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Promises to the Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Allen Habib
Allen Habib*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary, Calgary, ABT2N 1N4, Canada
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Extract

I Can we make promises to ourselves? This is a question that has not received much consideration in the large body of philosophical work on promising. And in what commentary there is, the answer is uniformly negative. I think this negativity is a mistake, and that the conventional view that we can't make reflexive promises is wrong. I also think that this has some important implications for promissory theory in general. In what follows, I will attempt to argue for the first of these two claims, and to briefly outline my reasons for the second.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 537 - 558
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2009

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References

1 I would like to thank Tom Christiano, David Schmidtz, Stefen Sciaraffa and the two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their help and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.

2 Hobbes, Thomas Leviathan, Tuck, Richard ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), 184Google Scholar

3 H.L.A., Hart ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ Philosophical Review 64 (1955) 175–191Google Scholar

4 Downie, R.S. ‘Three Accounts of Promising’ Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1985) 259–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Atiyah, P.S. Promises, Contracts and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1981), 54Google Scholar

6 Although there is some record of support for self promises as well; see, e.g., Raz's, Joseph appeal to them in his reply to Neil MacCormick in ‘Voluntary Obligations and Normative Powers — II’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplemental 59 (1972), 97.Google Scholar

7 Service, Robert ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee,’ The Collected Poems of Robert Service (New York: Putnam 1989).Google Scholar

8 Of course, while these questions avoid asking directly about promissory obligations, they do contain reference to promissory terms like promiser and promisee. But this is just a surface feature, for the sake of brevity. We could easily replace these terms with more cautious but clumsier phrases like ‘The person who made the ostensive promise’ or ‘The person we might call the promisee, were this a promise.’

9 Consider, for example, the paymaster of an army battalion. When it comes time to pay the soldiers, certainly she owes herself her own pay, and not in a metaphorical way, the way she might owe herself a vacation, but in a straightforward way, the way she owes another soldier his pay.

10 This, of course, on the assumption that such an ameliorative pledge is best characterized as a promise to the self. I think this is so, but I don't have space to argue it here. If the pledge of sobriety isn't sufficiently plausible as such we can run the same sort of argument with whatever one might be most disposed to call a self promise (e.g. religious vow, New Year's resolution, etc.) I think the consideration I advance still holds for all such cases.

11 Hobbes, Lev.II-26:184

12 Ibid.

13 Although some claim that such promises aren't obligatory (c.f. Jan, Narveson ‘The Desert Island Problem,’ Analysis 23 (1963) 63–7;Google Scholar Mason, Elinor ‘We Make No Promises,’ Philosophical Studies 123 [2005] 33–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

14 For a scholarly survey of divorce in Arabic and African Sharia courts, see Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History, Amira El Azhary and Eliazbeth Warnock Fernea, eds. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1996).

15 For a brief history of contemporary American No-Fault divorce law, see Kay, Herma Hill ‘Equality and Difference: A Perspective on No-Fault Divorce and Its Aftermath,’ University of Cincinnati Law Review 56 (1987) 1–80.Google Scholar

16 Such minister-only but voluntary duties are not a flight of fancy. Most churches have duties that fall solely on the clergy, and most also allow their prelates to voluntarily leave the priesthood.

17 This objection was first brought to my attention by Thomas Christiano, in his comments on an earlier version of the paper.

18 Indeed, it seems worse than this, for the problem isn't merely epistemological, but rather metaphysical. It's not that we can't tell whether an employee has the duties, but rather that there is no fact of the matter, until they have completed their record.

19 Indeed, it seems worse than this, for the problem isn't merely epistemological, but rather metaphysical. It's not that we can't tell whether an employee has the duties, but rather that there is no fact of the matter, until they have completed their record.

20 Scanlon, for example, uses this fact as one of the reasons to go beyond the traditional expectation-based view of McCormick and others, cf. What We Owe To Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1999) 302-6.

21 Cf. Scanlon, 295-316.

22 Cf. Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971), 344–8.Google Scholar

23 Habib, Allen The Authority Theory of Promises, Dissertation, University of Arizona, 2007.Google Scholar