Promises to the Dead

Many people attempt to give meaning to their lives by pursuing projects that they believe will bear fruit after they have died. Knowing that their death will preclude them from protecting or promoting such projects people who draw meaning from them will often attempt to secure their continuance by securing promises from others to serve as their caretakers after they die. But those who rely on such are faced with a problem: None of the four major accounts that have been developed to explain directed promissory obligation (the Authority View, the Trust View, the Assurance View, and the Reliance View) support the view that we are obligated to keep our promises to persons who are now dead. But I will provide hope for those who wish to use such promises to protect the meaning with which they have endowed their lives. I will argue that while we cannot wrong a person who is now dead by breaking a promise made to her during her life, we could wrong the living by so doing. We thus (might) have reason to keep the promises that we made to those who are now dead.

Aesthetic Reasons and Aesthetic Shoulds

Some questions about normative structure are global. We can ask how we should live, or what we ought to do all things considered, or whether there are any categorical oughts. But we can also examine local normative structure. We might ask ourselves about what we should do from the moral point of view rather than the prudential one, or discuss promissory obligation in contrast with what friendship demands. How should we understand such localized forms of normativity? We argue that a plausible sounding treatment of the distinction cannot account for what we call the “interrelatedness” of reasons from different domains.

Consequentialism and Promises

I explore the debate about whether consequentialist theories can adequately accommodate the moral force of promissory obligation. I outline a straightforward act consequentialist account grounded in the value of satisfying expectations, and I raise and assess three objections to this account: that it counterintuitively predicts that certain promises should be broken when common-sense morality insists that they should be kept, that the account is circular, and Michael Cholbi’s argument that this account problematically implies that promise-making is frequently obligatory. I then discuss alternative act consequentialist accounts, including Philip Pettit’s suggestion that promise-keeping is an intrinsic good and Michael Smith’s agent-relative account. I outline Brad Hooker’s rule consequentialist account of promissory obligation and raise a challenge for it. I conclude that appeals to intuitions about cases will not settle the dispute, and that consequentialists and their critics must instead engage in substantive debate about the nature and stringency of promissory obligation.

Hard incompatibilism and the participant attitude

Following P. F. Strawson, a number of philosophers have argued that if hard incompatibilism is true, then its truth would undermine the justification or value of our relationships with other persons. In this paper, I offer a novel defense of this claim. In particular, I argue that if hard incompatibilism is true, we cannot make sense of: the possibility of promissory obligation, the significance of consent, or the pro tanto wrongness of paternalistic intervention. Because these practices and normative commitments are central to our relationships as we currently conceive of them, it follows that hard incompatibilism has radically revisionary conclusions.

Promising and Assertion

Even if promising is a kind of assertion or accomplished by making an assertion, it has a normative upshot that goes beyond the normative upshot of ordinary assertions. When one breaks a promise, one is liable to criticism for actions subsequent to making the promise—a kind of criticism to which merely asserting something would not make one liable. This article explores various explanations for the ways in which a promise creates these obligations. It distinguishes those that see the relevant obligations as falling out of some prior obligation and those that treat promissory obligation as a new creation. If obligations generate reasons to comply, these latter accounts seem to postulate reasons that come from nowhere, and this in turn has led to some puzzlement. This article surveys the puzzlement, as well as ways to embrace it and ways to avoid it, while also examining reasons to be glad one can bind oneself by promising. Finally, it explores the possibility that promises as illocutionary acts are a species of assertion or constituted by assertions.

Agreements and Promises

This chapter begins an inquiry into the source of the demand-rights generally understood to be associated with agreements and promises. Following the literature it focuses on promises, discussing several points it takes to be firm, including the need for acceptance by the promisee and the inevitability and directedness of promissory obligation—the primary obligation of a promisor. It then reviews David Hume’s influential discussion of promises and relates it to the central contemporary approaches. Understanding promissory obligation to be a matter of moral requirement, Hume argues against the idea that it is a creature of the will, as is commonly thought, and proposes an alternative, conventionalist account of such obligation. Most contemporary theorists accept the former point; some are conventionalists and others not.

The Rationality of Promising

This essay first examines various conceptions of promissory obligation, which suggest a range of possible benefits associated with promising. Theories of temporally extended practical rationality suggest that to obtain benefits of this kind, it may be rational for a promisor to treat his or her promise as binding. The difficulty is that, whatever practical and normative benefits binding promises may have, it will not always be epistemically rational for the promisor to perform. Thus, to the extent that markets rely on binding promises, they rely on an element of irrationality in human decision-making.

The Bounds of Morality

Margaret Gilbert’s ‘Three Dogmas about Promising’ is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the literature, not only for its account of promissory obligation based on joint commitment, but for its equally important focus on two properties of such obligation, which her account uniquely and elegantly captures: first, that the duty to keep a promise is necessary—the obligation stands regardless of the content or morality of the promise—and, second, that it is directed, with the promisee having unique standing to demand performance. A related point, implied by Gilbert’s argument, is that moral requirements, alone, can never have those properties. Here I challenge that point, arguing that moral requirements, under the right circumstances, can give rise to necessary and directed obligations, after all, and I propose one such moral obligation of which the duty to keep a promise may well be an instance. Nevertheless, I conclude, it may not provide as plausible a basis of promissory obligation as joint commitment.