Promissory Obligation Research Articles

A Defense of the Obligation to Keep Promises to the Dead.

It is widely held that to break a promise that one made to a person who is now dead would be to wrong her. This view undergirds many positions in bioethics, ranging from those that concern who may access a person's medical records after she has died, to questions concerning organ procurement and posthumous procreation. Ashley Dressel has argued that there is no reason to believe that promissory obligations can be owed to people who are dead. Although her arguments are unsuccessful, others establish that neither of the promissory obligation accounts that she considers (the "Authority Account" and the "harm-based view") can justify the standard view that directed posthumous promissory obligation is possible. However, this does not mean that the received view that we should keep our promises to the dead is mistaken. First, the theoretical commitments and argumentative strategies of those who endorse the possibility of posthumous promissory obligations preclude them from grounding such on either of these accounts of directed promissory obligation. They are thus already committed to justifying such obligations in other ways. Second, the obligation to keep promises to the dead could be justified on the grounds that not to do so would adversely affect the living.

What We Owe to Ukrainians: A Moral Perspective on Nuclear Coercion and Military Intervention

AbstractUkraine's war of self-defense against Russia is one of the clearest examples of a nation fighting a just war in recent history. Ukraine is clearly entitled to defend itself, and Russia is clearly obligated to cease hostilities, withdraw troops, and make repair. In light of this, some of the most salient moral questions related to Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine involve the international community; namely, what moral duties it has toward Ukraine, especially in light of Russia's extreme and pervasive human rights abuses. The first section of the essay argues that there is a pro tanto moral duty to intervene militarily in Ukraine to stop Russian human rights abuses and ensure that Ukraine achieves a military victory. This duty is grounded in duties of rescue, promissory obligations, and reliance obligations, as well as duties to nations’ own citizens and to the international community. The second section of the essay argues that the most relevant consideration in determining whether there is an all-things-considered duty for the international community to intervene militarily in Ukraine is Russia's nuclear coercion and the associated risk of nuclear war. This section highlights the nuclear risks involved in compliance with Russian nuclear coercion, which I argue have been neglected in prominent discussions. The moral stakes involved in this determination are very high, and succumbing to Russian nuclear coercion in the face of massive human rights violations would set a dangerous precedent. Any course of action should be guided by a thorough analysis of all the risks involved, both nuclear and moral.

Promising by Normative Assurance

Abstract This paper develops a new theory of the morality of promissory obligations. T. M. Scanlon notoriously argued that promising consists in assuring the promisee that we will do something. I disagree. I argue that it is true that promising consists in assuring the promisee, but what the promisor gives to the promisee is not an assurance that they will do something, but that the normative situation is in a certain way.

The wrong of mercenarism: a promissory account

The wrong of mercenarism: a promissory account

The Mental States First Theory of Promising

Most theories of promising are insufficiently broad, for they ground promissory obligation in some external or contingent feature of the promise. In this paper, I introduce a new kind of theory. The Mental States First (MSF) theory grounds promissory obligation in something internal and essential: the mental state expressed by promising, or the state that promisors purport to be in. My defense of MSF relies on three claims. First, promising to Φ expresses that you have resolved to Φ. Second, resolving to Φ commits you to Φing, all else being equal. Third, the norms on speech acts are determined by the norms on the mental states they express, such that publicly expressing that you are in a state subjects you to whatever commitments are normally incurred by being in that state, regardless of whether you really are in it. I suggest that this general approach might also explain how the norms on other sorts of speech acts work.

The Next Best Thing To a Promise

What does the promisor owe the promisee when a promise is broken? Some writers have argued that the same reparative obligation – ‘next-best performance’ – arises, at least by default, in all such cases, no matter what kind of promise has been broken, what background relationship there is between promisor and promisee, and what the circumstances of the breach have been. This paper argues against this position, in part by offering a critique of Neil McCormick’s and John Gardner’s particular theses to that effect. The paper argues, to the contrary, that the one thing that the promisor owes the promisee in all cases of breach is an account, whereas the emergence of other reparative obligations in a given case depends on the combined effect of a number of variables, including the independent desirability of the promised action, reciprocal dimensions of the promise, the fault attending the breach, and the norms of the background relationship between the parties. The conclusions are shown to have a bearing on the relationship between reparative obligations in promise and in contract, on the question of the extent to which promisors (or promisors and promisees jointly) can control the normative implications of promises, and on the relationship between promissory obligations and other moral obligations.

Promises to the Dead

AbstractMany 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.

The social ontology of promising

AbstractThis paper takes an ontological approach to the subject of promising. Setting aside the typical concern over promissory obligations, I draw on recent work from the field of social ontology and develop a promissory schema that characterizes the functional role the practice of promising plays in our lives. This schema, put in terms of one agent's voluntary and intentional attempts to provide another agent with a specific kind of assurance, helps explain what we are doing when we make a promise, and what we desire when we ask that a promise be made. The promissory schema is explanatorily beneficial as it can help us understand why certain actions may be interpreted as promises, thereby reminding us that we need to be sensitive to the ways our actions can give rise to expectations in others.

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.

Uniformity and Multiplicity in Contract Law: Some Reflections on the Morality of Promises

This article engages a recent debate in contract theory concerning whether we should embrace a uniform contract law, or whether we should instead adopt different legal rules for different contracting relationships. A common assumption in the literature is that grounding contract in promissory morality would lead to the former. After all, the thinking goes, consumer purchases, parenting agreements, and commercial contracts all equally involve promises, and promissory morality requires one to do what one promised. But I argue that most contract-as-promise theorists have been operating with an overly abstract and individualistic conception of promissory morality that is too focused on the primary promissory obligation. This has obscured many important normative dimensions of promissory morality: How stringent is the promise? Under what conditions is a person obligated to perform? How is an agent entitled to respond to a breach? How should a promisee respond to a request for release? When should a promisee agree to renegotiate? Through a series of examples, I show how these features of promissory morality vary radically across different kinds of human relationships—e.g., marriage, friendship, parenting, and commercial bargains. I argue that this variance is best explained by conceiving of promissory morality as the morality of joint decision-making. The normativity of joint decision-making is dependent on the other joint projects that the parties have, such as maintaining a friendship, forging a life together as a married couple, or raising children. This is an important result for contract theory: if promissory morality doesn’t justify the application of general contract principles across different contracting relationships, then likely nothing does. So, for the law to have a coherent grounding, it ought to resist the urge to apply uniform contract principles across diverse human relationships, even if promissory morality plays a central justificatory role in contracts.

Promises, Rights, and Deontic Control

This article argues that the notion of a promissory right captures a central feature of the morality of promising which cannot be explained by the notion of promissory obligation alone: the fact that the promisee acquires a full range of control over the promisor’s obligation. It defends two main claims. First, it argues that promissory rights are distinctively grounded in our interest in controlling others’ deontic world. Second, it proposes a version of the ‘Interest Theory’ of rights (the ‘Deontic Interest Theory’) that incorporates our interest in purely deontic forms of control into the various human interests that constitute the grounds of our rights.

Contracts Without Promises: Blockchain-Based 'Smart Contracts' and the Title-Transfer Theory of Contract

Smart contracts are computer programs used to transfer digital assets according to user-generated specifications. Smart contracts run on decentralized blockchain networks. The fact that smart contracts, a new means for parties to digitally trade, greatly eliminate ex ante promissory obligations in favor of the actual execution of contracts through a single legal instrument presents a fundamental issue for a contract law paradigm based upon promissory obligations. Therefore, smart contracts offer a novel opportunity to re-examine the foundations of contract theory. The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract, premised not upon promissory obligations but on the transfer of property titles to scarce resources, saves contract theory from the theoretical issues posed by smart contracts by basing contract theory in the property theory of Rothbardian-libertarian ethics. Because neither smart contracts nor the Title-Transfer Theory of Contracts focus on promissory obligations, the two are inherently congruent.

Promises and Promissory Obligations [or When Is There No Obligation to Keep a Promise?

Promises and Promissory Obligations [or When Is There No Obligation to Keep a Promise?

Promising's Neglected Siblings: Oaths, Vows, and Promissory Obligation

AbstractPromises of a customary, interpersonal kind have received no small amount of philosophical attention. Of particular interest has been their capacity to generate moral obligations. This capacity is arguably what distinguishes promises from other, similar phenomena, like communicating a firm intention. But this capacity is common to still other nearby phenomena, such as oaths and vows. These latter phenomena belong to the same family of concepts as promises, but they are structurally and functionally distinct. Taken in their turn, they fill out what I call the ‘breadth criterion’: Theories of promising should cover not only customary, interpersonal promises but also sibling phenomena, including oaths and vows. Accommodating the breadth criterion is not something all theories of promising are positioned to accomplish. I focus on the challenge that the breadth criterion poses for Scanlon's influential expectation view of promising and suggest a normative powers account will fare better.

PROMISSORY OBLIGATION

Abstract Henry Sidgwick grounds promissory obligation in an obligation not to disappoint expectations. After explaining the view, I note the two standard current objections to expectation views—creating expectations is neither necessary nor sufficient for promissory obligation. I then suggest how Sidgwick (or any expectation theorist) could respond: one should agree that raising expectations is not sufficient for promissory obligation, and one can find harms, other than disappointed expectations, to explain why there is promissory obligation in cases in which expectations are not raised.

Hard incompatibilism and the participant attitude

AbstractFollowing 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.

약속의무에 관한 확신견해는 순환성반론에 취약한가?

약속의무에 관한 확신견해는 순환성반론에 취약한가?

Communicative eye contact signals a commitment to cooperate for young children

Making commitments to cooperate facilitates cooperation. There is a long-standing theoretical debate about how promissory obligations come into existence, and whether linguistic acts (such as saying “I promise”) are a necessary part of the process. To inform this debate we experimentally investigated whether even minimal, nonverbal behavior can be taken as a commitment to cooperate, as long as it is communicative. Five- to 7-year-old children played a Stag Hunt coordination game in which they needed to decide whether to cooperate or play individually. During the decision-making phase, children’s partner made either ostensive, communicative eye contact or looked non-communicatively at them. In Study 1 we found that communicative looks produced an expectation of collaboration in children. In Study 2 we found that children in the communicative look condition normatively protested when their partner did not cooperate, thus showing an understanding of the communicative looks as a commitment to cooperate. This is the first experimental evidence, in adults or children, that in the right context, communicative, but not non-communicative, looks can signal a commitment.

PROMISES AND THE BACKWARD REACH OF UPTAKE

Abstract I present a set of cases that pose problems for existing theories of promissory uptake. These cases involve (i) a delayed receipt and/or acceptance of a promise, though the obligation arises before the receipt or acceptance has taken place; (ii) a delay or absence of agency on the part of the promisee—making it impossible to satisfy the various suggested uptake criteria, though promissory obligation is nonetheless generated; and (iii) the promise is made to someone, de dicto—that is, the person who will be the promisee has not yet been filled in at the time when the obligation begins. I identify clues within each theory of promising to determine the temporal and agency-related boundaries on promissory obligation. I then introduce the backward reach of uptake.

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.