Abstract

Contemporary approaches to promise have focused primarily on the question of how promises produce obligations. Some of the answers to this question include: promissory obligation is defined by the constitutive rules of the institution; raised expectations create promissory obligations; promises merely evidence previous obligations; no explanation is needed because promissory obligation is intuitively clear; and intentions creat promissory obligations. ;My response has several parts. First, I show that all of these explanations have serious problems in explaining aspects of promise that are outside their narrow range. Second, in attempting to explain how promises create obligations, these approaches all but ignore the equally important questions of when and how promises cease to be obligatory. Third, these approaches are usually part of a larger project: a moral theory, a theory of language, a theory of intention. Promise is often used as a central case in these theories, but the actual accounts of promise lack coherency, explanatory power, and empirical content. ;More specifically, this study critically evaluates five contemporary approaches to promise. It argues that they underdescribe promise and fail to accord with its data. The approaches evaluated are the Institutional Approach used by John Rawls and John Searle; the Expectational Approach used by Henry Sidgwick and Jan Narveson; the Evidentiary Approach used by P. S. Atiyah; the Intuitionist Approach used by H. A. Prichard and W. D. Ross; and the Intentional Approach used by Michael Robins. ;In their place I posit a theory of practice. A practice is defined as conformative behavior which arises spontaneously within forms of life. Practices are created by human action not human design. They are characterized by the actions of practitioners acting within practice roles. Though constrained by certain conditions, these roles have a range of interpretations. Practices evolve as the interpretations of their roles evolve. I show that a number of human activities can be explained on a theory of practice, and that promising is one of these activities. I argue that a Practice Approach to promise has coherence, explanatory power, and empirical content. ;The Practice Approach to promise is a response to the rather limited range of the methodologies used by promise theorists of this century. The Practice Approach sees promise as a social practice and seeks to explain it as such. It attempts to be as conceptually rich as the social practice of promise is complex.