Promises

The proposition that “promises ought to be kept is one of the most important normative ideas or value judgements in our daily lives. But what about “illegal promises”? That is to say, what about promises that are, legally or morally speaking, malum in se or inherently wrongful, such as voluntary exchanges that are inherently immoral or wrongful, like bribes, blackmail, murder, etc.? In short, what moral obligations, if any, do such promises impose? Although many of the greatest thinkers in Western (...) civilization have offered a wide variety of theories to explain the source of promissory obligations, it turns out there is a blind spot in this centuries-old conversation, for few theorists have given the problem of illegal or immoral promises any sustained thought. Nevertheless, illegal or immoral promises should be of theoretical interest to us because such promises may help us delimit the outer boundaries of promissory obligations. (shrink)

John Searle’s Speech Act Theory enumerates necessary and sufficient conditions for a non-defective act of promising in producing sincere promises. This paper seeks to demonstrate the conjunctive insufficiency of the foregoing conditions due to the inadequacy of the sincerity condition to guarantee predicated acts being fulfillable. Being the definitive condition which contains the psychological state distinct in promises as illocutionary acts, that is the expression of intention (S intends to A), I purport that not all sincere promises are non-defective. To (...) motivate this, I shall explicate Searle’s conception of full blown explicit promises as his basic qualification for the application of the above conditions, and set the line as to how explicit is ‘explicit’? As a response to this insufficiency, I shall propose a condition, as part and parcel of the Propositional Content Clause, that makes up Searle’s felicity conditions for promises, which requires explicitness of the form: “A is fulfillable if A is explicit in form”. A is explicit if and only if 1) A is literal in form, where A can have either 1 basic or multiple meanings, and 2) The meaning of A, whether basic or multiple, with respect to its context is directly stated in the sentence uttered. I call this the Discharge Condition. (shrink)

There are two alternative approaches to accommodating an agent-centered restriction against, say, φ-ing. One approach is to prohibit agents from ever φ-ing. For instance, there could be an absolute prohibition against breaking a promise. The other approach is to require agents both to adopt an end that can be achieved only by their not φ-ing and to give this end priority over that of minimizing overall instances of φ-ing. For instance, each agent could be required both to adopt the end (...) of minimizing their own promise-breakings and to give this end priority over that of minimizing promise-breakings overall. The former is what I’ll call the side-constraint approach, and the latter is what I’ll call the teleological approach. In this chapter, I argue that, when it comes to accommodating restrictions, we should (1) favor the teleological approach over the side-constraint approach, (2) favor an act-consequentialist approach over a non-consequentialist, teleological approach (such as Rossian pluralism), and (3) favor a Kantsequentialist approach over other act-consequentialist approaches, where Kantsequentialism is a version of act-consequentialism that holds that persons are ends-in-themselves who are inherently and unconditionally valuable and are, thus, owed our respect. (shrink)

Most theories of promising are insufficiently broad, for they ground promissory obligation in some external or contingent feature of the promise. In this paper, I introduce a new kind of theory. The Mental States First (MSF) theory grounds promissory obligation in something internal and essential: the mental state expressed by promising, or the state that promisors purport to be in. My defense of MSF relies on three claims. First, promising to Φ expresses that you have resolved to Φ. Second, resolving (...) to Φ commits you to Φing, all else being equal. Third, the norms on speech acts are determined by the norms on the mental states they express, such that publicly expressing that you are in a state subjects you to whatever commitments are normally incurred by being in that state, regardless of whether you really are in it. I suggest that this general approach might also explain how the norms on other sorts of speech acts work. (shrink)

No matter how it is viewed, as a plausible version of anti-utilitarianism or of non-consequentialist, or even as a plausible version of deontology, the theory of prima facie duties certainly makes W. D. Ross one of the most important moral philosopher of the twentieth-century. By outlining his pluralistic deontology, this paper attempts to argue for a positive answer to the question of whether Ross’s theory can offer a solution to the issue of conflicting duties. If such a solution is convincing, (...) as I believe it is, it would indicate the possibility to justify within the deontological framework, i.e., without committing to the principle of good-maximizing, those “hard cases” where people should break a promise or other (prima facie) duty in order to prevent a disastrous outcome. The theory of prima facie duties might then suggest that deontology and utilitarianism would likely be reconcilable. (shrink)

Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of the dhamma and the saṅgha. However, the prominence of vows (...) in the Buddhist tradition seems at odds with another central part of the doctrine. For vows, like other promises, seem to involve representing a persisting self as the individual who undertakes the vow. And to explicitly appeal to a persisting self conflicts with one of the most important philosophical commitments of Buddhism – the no self view. We argue though that once we articulate the details of how vows generate behavior that conforms to them, we can see that no appeal to the self is required to internalize and act on vows. (shrink)

What exactly do we need to do in order to make a promise, or to exercise some other normative power? On a view relied on by many philosophers writing on promising, consent, and related phenomena, the answer is that we must communicate a suitable kind of intention. On this view, power-conferring principles assert that specific normative consequences, determined in part by the content of the communicated intention, attach to such communicative acts, and these principles need not be socially practised or (...) accepted to be true. The paper offers a defense of this convention-independent view against the forceful challenge developed by Jed Lewinsohn in ‘The “Natural Unintelligibility” of Normative Powers’. Lewinsohn appeals to action-theoretic considerations to show that the relevant type of communicative act could not be performed under conditions of rationality and full information, and that therefore promissory power and other normative powers require the existence of social rules conferring such powers. The defense of the view targeted by Lewinsohn turns partly on the exact content of plausible constraints on the intelligibility of actions done with a particular aim, and partly on the question just how the social acceptance of power-conferring rules should be thought to matter. (shrink)

While the energy transition is needed more than ever, for some agents it brings significant losses. This article investigates whether fossil fuel owners could refer to promises to avoid having their assets stranded. It explains how authors, in the context of just transitions, have argued for the normative relevance of Rawlsian legitimate expectations, which refer to promissory entitlements. However, it argues that the normative relevance of promises towards fossil fuel owners is limited, because there are only few promises about what (...) will be permissible in the future and because these promises should be just before they can lead to entitlements. (shrink)

This paper offers an original argument for a Humean thesis about promising that generalises to the domain of normative powers. The Humean ‘natural unintelligibility’ thesis – prominently endorsed by Rawls, Hart, and Anscombe, and roundly rejected or forgotten by contemporary writers (conventionalists and non – conventionalists alike) – holds that a rational, suitably informed agent cannot so much as make a promise (much less a morally-binding promise) without exploiting conventional norms that confer promissory significance on act types (e.g., signing on (...) the dotted line) that would not otherwise have such significance. The argument (like Hume’s) is action-theoretic in character; its central premise is the Contribution Condition on acting with an aim: roughly, that doing X in order to (bring about) Y requires that the agent believe that their having X-ed on the occasion might come to fully or partly account for Y’s coming to pass. The argument generalises to the broader domain of exercises of normative powers, i.e., to acts that modify normative properties by ‘fiat’ or ‘stipulation’. This stipulative act has been characterised in three different ways, each of which is given due consideration. Finally, two different ways of accommodating the ‘natural unintelligibility’ thesis are considered, as is the thesis’s normative significance. (shrink)

There seem to be many kinds of moral duties. We should keep our promises; we should pay our debts of gratitude; we should compensate those we’ve wronged; we should avoid doing or intending harm; we should help those in need. These constitute, some worry, an unconnected heap of duties: the realm of commonsense morality is a disorganized mess. In this paper, we outline a strategy for unifying commonsense moral duties. We argue that they can be understood in terms of contact (...) with value. You are in contact with a value when you are manifest in it or when it is manifest in you. You have reason to get in contact with the good and avoid contact with evil. And when you’re in contact with a value, the weight of the reasons it grounds are amplified for you. These ideas, we argue, can bring order to the chaos of commonsense morality. (shrink)

Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of the dhamma and the saṅgha. However, the prominence of vows (...) in the Buddhist tradition seems at odds with another central part of the doctrine. For vows, like other promises, seem to involve representing a persisting self as the individual who undertakes the vow. And to explicitly appeal to a persisting self conflicts with one of the most important philosophical commitments of Buddhism – the no self view. We argue though that once we articulate the details of how vows generate behavior that conforms to them, we can see that no appeal to the self is required to internalize and act on vows. (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)

Conventionalism about promising is the view that the power to make binding promises depends essentially on the existence of a social practice or convention of promising. This paper explores an objection to conventionalism that says that—(allegedly) contra conventionalism—there is no morally acceptable world in which we lack the power of promise. Instead, normative powers theorists claim that our power of promise is morally basic or necessary. I argue that the conventionalist need not deny this claim. There are several ways to (...) develop a noncontingent conventionalism: a version of the view that can accommodate the insight that the power of promise is indispensable to morally acceptable lives. Then, I argue that the conventionalist is indeed on the hook for accommodating this insight. I wrap up by considering the state of play in the debate over conventionalism about promising. Once we note the theoretical possibility of noncontingent conventionalism, it looks like the theatre of battle shifts to the difficult question of whether “natural” morality always provides “moral necessities.”. (shrink)

The Canadian Department of Citizenship and Immigration has recently proposed to make in-person citizenship ceremonies optional. These ceremonies are oaths of allegiances: naturalizing citizens swear loyalty to King Charles and obedience to the laws of Canada. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration proposes to allow naturalizing citizens to take these oaths by checking a box online rather than by taking part in an in-person ceremony. In this commentary, I argue that Canada should go much further. It should stop forcing naturalizing (...) immigrants to swear oaths of allegiance altogether. Such oaths create an unjust inequality between naturalized and natural-born citizens: they mean the former have much weightier political obligations than the latter. (shrink)

In this article I want to focus on a specific function that promises fulfil in our lives: their role as a way of shaping our character. To make my case, I will present an account of truth-telling based on Bernard Williams’ work on genealogy and on the virtues of truth. This account will highlight how our selves (or characters) are not static entities in time, that they are not immediately transparent to us. Nonetheless, we seem to have what I call (...) a drive to be someone, to have a character. We need ways to ‘steady the mind’, that is, ways of shaping our selves to whom we are or want to be. The argument I will put forward is that promises are one of the resources we have for doing so. By making promises, we commit ourselves to acting in a certain way and by doing that we also shape our selves. The argument will help us to answer some philosophical challenges raised against promises, notably about their rationality and about their relationship with vows and resolutions. Additionally, it will impact our thinking about contract law. What emerges from this article is an account of an important role played by promises that has been often neglected by the literature. (shrink)

This paper develops a new theory of the morality of promissory obligations. T. M. Scanlon notoriously argued that promising consists in assuring the promisee that we will do something. I disagree. I argue that it is true that promising consists in assuring the promisee, but what the promisor gives to the promisee is not an assurance that they will do something, but that the normative situation is in a certain way.

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)

Brands are widely regarded as a constellation of shared associations surrounding a company and its offerings. On the traditional view of brands, these associations are regarded as perceptions and attitudes in consumers’ minds in relation to a company. We argue that this traditional framing of brands faces an explanatory problem: the inability to satisfactorily explain why certain branding activism initiatives elicit the moralized reactive attitudes that are paradigmatic responses to wrongdoing. In this paper, we argue for a reframing of brands (...) that calls for viewing brands as a series of normatively binding expectations that are ethically akin to promises. Our promissory framing of brands avoids the explanatory problem, illuminates a number of ethical requirements on branding, and reconceptualizes the role of brand managers. (shrink)

Normative powers like promising allow agents to effect changes to their reasons, permissions and rights by the means of communicative actions whose function is to effect just those changes. An attractive view of the normativity of such powers combines a non-reductive account of their bindingness with a value-based grounding story of why we have them. This value-based view of normative powers however invites a charge of wishful thinking: Is it not bad reasoning to think that we have a given power (...) because it would be good? In this article, I offer a defence of the value-based view of normative powers against this surprisingly under-discussed objection. First, I clarify the challenge by distinguishing between two components of normative powers, which I call the material and normative components, respectively. Secondly, I defend the form of normative explanation involved, showing that it is needed to give convincing value-based explanations for other important normative phenomena, especially rights of autonomy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Robert Veatch argues that physician oaths should not be valued as substantive moral commitments, transformational rituals, or symbolic acts. Further, he insists that oath recitation in medical schools is immoral. I respond to Veatch's criticisms and argue that, with alterations to their content and practice, oaths can have value for articulating moral commitments and building a sense of moral community within the profession. I break down Veatch's multitude of objections to oaths over his career, and I suggest how medical schools (...) can avoid the pitfalls identified by Veatch. A promising and innovative path forward is to integrate a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion—though with an understanding that a few lines in an oath are far from sufficient for institutional culture, faculty accountability, or students' education. (shrink)

According to an attractive and widely held view, all practical reasons are explained in terms of the (instrumental or final) value of the action supported by the reason. I argue that this theory is incompatible with plausible assumptions about the practical reasons that correspond to certain moral rights, including the right to a promised action and the right to an exclusive use of one’s property. The argument is an explanatory rather than extensional one: while the actions supported by the relevant (...) reasons (e.g. keeping a valid promise or respecting property) can be argued to have a certain kind of value, I argue that this value presupposes a moral right, and therefore cannot explain the reason. Reflection on such cases suggest the conclusion that reasons that are subject to normative powers are generally not value-based. This also has important implications for the dialectic between ‘value-first’ and ‘reasons-first’ approaches to normativity. (shrink)

This article argues that the dominant “nonconventionalist” theories of promising cannot account for the moral impact of two basic commercial practices: the transfer of contractual rights and the discharge of contractual debt in bankruptcy. In particular, nonconventionalism’s insensitivity to certain features of social context precludes it from registering the moral significance of these social phenomena. As prelude, I demonstrate that Seana Shiffrin’s influential position concerning the divergence between promise and contract commits her to impugning these features of the modern economy. (...) Finally, I examine the importance of promising for friendship and why we resist the commodification of promissory rights in this domain. (shrink)

Moral philosophy is often said to be about what we owe to each other. Do we owe anything to ourselves?

What do we owe each other when we act together? According to normativists about collective action, necessarily something and potentially quite a bit. They contend that collective action inherently involves a special normative status amongst participants, which may, for example, involve mutual obligations to receive the concurrence of the others before leaving. We build on recent empirical work whose results lend plausibility to a normativist account by further investigating the specific package of mutual obligations associated with collective action according to (...) our everyday understanding. However, our results cast doubt on a proposed obligation to seek the permission of co-actors before exiting a collective action, and suggest instead that this obligation is a function of explicit promising. We then discuss how our results pave the path for a new normativism, a theory that neither under- nor overshoots the target given by our common conception of the interpersonal obligations present in collective action.*. (shrink)

The normative mechanics of promising seem complex. The strength and content of promissory obligations, and the residual duties they entail upon being violated, have various prima facie surprising features. We give an account to explain these features. Promises have a point. The point of a promise to φ is a promise-independent reason to φ for the promisee’s sake. A promise turns this reason into a duty. This explains the mechanics of promises. And it grounds a nuanced picture of immoral promises, (...) an argument against promissory bare wrongings, and a constraint on theories of why we have promissory obligations at all. (shrink)

I answer two questions: (1) what are people doing when they exchange conventional wedding vows? and (2) under what circumstances are these things morally and rationally permissible to do? I propose that wedding pledges are public proclamations that are simultaneously both private vows and interpersonal promises, and that they are often subject to uncertainty. I argue that the permissibility of uncertain wedding promises depends on whether the uncertainty stems from doubts about one’s own internal weakness of will and susceptibility to (...) temptation or from the expectation that external circumstances might change. I then explain why uncertainty is a prima facie challenge for unconditional wedding vows, and I offer a solution: rational wedding vows are unconditional in their content but implicitly conditional in their structure; the spouse pledges to act in certain ways unconditionally, so long as they remain in the spousal role. I respond to objections to my view (including Elizabeth Brake’s claim that the permissibility of unilateral divorce undermines an understanding of wedding vows as promises), and conclude with some suggestions about what marrying couples should do to ensure permissible pledges. (shrink)

Abraham Roth argues that to accept a promise is to intend the performance of the promised action. I argue that this proposal runs into trouble because it makes it hard to explain how promises provide reasons for the performance of the promised action. Then, I ask whether we might fill the gap by saying that a promisor becomes entitled to the reasons for which her promise is accepted. I argue that this fix would implausibly shrink the class of binding promises (...) and suggest that similar difficulties may arise for any theory that casts promises as an exercise of shared agency. (shrink)

Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...) What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)

Unlike natural-born citizens, many immigrants have agreed to undertake political obligations. Many have sworn oaths of allegiance. Many, when they entered their adopted country, promised to obey the law. This paper is about these agreements. First, it’s about their validity. Do they actually confer political obligations? Second, it’s about their justifiability. Is it permissible to get immigrants to undertake such political obligations? Our answers are ‘usually yes’ and ‘probably not’ respectively. We first argue that these agreements give immigrants political obligations. (...) We then argue that getting immigrants to undertake such obligations is morally wrong. This is because it makes immigrants’ political obligations more burdensome than those of natural-born citizens. We conclude that the practice of getting immigrants to undertake such obligations should be abolished. (shrink)

This short reply to my critics begins with four issues concerning my conception of the people’s integrity. I clarify how general morality and, more specifically, liberal political morality, relate to my account of collective integrity. I then turn to address several questions that the critics raise regarding my conception of the people’s property.

This paper takes an ontological approach to the subject of promising. Setting aside the typical concern over promissory obligations, I draw on recent work from the field of social ontology and develop a promissory schema that characterizes the functional role the practice of promising plays in our lives. This schema, put in terms of one agent’s voluntary and intentional attempts to provide another agent with a specific kind of assurance, helps explain what we are doing when we make a promise, (...) and what we desire when we ask that a promise be made. The promissory schema is explanatorily beneficial as it can help us understand why certain actions may be interpreted as promises, thereby reminding us that we need to be sensitive to the ways our actions can give rise to expectations in others. (shrink)

What is it for a duty or obligation to be directed? Thinking about paradigmatic cases such as the obligations generated by promises will take us only so far in answering this question. This paper starts by surveying several approaches for understanding directed duties, as well as the challenges they face. It turns out that shared agency features something similar to the directedness of duties. This suggests an account of directedness in terms of shared agency – specifically, in terms of the (...) so-called practical intimacy that holds between individuals when they act together. The final section addresses a challenge to the shared agency approach posed by legal wronging in tort law. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An influential argument against the possibility of obligations to oneself states that the very notion of such obligations is incoherent: If there were such obligations, we could release ourselves from them; yet releasing oneself from an obligation is impossible. I challenge this argument by arguing against the premise that it is impossible to release oneself from an obligation. I point out that this premise assumes that if it were possible to release oneself from an obligation, it would be impossible (...) to violate that obligation. I note that there are two interpretations of this assumption, one conceptual and one psychological. I argue that, on both interpretations, the assumption is false—at least according to independently plausible accounts of obligations to oneself and of what it means to waive an obligation. My arguments paint a picture of obligations to oneself that not only challenges the argument against their coherence, but also illuminates these obligations’ relationship to other parts of the moral domain. (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)

This paper discusses the prospects of a comprehensive philosophical account of promising that relies centrally on the notion of trust. I lay out the core idea behind the Trust View, showing how it convincingly explains the normative contours and the unique value of our promissory practice. I then sketch three distinct options of how the Trust View can explain the normativity of promises. First, an effect based-view, second, a view drawing on a wider norm demanding respect to those whom one (...) has invited to something, and finally, as a new suggestion, a Normative Interest View. This view holds that promising is a normative power that serves our interest in facilitating or enabling the relationship of trust between promisor and promisee. I argue that only those embracing the third view can fully account for the distinctive obligation that results from the giving of a valid promise in all cases. (shrink)

This is a condensed description of the contents and overarching argument found in Hippocrates’ Oath and Asclepius’ Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession. In that work, I maintain that the basic medical ethical problem concerns iatrogenic harm. I focus particularly on what I refer to as ‘role-conflation’. This most egregious form of iatrogenic harm occurs when a physician deliberately adopts the role of wounder. A contemporary practice such as physician-assisted suicide exemplifies a doctor’s deliberate wounding. I argue that the (...) author of the Hippocratic Oath – aware of the chronic risk of role-conflation – responds to this threat by having the oath-taker specifically forswear signal acts that wound the sick, such as giving a deadly drug even if asked, giving an abortifacient, sexual predation, and gossiping. I argue that by means of the Oath, Hippocrates founds medicine as a profession, a practice intimately involving promising. (shrink)

Why do we have a moral duty to fulfill promises? Hume offers what today is called a practice theory of the obligation of promises: he explains it by appeal to a social convention. His view has inspired more recent practice theories. All practice theories, including Hume’s, are assumed by contemporary philosophers to have a certain normative structure, in which the obligation to fulfill a promise is warranted or justified by a more fundamental moral purpose that is served by the social (...) practice of promising or adherence to it. Recent practice theories do have this structure, but, I argue, Hume’s own does not. Hume’s account, while it does trace the origin of promises to convention, is instead a causal explanation of the moral sentiments we have toward fulfillment and violation of promises, sentiments he regards as normative in themselves and not susceptible of further warrant. He explains how a collectively-invented social practice becomes morally obligatory for us to conform to, without deriving its moral authority from a more basic principle. I discuss one objection often made to practice theories that, in its application to Hume, presupposes the incorrect interpretation, and show that while it is telling for Hume’s descendants, for Hume it misses the mark. Instead I make a different challenge to Hume, and suggest how he might meet it. (shrink)

Using forgiveness theory, we investigated the effects of organizational apology and restitution on eliciting forgiveness of a transgressing organization after transactional psychological contract breach. Forgiveness theory proposes that victims are more likely to forgive offenders when victims’ positive offender-oriented emotions replace negative ones. Three pre-post laboratory experiments, using vignettes about a broken promise of financial aid, found that while apology-alone and restitution-alone each increased likelihood of forgiving, restitution-alone was the more effective of the two responses. When combined with an apology, (...) restitution boosted the effect of apology-alone. However, restitution was unnecessary if positive emotions replaced negative ones; third-party blame accomplished this negative-to-positive emotion replacement. Consistent with forgiveness theory, offender-oriented negative-to-positive emotion replacement partially mediated all effects, and negative emotion reductions were strongly correlated with positive emotion gains. We discuss implications for the repair of damaged norms and relationships within an organizational community. These include reparative effects of apology and restitution, dual-process conceptions of violation and repair, repair after psychological contract breach, and emotion replacement models of forgiveness. (shrink)

This paper argues that promises are proposals in joint practical deliberation, the activity of deciding together what to do. More precisely: to promise to ϕ is to propose (in a particular way) to decide together with your addressee(s) that you will ϕ. I defend this deliberative theory by showing that the activity of joint practical deliberation naturally gives rise to a speech act with exactly the same properties as promises. A certain kind of proposal to make a joint decision regarding (...) one's own actions turns out to have the very same normative effects, under the very same conditions, as a promise. I submit that this cannot be a coincidence: we should conclude that promises and the relevant kind of proposals in joint practical deliberation are one and the same. (shrink)

I argue for an account of the vulnerability of trust, as a product of our need for secure social attachments to individuals and to a group. This account seeks to explain why it is true that, when we trust or distrust someone, we are susceptible to being betrayed by them, rather than merely disappointed or frustrated in our goals. What we are concerned about in matters of trust is, at the basic level, whether we matter, in a non-instrumental way, to (...) that individual, or to the group of which they are a member. We have this concern as a result of a drive to form secure social attachments. This makes us vulnerable in the characteristic way of being susceptible to betrayal, because how the other acts in such matters can demonstrate our lack of worth to them, or to the group, thereby threatening the security of our attachment, and eliciting the reactive attitudes characteristic of betrayal. (shrink)

It is natural to wonder about contract law’s relationship to the morality of promises and agreements. This Chapter distinguishes two ways to conceive of that relationship. First, parties’ agreement-based moral obligations might figure into the explanation of contract law—into an account of its functions or justifications. Contract law might serve to enforce parties’ first-order performance obligations, to enforce second-order remedial obligations, to support the culture of making and keeping agreements more generally, or at least to do no harm to that (...) culture or to people’s ability to act morally. Second, contract can be understood as the legal analog to promise. Both contract and promise enable people to undertake new obligations to one another when they wish. Each is a type of normative power, the one legal, the other moral. The Chapter concludes by arguing that these two ways of thinking about contract law are not mutually exclusive. Contract law both imposes on parties to exchange agreements a legal obligation to perform for reasons independent of the parties’ possible contractual intent, and confers on them the power to undertake that legal obligation when they so intend because they so intend. (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)

This article argues that the notion of a promissory right captures a central feature of the morality of promising which cannot be explained by the notion of promissory obligation alone: the fact that the promisee acquires a full range of control over the promisor’s obligation. It defends two main claims. First, it argues that promissory rights are distinctively grounded in our interest in controlling others’ deontic world. Second, it proposes a version of the ‘Interest Theory’ of rights that incorporates our (...) interest in purely deontic forms of control into the various human interests that constitute the grounds of our rights. (shrink)

This paper will focus on a philosophically significant construction whose semantics brings together two important notions in Kit Fine’s philosophy, the notion of truthmaking and the notion of a variable embodiment, or its extension, namely what I call a ‘variable object’. This is the construction of definite NPs like 'the number of people that can fit into the bus', 'the book John needs to write', and 'the gifted mathematician John claims to be'. Such NPs are analysed as standing for variable (...) objects, which are part of the 'shallow', construction-driven ontology of natural language, yet are real. (shrink)

Philosophers have long argued that duties to oneself are paradoxical, as they seem to entail an incoherent power to release oneself from obligations. I argue that self-release is possible, both as a matter of deontic logic and of metaethics.

In this paper, we will consider the role of oaths and codes of ethics in undergraduate medical education. Studies of ethics syllabi suggest that ethics educators typically use well-known bioethics texts such as Beauchamp and Childress. Yet, many issues that medical students will face are addressed by codes of ethics and oaths. We will first provide a historical survey of oaths and codes and then address how these sources of ethical guidance can be effectively used in ethics education of medical (...) students. Oaths and codes can be engagingly taught using a range of techniques including visual narrative. Excerpts from television and film can be used to highlight challenging ethical dilemmas in a variety of settings, taking the learning from the theoretical to the more applied while offering context. (shrink)

It is now popular to think that promissory obligation is grounded in an invitation to trust. I object that there are important differences between invitations and promises; appealing to trust faces one of the main problems alleged to face appealing to expectations; and whatever puzzles afflict promissory obligation afflict the obligation not to renege on one’s invitations.