Richard Price on Promising: A Limited Defense

Richard Price on Promising: A Limited Defense ROBERT J. FOGELIN IN THIS ESSAY I shall examine a work that is rarely read without praise, but still rarely read: Richard Price's Review of the Principal Questions in Morals.' I shall concentrate upon one specific topic: Price's account of our obligation to keep promises. I shall show that his concerns were essentially the same as those that have marked discussions of promises in this century. Indeed, as we shall see, two recent writers have revived Price's position without recognizing him as a precursor. More importantly, I shall argue that Price's account of promising has considerable merit in its own right. In fact, though it is somewhat underdeveloped by modern standards, I think that it can hold its own against competitors. Before examining Price's account of promising, let me quickly revive the standard perplexity that any adequate account of promising must resolve. Prichard, whose contribution in this regard is well known, put the matter this way: In promising, agreeing, or undertaking to do some action we seem to be creating or bringing into existence the obligation to do it, so much so that promising seems just to be binding ourselves, i.e., making ourselves bound to do it.... Yet an obligation seems a fact of a kind which it is impossible to create or bring into existence? Prichard's point is that an obligation does not seem to be the kind of thing that can be brought into existence directly. Of course, by doing or saying ' Richard Price, Reviewof thePrincipleQuestionsin Morals,third edition, London: T. Cadell in the Strand, x787. '~ H.A. Prichard, "The Obligation to Keep a Promise," MoralObligation,Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949, p. 169. [~89] ~9o HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY certain things I can bring it about that I have an obligation. For example, by becoming the father of a family, I fall, as Prichard remarks, under the obligation "to feed and educate it. ''3 But in this case my action does not directly generate an obligation: instead, it puts me into a situation where an obligation devolves upon me. In virtue of doing certain things I become the father of a family. In virtue of being the father of a family I assume certain obligations. Here my doings generate obligations, but, as Prichard wants to say, only indirectly. Yet promising seems to be nothing more than an act of creating an obligation (for myself). That, according to Prichard, is paradoxical . It seems no more reasonable to suppose that I can create an obligation directly than that I could have made it the case, through some action of my own, that "the square of three is odd. TM For Prichard, this is an apt comparison , because the disability in question is not contingent: it is not an incapacity we discover through repeated failing attempts. Prichard thinks that it is sufficient to reflect upon what obligations are in order to see that they cannot be brought into existence directly by any action on the part of an agent. To become obligated, we must do something else in virtue of which we are obligated. Two hundred years earlier, Hume used a parallel argument to show that our obligation to keep a promise must spring from an artificial rather than a natural source. On his moral sense theory, an obligation is explained in the following way: All morality depends upon our sentiments; and when any action, or quality of the mind, pleases us after a certain manner, we say it is virtuous; and when the neglect, or non-performance of it, displeases us after a like manner, we say that we lie under an obligation to perform it.5 But we can no more directly change our sentiments than we can change "the motions of the heavens. ''~ In contrast with Prichard, Hume cites a contingent fact as a comparison. Again we arrive at the conclusion that what seems to happen in promising cannot happen, i.e., promising is not a direct act of undertaking an obligation to do something. Neither in principle (Prichard) nor in fact (Hume) may obligations be directly undertakable. The paradox that demands resolution is that in...