Ethics-promises
Warnock highlights that there is an obligation not to misrepresent the world. Normally, this requires us to try to make our words fit the world and to base our statements on evidence. When we make statements about how to world will be or was , our obligation to speak truthfully requires us to consult the evidence But sometimes, when we are speaking about future facts that are under our control, it requires us to make the world fit our words. Warnock concluded that for promising, it is by my words that I give it to be understood that I will act in a certain way, and therefore if truth is to be satisfied, I must so act as I said I would. There is something which "by my own words I am bound to what I am doing".
Expand on Warnock's idea.
One might argue that promises are more than just words. Maybe there is more to it, it could be that when one makes a promise, uttering words is not the only thing that they do. Perhaps you change your state of mind in ways and change the state of mind of the person you are talking to. Perhaps this is the moral significance which can change the obligation. One might question With which words do you promise? If a promise really is just words, then it is difficult to define a promise.The words 'I promise'? .Plausibly saying these words is neither sufficient nor necessary for promising. If this is true then a promise isn't the same thing as just saying the words 'I promise' it Is something else. This is because you can say those words and not promise and you can promise without saying these particular words.
How might one respond to the sceptics position?
There are cases when you have made a promise, but it does not look like it would be wrong to break that promise. Arguably, these include: -ones made under duress (coercive pressure). E.g. promising to go to the cashpoint when someone has you at gunpoint. It is plausible that in such a circumstance, you do not owe it to that person to keep that promise, it does not generate an obligation to do it. -ones made under the influence of deception. -ones that become (through no fault of one's own) unexpectedly difficult or costly to keep. E.g. if you promise to walk my dog and then you break your leg, that promise is one which seems very costly to keep, it seems fair to break the promise in these circumstances. However, the decent thing to do is to tell the promisee that you can no longer keep your promise, so you are not relieved of the obligation just because you break your leg, you are released from the obligation form the promisee. This suggests that there is something else about promising which is significant when it comes to obligation. It is an intriguing feature of promising that both parties have normative powers, powers to change the normative situation. -promises to perform immoral acts. E.g. the promise to murder, the wrongness of murder overrides the wrongness of breaking a promise. A promise to murder is never a promise which you are obligated to keep.
However, can there be exceptions?
You might doubt that this is what a promise means, it's a very sophisticated account of what a promise means But, children make promises, but children are not able to communicate anything as complex as this. It is possible that you could make a promise to someone and not have any thought about obligation. Its not obvious that when we say 'I promise, we are saying something about obligation. Even if it were true that this is what a promise means, it's not obvious that it is something which you can make true just by saying so. There are lots of cases where saying something does not make it so, for example, saying 'I insult you', just saying that is not enough to actually insult you.
However, what is a possible objection?
However, it does not look as if a moral obligation is the sort of thing which you can bring into existence just by willing it. One of the key differences between promising to do something and deciding to do something is that when you decide to do something, you can just change your mind, you are not bound to the decision. We can easily revoke our decisions. But, the obligation of a promise is not like this, you cannot get out of the obligation of a promise just by changing your mind. It seems difficult to put yourself in a situation where you will yourself to have an obligation, but it is not mysterious as to how we can make a decision. Promising is more than just making up your mind to do something, it is binding yourself to do something. It is hard to see how you could do that just by yourself in your head.
However, what is a problem with this theory?
If it is true that promises obligate, that is not a fact about human behaviour it is a moral/normative fact. I am not describing any pattern of behaviour when I say that promises obligate. Notice that the fact that promises obligate isn't a regularity of behaviour, so it can't be a convention. However, it might be a convention that we act as if promises obligate. For example, we do criticise people who do not keep their promises and expect people to keep them, that is the regularity of behaviour which we conform to, we don't want to be shamed of excluded for being a promise breaker. Arguably, this is a socially useful convention. Rawls suggests that it is better for all of us that that convention obtains than that it doesn't, it is for the common good. It fosters all kinds of good things such as cooperation, trust, coordination. If we agree that this is a social convention that we all benefit from, then we could argue that we should continue to do our bit to maintain that social convention. Arguably, each of us has an obligation to help maintain socially useful conventions. So, the conventionalist view suggests that there may be an obligation to maintain the convention of acting as if promises obligate.
So, how might the obligation to keep a promise might depend on a convention?
Typically, when one promises to do something, one obligates oneself to do it. That is, one makes it the case that it would be wrong not to do it. But, a promise is just words so how can words change what is right or wrong? There seems to be a sort of magical thinking in saying that just words can change the moral facts. That can't literally be true , it seems that it does not represent anything real.
So, what is the puzzle about promising?
1. Scanlon presents two worries with conventionalism, The first is that it requires the presence of a convention between the parties before promising is possible, and thus rules out promises between those who lack such a shared convention. We can imagine some primitive society where there is no convention of promising. However, this is not the best challenge because couldn't there be obligations just like promissory ones, in a world with no convention of promising? For couldn't people still assure each other that they would do certain things, and thereby obligate themselves to do them. There might no be any promissory obligations but there could be obligations which are very similar to them, individuals will still assure each other they will do something, this generates a very similar type of obligation as making a promise does. 2. The second criticism is that the conventional view gets the harm of breaking a promise wrong. On the conventional view, when someone breaks a promise, they harm the convention of promising as a whole, and by extension, all those who rely on it. But this clashes with our firm intuition that a broken promise harms primarily the jilted promisee. A promissory obligation is directed towards the promisee. The promisor owes it to her to keep her promise (such that she is wronged if it is not kept, there is a distinctive victim). You have some sort of moral right or claim against the person who broke their promise. There is something special about the relationship between the promiser and the promisee, conventionalism can't explain this since we think that when a promise is broken the promisee has been wronged, we don't think that they have wronged everyone who is a part of this social convention.
What are the two worries presented by Scanlon?
Hume illustrates this same worry, he compares promises to the church (Hume is believed to have been an atheist). He describes some of the things which go on in the church, the words which are said in the case of transubstantiation and holy orders don't actually change anything unless we all just get together and pretend that it does. What Hume is suggesting is that this is all very mysterious, it is a puzzle how it could be that the priest has this kind of power. It is equally as mysterious to how a promise imposes a new obligation. The language Hume uses suggests it is a deep and intriguing mystery. He remarked, "I shall farther observe, that since every new promise imposes a new obligation of morality on the person who promises...; it is one of the most mysterious and incomprehensible operations that can possibly be imagined, and may even be compared to TRANSUBSTANTIATION, or HOLY ORDERS".This is the sceptical view of promises (saying the words 'I promise' doesn't change anything)
What does David Hume argue?
Answer 5: A promise obligates due to an obligation of veracity, this is an obligation of truthfulness. He argues that the obligation to keep a promise is just a species of a more general obligation, the obligation to tell the truth.On this view, what a promisor says is simply that she will do such-and-such. She doesn't say anything at all about obligation, you simply make a kind of prediction about the way in which the future is going to be. So, if you have said it will happen and there is an obligation to speak the truth then you have to make it happen. She is then obligated to do as promised, in order to ensure that she told the truth. Warnock remarked that, "to promise, we might say, is in effect and often is in fact to say 'I will', this being meant as and taken as not the mere expression of a present intention, but as an actual truth about my future behaviour".
What is Warnock's answer to why a promise obligates?
Whilst its true that the promiser leads the promisee to expect you will keep your promise, we have to ask why this is the case. What is the reason for that expectation? It is very plausible to think that the reason for why you will keep your promise is because you are now obligated to do so. However it seems it is the other way around for the expectationalist, as they argue that it is because you expect that I will keep my promise that I am obligated to keep my promise. For lots of promises, a promisee's expectation of performance depends on the promisor's obligation. So how can it also be the other way around? There is something circular going on here. Suppose I promise you that I will mow your lawn ,something I have no desire to do unless I am obligated to do it. If you're rational, you won't expect that I will do this until I am obligated. But according to Expectationalism, I am not obligated to do it until you form the expectation. But if the obligation is not incurred until the expectation is formed, and the expectation is not formed until the obligation is incurred, neither will ever come into existence. Additionally, another worry is that by suggesting promises are merely expectation-producing mechanisms, expectationalist's collapse the distinction between promising and other things, like advising, warning and threatening. The expectationalist can't explain why promissory expectations produce obligations, in a way that other expectations don't.
What is a problem with Expectationalism?
Searle argues that promising obligates because "Saying makes it so". It is not that thinking makes it so, its that saying makes it so. So, it is not that you get the obligation from an act of will, intention or a mental act, its that you generate the obligation by a speech act. What you're saying when you make a promise is something like 'I hereby obligate myself to you'. And, the second part of the view argues that when you say that, you make it true. Searle describes this as a rule of language that when you say those words you make them true. A promise obligates because the promisor says that it does. There are many words that work in that way, for example: •Saying, I apologise, it seems like if I say this then I make it true. It is enough just to say the words. So, if we understand what the word I promise means then we will understand that we are putting ourselves under an obligation and by saying that we will put ourselves under an obligation, we do put ourselves under an obligation.
What is another possible answer?
Answer 1: Volitionism- this is the view that a promise obligates because the promisor wills or intends that it does. The idea is that when I say that 'I promise' and I am being sincere then one of the things I am doing as I speak is intentionally putting myself under an obligation. I am willing the obligation into existence. For example, compare what happens when you make a decision. A decision is not the same as a promise since a decision is something which you usually do by yourself, you are performing a mental act which is invisible to anyone else. The consequence of making a decision is that you acquire a commitment which you didn't have before, you've decided. So if you forget you might be annoyed that you have not done something you decided to do. However, this is different from promising as you haven't committed some ethical or moral wrong by not doing what you decided but something similar is going on when promising as you also perform a mental act which makes it the case that you will have made an error if you do not do it.
What is the first answer to the question 'Why does a promise obligate? '
Answer 4: Expectationalism (see e.g. MacCormick, Scanlon). This account is motivated by the idea that when you make a promise, you don't just have an obligation, you have an obligation which is directed towards the person to whom you make the promise. Scanlon is trying to make sense of that idea. A promise obligates because it raises the promisee's expectations of performance, you will have a higher degree of belief that I will do it, I am changing your state of mind with regard to this future act. You are messing with someone if you fail to do the thing that you set out to do. The key thought is that it's wrong to put another's mind at rest only to unsettle them later on. Expectationalist theories maintain that 1) Promises are the sorts of things that are designed to invite the trust of the promisee 2) This trust is a valuable thing, and its betrayal causes harm to promisee's. Thus expectationalist theorists conclude that the wrong in breaking a promise the ground of promissory obligation is the production of this harm. Scanlon has his own expectationalist theory, he claims that promissory obligations derive from another sort of more basic moral obligations, specifically obligations not to 'unfairly manipulate' others. One has a moral duty to keep one's promises because making a promise will lead others to believe that you will do what you promise. Breaking the promise is then tantamount to deceiving those one promised, and since one has a moral duty not to do this, one has a moral duty to keep one's promises.
What is the fourth possible answer to the question of why promises obligate?
Answer 3: Conventionalism (see e.g. Hume, Rawls). A promise obligates because it is a social convention that it does. In other words, it is because we have social conventions about promises obligating that they do obligate. This view maintains two claims, 1) that promising is essentially a human convention, that is, a rule based practice or set of practices, and 2) that the practice of promising is very beneficial to both groups and to individuals who share the convention, by making trust-based cooperation and coordination possible.An example of a social convention would be that you wear black to a funeral. In these examples, what going on is that there is a pattern in behaviour, or as David Lewis puts it: it's a regularity of behaviour, to which most people in a community conform. He argues that they conform because they (a) prefer to conform, on the condition that a sufficient number of others do, and (b) believe that a sufficient number of others do. We have a conditional preference to conform on the condition that most other people do, and I have a belief that most people do conform.
What is the third answer?
•We want to know what goes on when you make a promise to someone else? What goes on at a linguistic level, what sorts of things do you have to say to make a promise? •What goes on, on a psychological level, how does making a promise change your mental states, your beliefs, and intentions. •What goes on at an ethical level-how does the promise change the rights and wrongs of the situation that you are in? •Related to the question of 'what is a promise' is the question 'under what circumstances does a promise obligate you', in other words, under what circumstances in the making of a promise make you morally required to keep the promise? What is the explanation for this? If promises do obligate us, why is this?
When we are talking about promises, what kinds of questions are we concerned with?
You can promise without saying 'I promise' if: You are speaking a language other than English, there are other words you could use which have the same status as 'I promise', even in English, arguably, you can promise by saying: •'I guarantee it' •'You can rely on me' •'Trust me' •'Take my word for it' you might also say 'I'll do it' - this seems to offer a bit less of a guarantee than those other words. The other expressions seem to imply that my moral reputation is at stake, I'm not just saying I will do it, I am committing myself to you. However, this could work if you seem serious.
Why is saying 'I promise' not necessary?
There will be many circumstances when that is not enough. •you do not address anyone, •your addressee does not understand you, (they don't speak your language) •your addressee does not want you to φ, (e.g. if someone says 'I promise I'll break your legs') •your addressee knows that you are not able to φ, •your addressee rejects your offer of a promise, •the practice of promising has died out. •This suggests that there needs to be more conditions in place for these words to be enough. A promise isn't just words, it is words and the holding of certain other conditions. Minimally, the person you are talking to should understand what you're saying, accept what you're saying and wants you to follow through and believes that you can follow through. It seems to take two to generate a promise, when I say 'I promise' I haven't actually promises until the promisee accepts my promise.
Why might just saying 'I promise' not be sufficient to actually make a promise?
Most people who have written about this topic assume that, typically, when one promises to do something, one obligates oneself to do it. That is, one makes it the case that if you are obligated to do something it would be wrong not to do it. For ethical theorists the central task here an explanation of promissory obligations, they attempt to answer the question of, How is it that we come to have a moral obligation to do what we promise we will? he question is particularly difficult because promissory obligations differ from other sorts of moral obligations in a number of ways. Unlike paradigmatic moral duties, the duty not to harm for example, promissory obligations are not owed equally to everyone, but rather only those we have promised. Further, promissory obligations are voluntary; we don't have to make promises, but we must keep them when we do.
what can we say about obligation?
