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Notes
See T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 295–397.
See Niko Kolodny and R. Jay Wallace, “Promises and Practices Revisited,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 31, Issue 2, pp. 119–154 (2003).
See, e.g., Nicholas Southwood and Daniel Friedrich, “Promises Beyond Assurance,” Philosophical Studies, Vol. 144, No. 2, p. 270 n. 15 (2009).
Scanlon does not explicitly list these desiderata in one place; they are implicit in his discussion in Chapter 7 of Scanlon, op. cit., pp. 295–327.
See Kolodny and Wallace, op. cit., p. 137 (“It is distinctive of promising [according to Scanlon] that A’s public performance itself reflexively provides B with a reason to believe that A will do X that is connected to A’s concern to avoid wrongdoing…”).
Scanlon, op. cit., pp. 302–304.
Ibid., pp. 298, 306.
Seana Shiffrin, “Promising, Intimate Relationships, and Conventionalism,” Philosophical Studies, Vol. 117, No. 4, p. 482 (2008).
Scanlon, op cit., p. 316 (“Unlike an obligation to comply with a just institution that provides some of the public goods, the obligation to keep a promise is owed to a specific individual who may or may not have contributed to the practice of promising.”).
Ibid., pp. 295–296; see also, e.g., John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 344–350.
See Rawls, op. cit., pp. 295–296.
Scanlon, op cit., p. 316.
Ibid., pp. 296–297.
Ibid., p. 304.
Ibid.
Kolodny and Wallace, op. cit., pp. 131–136.
Ibid., p. 132.
Scanlon, op. cit., p. 300.
Kolodny and Wallace, op. cit., p. 137 (emphasis added).
Ibid., p. 139 (quotation marks omitted).
Ibid., pp. 139–140.
Ibid., p. 140.
Ibid.
See ibid., pp. 139–144.
Scanlon, op. cit., pp. 312–314.
Ibid., p. 312.
Ibid., p. 314.
Ibid., p. 314.
Andrei Marmor suggested this case to me.
Southwood and Friedrich, op. cit., p. 272, similarly offer Soccer Game. The story stars young Daisy and her unreliable father, who never attends her soccer games even though Daisy desperately wants him to. One day, her father sincerely promises to show up to Daisy’s next soccer game. But Daisy knows better than to get her hopes up. When game day rolls around, Daisy’s father—as expected—fails to arrive. Instead, he goes out drinking with friends. The case doesn’t appear to raise any special concerns apart from Profligate Pal. That is, Scanlon’s responsive strategy—if it succeeds—would seem to succeed equally well against Profligate Pal and Soccer Game. Scanlon could say, for example, that the dad is obligated to go because he has an ongoing duty to support his child—but the obligation isn’t a promissory one. For similar doubts about Profligate Pal, see Shiffrin, op. cit., pp. 486–489.
See also Shiffrin, op cit., p. 489 (“Why should a public history of prior breach make a contemporary breach morally insignificant?”).
This doesn’t mean, however, that one can’t trigger a duty by invoking a social practice (like Reindeer Oaths). Rather, the principle doesn’t rely on social practices essentially, any more than Scanlon’s original Principle F does.
Scanlon, op. cit., p. 314.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
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I thank Rima Basu, Janet Levin, and Kadri Vihvelin for their comments on an earlier draft. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Andrei Marmor for his extremely helpful counsel throughout this project.
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Encarnacion, E. Reviving the Assurance Conception of Promising. J Value Inquiry 48, 107–129 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9409-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9409-6