy for its breach, one must nevertheless remember that virtue requires one to be or become the kind of person who often goes beyond the call of duty. But the fact that virtue often requires us to do what we have no duty to do should not cause us to confuse its conditions with the conditions of right and wrong action. We have a duty to keep promises or to otherwise protect the reliance interests that they generate only when failing to do so will lead either to our own unjust enrichment or to others’ unjust injury. And this means that we have a duty to keep promises in far fewer circumstances than is commonly believed. (shrink)

I discuss three views of promising: the view is that promising is a social practice, and that our obligation to keep promises is related to the practice in some way; Scanlon’s non-practice view, and Wallace and Kolodny’s “hybrid view”. I shall argue that none of these accounts is satisfactory, and propose a fourth view: deflationism. Deflationism is the view that saying “I promise” merely adds emphasis and does not incur any extra obligation.