Abstract
On some popular accounts of promissory obligation, a promise creates an obligation to the person to whom the promise is made (the ‘promisee’). On such accounts, the wrong involved in breaking a promise is a wrong committed against a promisee. I will call such accounts ‘directed obligation’ accounts of promissory obligation. While I concede that directed obligation accounts make good sense of many of our promissory obligations, I aim to show that directed obligation accounts, at least in their current forms, cannot accommodate an obligation to keep deathbed promises. While the term 'deathbed promise' refers to any promise made to a person who is dying, I focus specifically on deathbed promises which will not, or even cannot, be fulfilled until after the promisee's death. In what follows, I examine two prominent types of directed obligation account: (i) rights-based accounts, which argue that a promissory obligation is a directed obligation because a promise gives the promisee certain rights, and (ii) harm accounts, which argue that a promissory obligation is a directed obligation because a promise puts the promisee in a special position to be harmed. I argue that neither version can accommodate an obligation to keep deathbed promises.
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Notes
Advocates of this type of account include Patrick Atiyah, Margaret Gilbert, H.L.A. Hart, Elinor Mason, and Kenneth Shockley. I also take Thomas Scanlon’s deontological account of promissory obligation to be a special sort of directed-obligation account, though I will not treat his account in detail here.
I do not mean to block the possibility that such an obligation might, under special circumstances, be overridden or annulled. However, other things being equal, it would stand.
Though this point may seem trivial, a number of thinkers, including some prominent ones, have held that the dead can have rights - see, for example, Bob Brecher (2002), T.M. Scanlon (1998), Judith Jarvis Thompson (1992), T.M. Wilkinson (2002), and J. Jeremy Wisnewski (2009). Their arguments often rely the possibility that a person’s interests might survive her death. I work to refute arguments which rely on such a possibility in the following section, so I will not treat them here.
For a similar objection, see Wisnewski (2009), pp. 58–60.
I take representatives of this sort of account to include Páll Árdal, Patrick Atiyah, Thomas Scanlon, and Elinor Mason.
Quite a number of scholars think that there is more to promissory obligation than this, but here I emphasize the points of broad agreement, so as to encompass as many views as possible.
This passage is cited or referred to by Joel Feinberg, Earnest Partridge, and James Stacey Taylor (2008), among others. It is not at all clear that Aristotle agrees with this popular belief. However, for the purposes of this paper, it is not important whether or not Aristotle believes that fortune and misfortune can befall the dead.
Partridge is responding to Feinberg’s earlier claim that interests can be harmed. Feinberg rescinded the view that interests can be harmed in Harm to Others, p. 83.
Note, this is not the same as claiming that her interests cannot be, for example, legally protected postmortem.
I assume that if an individual cannot be harmed in her postmortem state (qua corpse, etc.) or in her antemortem state, then she cannot be harmed at all.
I would like to extend special thanks to Margaret Gilbert, whose questions and comments greatly aided the development of this paper.
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Dressel, A. “Directed Obligations and the Trouble with Deathbed Promises”. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 323–335 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9520-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9520-1