Promises

Suppose you decide or promise to do something that you have evidence is difficult to do. Should you believe that you will do it? On the one hand, if you believe that you will do it, your belief goes against the evidence—since having evidence that it’s difficult to do it constitutes evidence that it is likely that you won’t do it. On the other hand, if you don’t believe that you will do it but instead believe, as your evidence suggests, (...) that it is likely that you will fail, your decision is not serious and your promise is not sincere. This problem—I call it the Epistemological Problem of Difficult Action—is a pressing philosophical problem that each of us faces. In this paper I consider several possible responses to it. I conclude that the right response is to say that we should believe against the evidence. Cases in which we decide or promise to do something that we have evidence is difficult to do are the best counterexamples to evidentialism. (shrink)

The article compares David Humes’ and John Searle’s positions concerning the relation between descriptive and evaluative statements. Although the two positions seem to be just opposite in that Hume denies the derivability of the ought from the is, while Seale accepts it, the author shows that Hume and Searle have many similarities, for for both obligations rely upon the institution of promising. The difference is that for Hume the speech act of promising as such does not have intrinsic evaluative impact. (...) Only in the civil state can the calm passions emerge which give to the motivation to act its ought-character. For Searle, on the contrary, the evaluative character is intrinsically linked to the speech act of promising, so that it becomes possible to derive the ought from the is. At the end the question of the relation between institutional and moral institutions is addressed. (shrink)

Le présent ouvrage fait suite aux deux précédents volumes de l’auteur : (2015) Droit des affaires en Afrique subsaharienne et économie planétaire, et (2016) : Démocratie électorale en Afrique subsaharienne Entre droit, pouvoir et argent, publiés par les Éditions Globethics. Bien que Pascal Mukonde convoque le thème du contrat du point de vue strictement juridique et dans le contexte du droit africain en RD. Congo, sur une ligne de recherche systématique (p.75), nous souhaitons mentionner comme préliminaire, la place de l’éthique (...) vis-à-vis des concepts juridiques, dans ce livre centré sur la notion de contrat. Le contrat est en effet un concept central dans l’histoire de la philosophie, partagé entre les normes du droit et un type de collaboration politique. Il est intéressant de comparer la valeur éthique du concept de partenariat, dans l’expression « contrat de partenariat », que nous mettons par hypothèse en rapport avec une finalité de développement, car parmi les risques d’un contrat de partenariat, en particulier entre le public et le privé, il n’est pas seulement question de risques économiques : il y a aussi celui éthique de réputation, par exemple lorsqu’il y a corruption des agents (cf. ci-dessous p. 130), c’est-à-dire des obstacles au développement liés au caractère non transparent des pratiques. (shrink)

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)

ABSTRACTA powerful objection against moral conventionalism says that it gives the wrong reasons for individual rights and duties. The reason why I must not break my promise to you, for example, should lie in the damage to you—rather than to the practice of promising or to all other participants in that practice. Common targets of this objection include the theories of Hobbes, Gauthier, Hooker, Binmore, and Rawls. I argue that the conventionalism of these theories is superficial; genuinely conventionalist theories are (...) not vulnerable to the objection; and genuine moral conventionalism is independently plausible. (shrink)

Hume seems to contend that you can’t get an ought from an is. Searle professed to prove otherwise, deriving a conclusion about obligations from a premise about promises. Since (as Schurz and I have shown) you can’t derive a substantive ought from an is by logic alone, Searle is best construed as claiming that there are analytic bridge principles linking premises about promises to conclusions about obligations. But we can no more derive a moral obligation to pay up from the (...) fact that a promise has been made than we can derive a duty to fight a duel from the fact that a challenge has been issued – just conclusions about what we ought to do according to the rules of the relevant games. Hume suggests bridge principles that would take us from the rules of the games to conclusions about duties, but these principles are false. My argument features an obstreperous earl, an anarchist philosopher and a dueling Prime Minister. (shrink)

Evidence and Agency: Norms of Belief for Promising and Resolving. By Marušić Berislav.

I present a set of cases that pose problems for existing theories of promissory uptake. These cases involve a delayed receipt and/or acceptance of a promise, though the obligation arises before the receipt or acceptance has taken place; a delay or absence of agency on the part of the promisee—making it impossible to satisfy the various suggested uptake criteria, though promissory obligation is nonetheless generated; and the promise is made to someone, de dicto—that is, the person who will be the (...) promisee has not yet been filled in at the time when the obligation begins. I identify clues within each theory of promising to determine the temporal and agency-related boundaries on promissory obligation. I then introduce the backward reach of uptake. (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)

Situationists in moral philosophy infer from empirical studies in social psychology that human beings lack cross-situational behavioral consistency: that is, for the most part, we human beings are not able to act in the same trait-relevant way across a range of distinct types of situations, because those situational differences trigger differences in behavior. In this paper we defend the following thesis: one who accepts this conclusion (that is, one who judges that human beings in general are not possessed of behavioral (...) consistency) cannot make a promise in good faith. This has important consequences for the ethical institution of promising and its associated reactive attitudes. (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)

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)

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)

This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, I extend the traditional definition of lying to illocutionary acts executed by means of explicit performatives, focusing on promising. This is achieved in two steps. First, I discuss how the utterance of a sentence containing an explicit performative such as “I promise that Φ ” can count as an assertion of its content Φ . Second, I develop a general account of insincerity meant to explain under which conditions a (...) given illocutionary act can be insincere, and show how this applies to promises. I conclude that a promise to Φ is insincere (and consequently a lie) only if the speaker intends not to Φ , or believes that he will not Φ , or both. In the second part, I test the proposed definition of lying by promising against the intuitions of ordinary language speakers. The results show that, unlike alternative accounts, the proposed definition makes the correct predictions in the cases tested. Furthermore, these results challenge the following necessary conditions for telling a lie with content p: that you have to assert p directly; that you have to believe that p be false; that p must be false; that you must aim to deceive the addressee into believing that p. (shrink)

The Hippocratic Oath enjoys imperishable value in the western traditions of medicine. In modern culture, its postulates have frequently been interpreted as the foundations for the principles of bioethics and a basis of paternalistic practice, typical for modern medicine and opposite to bioethics. According to the authors of this contribution the semantics of the Hippocratic Oath underwent a serious transformation in the course of centuries, while contemporary bioethics revives its archaic pragmatics.

Contract as Promise is a study of the philosophical foundations of contract law in which Professor Fried effectively answers some of the most common assumptions about contract law and strongly proposes a moral basis for it while defending the classical theory of contract. This book provides two purposes regarding the complex legal institution of the contract. The first is the theoretical purpose to demonstrate how contract law can be traced to and is determined by a small number of basic moral (...) principles. At the theory level the author shows that contract law does have an underlying, and unifying structure. The second is a pedagogic purpose to provide for students the underlying structure of contract law. At this level of doctrinal exposition the author shows that structure can be referred to moral principles. Together the two purposes support each other in an effective and comprehensive study of contract law. This second edition retains the original text, and includes a new Preface. It also includes a substantial new essay entitled Contract as Promise in the Light of Subsequent Scholarship--Especially Law and Economics which serves as a retrospective of the work accomplished in the last thirty years, while responding to present and future work in the field. (shrink)

Evidence and Agency is concerned with the question of how, as agents, we should take evidence into account when thinking about our future actions. Sometimes we promise and resolve to do things that we have evidence is difficult for us to do. Should we believe that we will follow through, or believe that there is a good chance that we won't? If you believe the former, you seem to be irrational since you believe against the evidence. Yet if you believe (...) the latter, you seem to be insincere since you can't sincerely say that you will follow through. Hence, it seems, your promise or resolution must be improper. To meet this challenge, Berislav Maru%si'c considers and rejects a number of responses, before defending instead a solution inspired by the Kantian tradition and by Sartre in particular: as agents, we have a distinct view of what we will do. If something is up to us, we can decide what to do, rather than predict what we will do. But the reasons in light of which a decision is rational are not the same as the reasons in light of which a prediction is rational. That is why, provided it is important to us to do something we can rationally believe that we will do it, even if our belief goes against the evidence. (shrink)

Promising ourselves is familiar, yet some find it philosophically troubling. Though most of us take the promises we make ourselves seriously, it can seem mysterious how a promise made only to oneself could genuinely bind. Moreover, the desire to be bound by a promise to oneself may seem to expose an unflattering lack of trust in oneself. In this paper I aim to vindicate self-promising from these broadly skeptical concerns. Borrowing Nietzsche’s idea of a memory of the will, I suggest (...) that self-promising involves an activity of the will, aimed at the preservation and protection of one’s values. I explain how, understood in this way, these promises can indeed bind, and show that the motivation for making them need not involve mistrust or other alienated attitudes. I then turn to interpersonal promising, arguing that this same activity of the will is required for sincerely promising others: in effect, making a sincere promise to another requires making a promise to oneself. Attention to this under-appreciated aspect of interpersonal promising enriches our understanding of all promises, and helps to correct a narrow and distorted picture of what it means to be bound. (shrink)

In this article, I argued that in contexts in which tipping is customary, there is a moral duty to tip or to explicitly tell the server that you will not be tipping. The evidence for this rests on anecdotes about people's mental states, and customers and server's intuitions about duties that would arise were a customer unable to tip his server. The promise is a speech act that is implicit in ordering food. The speech act must be matched by the (...) server's uptake, which is implicit in her taking the order. The promise argument rests on an actual promise and not a merely hypothetical promise. If there is such a duty, then in the absence of an explicit content, its content is likely set by convention. The convention is that customers tip 15–20%. Thus, customers have a duty to tip servers 15–20%. Other purported moral considerations do not ground this duty. These include custom, desirable incentives, role‐relative obligation, and gratitude. (shrink)

My paper explores the power that forgiveness and the promise, as potentialities of action, have to counter the two difficulties that follow from the possibility of being able to begin something new or what Arendt calls the ‘frailty of human affairs’: irreversibility and unpredictability. Acts of forgiving and promising are expressions of freedom and natality, as they begin human relations anew: forgiveness creates a fresh beginning after wrong-doing, and the promise initiates new political agreements. Arendt argues that forgiveness and the (...) promise depend on plurality. They also create more favorable conditions for people to live together in the public world. Historically, forgiveness has been important in political thought in the form of pardon. In contrast, promises have been conceptualised in political thought primarily in contract theories. (shrink)

This article argues that Kant's essay on enlightenment responds to Moses Mendelssohn's defense of the freedom of conscience in Jerusalem. While Mendelssohn holds that the freedom of conscience as an inalienable right, Kant argues that the use of one's reason may be constrained by oaths. Kant calls such a constrained use of reason the private use of reason. While he also defends the unconditional freedom of the public use of reason, Kant believes that one makes oneself a part of the (...) machinery of the church or state by swearing an oath to and assuming a position within those institutions. -/- The appendix to this article includes a translation of Mendelssohn's comments on Kant's enlightenment essay, "Public and Private Use of Reason.". (shrink)

Why is consent revocable? In other words, why must we respect someone's present dissent at the expense of her past consent? This essay argues against act-based explanations and in favor of a rule-based explanation. A rule prioritizing present consent will serve our interests the best, in light of our interests in having flexibility over our consent and in minimizing the possibility of error in people's judgments about whether we consent.

In his famous paper John Rawls outlines a version of utilitarianism that takes into account the existing criticism of the utilitarian approach. Author shows that the traditional objections expressed in relation to two test cases of utilitarianism — punishment and promise-keeping — are based on the misunderstanding of utilitarian position, because they don’t make a distinction between justifying a practice and justifying a particular action falling under it. In the case of punishment, there two justifications of it: the retributive view (...) that presupposes that punishment is justified on the grounds that wrongdoing merits punishment, and the utilitarian view that holds that punishment is justifiable only by reference to the probable consequences of maintaining it as one of the devices of the social order. According to the author, utilitarian arguments are appropriate with regard to questions about practices, while retributive arguments fit the application of particular rules to particular cases. In the case of promising, truly utilitarian approach presupposes that promisor must weigh not only the effects of breaking his/her promise on the particular case, but also the effect which his/her breaking promise will have on the practice itself. Author thinks that the distinction between justifying a practice and justifying a particular action falling under it was neglected not only by the critics, but by the utilitarians themselves, due to the prevalence of the summary view of the rules. Rawls suggests his own, practical conception of the rules, that presupposes that practices are prior to particular cases of their application. (shrink)

We often promise to ϕ despite having evidence that there is a significant chance that we won’t ϕ. This gives rise to a pressing philosophical problem: Are we irresponsible in making such promises since, it seems, we are insincere or irrational in making them? I argue that we needn’t be. When it’s up to us to ϕ, our practical reasons for ϕ-ing partly determine whether it is rational for us to believe that we will ϕ. That is why we can (...) sometimes rationally believe that we will ϕ even if our belief goes against the evidence. (shrink)

The article reviews the book "Shaping the Normative Landscape" by David Owens.

T. M. Scanlon suggests that the binding nature of promises itself plays a role in allowing a promisee rationally to expect follow through even while that binding nature itself depends on the promisee’s rational expectation of follow through. Kolodny and Wallace object that this makes the account viciously circular. The chapter defends Scanlon’s theory from this objection. It argues that the basic complaint is a form of wrong kinds of reason objection. The thought is that the promisee’s reason to expect (...) compliance are undermined if the promise is binding only when the promisee forms that very expectation. The chapter suggests that other uncontroversially rational processes of multi-person coordination involve beliefs with the very same feature. Focal point reasoning in the theory of games is one example. In coordination situations it can be rational to believe that another person will do something precisely because that person expects you to believe what one does about what they’ll do. An examination of the reasoning in such cases motivates a group reflection principle that vindicates the reasoning employed in Scanlon’s account. -/- . (shrink)

This chapter argues that political promises do not have to be made by individual politicians. Rather, multiparty discourses may be attributed to political leaders, a process labeled metaphorical promising. It analyzes Yukio Hatoyama's brief (2009-2010) reign as Prime Minister of Japan. Hatoyama was forced to resign amid charges that he had failed to remove a US military base from Futenma, Okinawa. Although Japanese newspapers accused him of breaking promises to move the base, Hatoyama had never explicitly promised to do so. (...) Expectation for change arose through a complex discourse involving the government, opposition, and Japanese media, among others. As political leader, Hatoyama failed to take difficult steps toward military reform. As peace is not merely the absence of war, political accord is more than the absence of divisive speech. Japan's experience reminds us that accord and mutual agreement must be sought through active engagement throughout society. (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)

If common law is to run parallel to the morality of promissory obligation, it must require the breaching seller to keep his promise, not simply to pay off the buyer. However, in the event of promise-breaking, common law orders the defendant to compensate the claimant for the loss that flows from the breach of the duty to perform. The following questions then arise: why does English law not order the defendant to do the very thing that the substantive duty requires (...) him to do? Why does it not adopt specific performance as the primary remedy? Is it because English law runs against the morality of promise? The answer is ‘no’. A number of justifications have been put forward to explain the common law’s reluctance to award specific performance despite its undoubted acceptance as the appropriate moral response to promise-breaking. This article will explain each and show which is more persuasive. (shrink)