Abstract
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.
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Notes
Compare the claim that a promise to oneself is not a promise because one cannot release oneself from it Singer (1959). If this were the only objection to the possibility of promise to oneself, it could be answered by saying that, if one can promise oneself, one can also release oneself from that promise. The claim that one can release oneself from one’s promise is no less plausible than the claim that one can promise oneself (in my intuition, these claims are equally implausible).
“Agential contribution” here extends to belief, and so does not imply acceptance. Acceptance is an intentional communicative act (which in special cases includes omission, but always more than a belief).
Obligations are often plausibly said to be reasons. If so, an obligation is not any old reason that counts in favor of some action; it is a special, peremptory reason that renders the failure to perform that action wrongful (cf. e.g., Raz 1999).
I do not wish to attribute this view to anyone in particular: some of those who understand promises in terms of obligations deviate from my formulation in various ways. By and large, however, these deviations are irrelevant for my purposes. Here are ten examples of the basic view I have in mind. (Prichard 1949: 169): “In promising ... we seem to be creating or bringing into existence the obligation to do it ... Once call some act a promise and all question of whether there is an obligation to do it seems to have vanished;” Searle (2001: 193): “[P]romising is by definition undertaking an obligation to do something;” Rawls (1999: 305): “Promising is an act done with the public intention to deliberately incurring an obligation;” Raz (1982: 928): “All promises communicate an intention to undertake, by that very act of communication, an obligation;” Owens (2006: 54): “I am not promising to take you home unless, in saying what I say, I mean to communicate an intention to undertake an obligation to take you home;” Finnis (1980: 298f): “The giving of a promise is the making of ... a sign that signifies the creation of an obligation, and which is knowingly made with the intention of being taken as creative of such obligation;” Mackie (1977: 69): “someone who promises purports to put himself under an obligation;” Armstrong (1971: 446): “A cannot promise sincerely to do X without binding himself morally to do X;” Seligman (1995: 87): “Anyone who has made a promise is under an obligation (generally speaking) to keep it just because to make a promise is to undertake that obligation;” Robins (1984: 14): “A promise ... not only creates an obligation, but a right of another, to whom the obligation is owed;” Altham (1985: 9): “A promise ... is an act whereby one communicates an intention to undertake, by that act of communication, an obligation to do a certain action.”
I argue the case in Sheinman (2008b).
Cf. Robins (1984: 96): “[Conventional obligations] presuppose as more primitive the concept of promising and not the other way around;” “My reason, however, for defending the priority of promising over convention is simply that I take it to be true that conventions presuppose ... the social dimension of commitment that promising represents” (97). This seems to me to assimilate pretty much any form of human communication or cooperation into promises, draining the subject matter of much of its richness and distinctiveness.
Hart was critical of so-called sanction theories that explain social rules by reference to sanction or “hostile reaction,” because he thought such theories fail to reflect the fact that we take our rules as reasons—including reasons to impose a sanction. Sanction theories, in other words, reverse the correct order of explanation. The trouble is that expressed disapproval is just more sanction or hostile reaction. As Hart concedes, his own account “presupposes a background in which deviations from rules are generally met by hostile reactions.” (1992). This means that Hart’s order-reversal objection applies to his theory of practice rules with equal force. After all, he seeks to explain practice rules in terms of hostile reaction. If there were an order-reversal problem in explaining practice rules in terms of non-disapproving hostile reactions, there is an order-reversal problem with explaining them in terms of disapproving such reactions. Here I simply assume that Hart’s order-reversal objection to sanction theories of practice rules—including Hart’s own—is unsound.
This is obvious in the case of games, but what about our so-called moral practices? Many accept the rules of our moral practices as moral rules—this is partly why we call them moral practices. But I’m going to assume that neither the moral practices nor their moral nature depends on this fact. I believe one can wholeheartedly accept a rule while recognizing that it is morally unsound (i.e., provides a false criterion of right).
I deliberately leave the expression “such a reason” vague, because determining the scope of its extension depends on a tricky balancing act that does not affect the issues at bar. Basically, the problem is to strike the right balance between making the intention reflexive enough to explain the communicative nature of promising, and not making it too reflexive so as to avoid a self-reference problem. Alternative accounts of promises such as the Obligation Account encounter an exactly similar challenge.
Equivalently: (a) A intends to lead B to believe 1a by communicating to B, as A does, a 1a intention (A might not have).
Equivalently: (b) A tries to lead B to believe that A believes 1b (as she might not).
By this I mean that inadvertent promises are either not promises at all or are highly defective promises.
Cf. Searle (2001: Chap. 6) who argues that every intention gives reasons. This makes it very difficult to distinguish promises from ordinary intentions—or explain desideratum (1).
Cf. Owens (2006: 68), who describes Hume’s creatures of confined generosity as “less than decent in their dealing with one another.” I am not sure why. Surely, decency hardly requires unconfined generosity? Incidentally, Owens almost seems to concede this much when he remarks that “it is reasonable for each of us to have more care for our own interests than for those of others” (67).
Since there is no reliable way of knowing whether people generally follow rules that can only be followed in secret, the extension of practice rules to such cases will depend on rather aggressive education (indoctrination).
Scanlon is not clear on whether A intends to throw over the boomerang if B throws over the spear (p. 298). I am assuming that he does.
It is in this respect surprising that, after briefly acknowledging something in the neighborhood of the problem I am raising in the text, Scanlon simply moves on to “consider some further examples—not, this time, ‘state of nature’ cases, but examples that we could imagine occurring in society as we know it.” But of course, this is to abandon the test case for Scanlon’s claim that promises and their obligations are not essentially practice-based. In “society as we know it,” we promise against the background of robust independent promising practices, and so it is exceedingly hard to rule out the possibility that one’s promissory obligation depends crucially on some such practice. Scanlon’s further examples simply fail to engage my claim that promises and promissory obligations are essentially practice-based.
A quasi-promise is not a failed promise. One might choose to leave one’s statement conveniently ambiguous between a mere prediction and a promise. In some informal personal contexts, for example, one might prefer giving a quasi-promise to giving either a mere prediction or a promise.
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Acknowledgment
This paper has greatly benefited from conversations with Melinda Fagan, Stan Husi, Alastair Norcross, Nicoletta Orlandi, David Owens, and George Sher. I presented drafts of the paper at the Contract and Promise Workshop at Georgetown Law (September 2007), Rice University Humanities Research Center (September 2007), Philosophy Colloquium of the University of California at San Diego (October 2007), and Bled Conference on Social and Political Philosophy (June 2008), and would like to thank these audiences for many valuable comments. The paper is part of a larger philosophical study of promises and agreements. I’d like to thank the participants in my graduate philosophy seminar on promises and agreements (Spring 2008) for many helpful discussions. Finally, I’d like to thank the Rice University Humanities Research Center a very helpful Faculty Fellowship during the fall of 2006, and to Jon and Paula Mosle for their generous Junior Faculty Awards.
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Sheinman, H. Promise as Practice Reason. Acta Anal 23, 287–318 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0033-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0033-1