Making and Keeping Promises

Abstract

HE concept of a practice or institution of promising has played a central role in some recent discussion of the obligation to keep promises.' The main contention which this concept has been used to establish is that a promise is an obligation-creating speech act which can only be said to occur given the existence of a practice or institution of promising. It has been argued that the truth of this contention implies that one can justify one's action by showing that it is the keeping of a promise, given the existence of the practice. The analogy with formalized games is used to illustrate how this kind of justification is carried out. In baseball, a batter can justify walking to first base by the fact that he has been pitched four balls. So, too, a promisor can justify doing X if he has promised to do X. (This will be qualified below.) If promising is a practice or institution analogous to games, then the moves of making promises and keeping them are governed by constitutive rules of the game. One of the chief criticisms made of this use of the concept of a practice of promising has been that it embodies a confusion between explaining and justifying action.2 These critics argue that it is one thing to say what one is doing and why one is doing it (describe and explain). It is an entirely different enterprise to show that what one is doing, or that the reason why one does it, is justified (morally, prudentially, etc.). In this paper I try to show, first, why the notion that there is a practice of promising is plausible and appealing and why it is tempting to use this notion in explaining the obligation to keep promises. However, I am sympathetic with the criticism that one must distinguish carefully between explaining and justifying action. So my second task is to show that, while the exponents of the view that there is a practice of promising do make a distinction between explaining and justifying, it is not a very clear one and that, in any case, the distinction is not consistently used. Consequently, my third purpose is to draw a distinction between explaining and justifying action which is the one I believe both sides of the debate would wish to draw. My proposal for making the distinction rests on defining explanation in terms of J. L. Austin's concept of illocutionary acts. The over-all aim of the paper is to show both the merits and limits of the use of the concept of a practice of promising in explaining the obligation to keep promises.