Promising

Chapter Two: Approaches to Promise: The Contemporary Landscape

CHAPTER TWO Approaches to Promise: The Contemporary Landscape I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again, 'I know that that's a tree,' pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.' LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, On Certainty I t is a perfectly good piece of common sense to believe that promises are obligatory and that after having made a promise one should, all things being equal, keep it. But as Ludwig Wittgenstein notes with frustration, philosophers cannot keep themselves from questioning the ordinary person 's good sense and from seeking grounds to justify the ordinary person's claims. Wittgenstein would, no doubt, despair of the abundance of contemporary philosophical literature devoted to promise and to the problems of justification that arise when a philosopher asks, "Why should we keep our promises?" It would be a mistake, though, to reject this contemporary literature outright because it asks-and attempts to answer-questions that the everyday person does not think are important to ask, or because Wittgenstein believes that the questions themselves are not understandable, since to ask them undermines the very language game in which the questions are framed. I agree with Wittgenstein that we can go too far with our philosophical analysis and that sometimes our language runs up against its own limits. But I nevertheless believe that what Wittgenstein calls "forms of life" are capable of being described and talked about, though not with the kind of rigor and precision that most philosophers believe 35 Copyrighted Material CHAPTER TWO their theories can attain. An outline and evaluation of the contemporary literature on promise are important both in terms of what the literature says about promise and in providing evidence of where, from my perspective, this literatureand the approaches to which it is wedded-goes wrong. Even if we ultimately end up with a theory of promise very different from the accounts of promise discussed in this chapter, what we gain from these theoretical accounts is invaluable. The literature is categorized in terms of the descriptive taxonomy provided in Chapter One: institutional, expectational, evidentiary, intuitionist, and intentional. I take each approach in turn and outline its basic features and main adherents. Where relevant, I appeal to the various examples from Chapter One, and I occasionally digress from an otherwise dispassionate review of the literature to set up the discussion and evaluation undertaken in Chapter Three. I devote the greatest space to the institutional approach, because it has received the most attention in the literature and because it most resembles the theory of practice I outline in later chapters. Promise as Institution The institutional approach describes promise as an institution that is defined and guided by constitutive rules. These rules give the various aspects of the institution their meaning. Every aspect of promise is defined by these rules. John Rawls expresses it this way: "That promising [is a practice] is beyond question.... This is shown by the fact that the form of words 'I promise' is a performative utterance which presupposes the stage-setting of the practice and the properties defined by it. Saying the words 'I promise' will only be promising given the existence of the practice.... Those engaged in a practice recognize the rules as defining it.'" For John Searle, 36 Copyrighted Material Approaches to Promise the normative claim against the promisor follows not from any "brute fact" but from the institutional fact that the promisor , Jones, has promised to pay Smith five dollars. This institutional fact exists as the result of the constitutive rule that states: "A person who utters the words 'I promise to pay you, Smith, five dollars' under the right conditions, has in fact an obligation to pay Smith five dollars and ought to do so." Representatives of this approach include John Rawls, John Searle, H.L.A. Hart, and J. L. Austin.2I focus on the work of Rawls and Searle. Regarding terminology, I shall be faithful to Rawls's use of the terms "practice" and "institution." In "Two Concepts of Rules," he uses "practice" to identify his approach, whereas in A Theory of Justice he uses "institution " to identify a nearly identical approach. In both cases I take him to be presenting an institutional approach to promise. Rawls PARAMETERS OF A PRACTICE In "Two Concepts of Rules...