Promising

Notes

Notes Chapter One I. For those interested in searching them out, there are important differences between oaths, contracts, and the more mundane promises of everyday life. This study casts a wide net and seeks a theoretical explanation that unites rather than divides. 2. I offer here the first of many examples that are woven into this chapter and that function as data, as examples of what people do when they make promises. They reappear throughout the book and serve to test theoretical positions. Some examples are from common life and others from literature. Unlike made-up examples that too often are abstract and emaciated and crafted exclusively to illustrate a theorywhen instead a theory should be put in service of explaining an existing example from common life-they are intended to serve as fleshy examples of actual promises in everyday We. See my "Converging Theory and Practice: Example Selection in Moral Philosophy," Journal of Applied Philosophy 9 (1992):171-82. In response to Steve's request for advice, I must add that it is at moments such as this \that I feel most inadequate as a philosopher. Like Job's friends, I was silent. 3. The anthropological case for this paradox-the simultaneous creation of promise and promisor-is made forcefully by Peter Wilson in Man, the Promising Primate: The Conditions of Human Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 45-110. See also the conclusion of James Wallace's fine book Virtues and Vices (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978). I use the phrase "selfin -community" as a way to resist the dichotomous choice between individualism and communitarianism. There are no individuals without communities and no communities without individuals. 4. Hobbes is a customary starting point for the modem period of moral philosophy, though strong cases can be made for giving this distinction to other, lesser known philosophers. 5. See G.E.M. Anscombe, "Modem Moral Philosophy," Philosophy (1958):1-19; Stuart Hampshire, "Fallacies in Moral Philosophy," 237 Copyrighted Material NOTES Mind (October 1949):466-82; Stephen Toulmin, "The Tyranny of Principles," Hastings Center Report II (December 1981):31-39; and Alasdair MacIntyre, "What Morality Is Not," in MacIntyre's Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (London : Duckworth, 1971), pp. 96-108. 6. One of the best refutations of this view is found in David Hume's essay "On the Original Contract," in Essays: Moral, Political , and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), pp. 465-87. 7. There is a problem with terminology here. Although John Rawls uses the term "practice" in "Two Concepts of Rules" (in Theories of Ethics, ed. Philippa Foot [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19791, pp. 144-70), his use of the term parallels closely what Searle and others refer to as "institution." Despite the fact that Rawls's work precedes Searle's, I nevertheless use "institution" to describe both their views and any view that sees promising as a game, practice , or institution arising from constitutive rules. Rawls uses "institution " in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). As Christopher Cherry remarks in "Two Views of Moral Practices " (Analysis 33 [March 19731: I 18-23), "The terms 'game', 'practice ', and 'institution' feature prominently but untidily in a good deal of current moral philosophy" (p. 118). "Practice" is far more descriptive of the approach I am presenting than are any of the possible alternatives. 8. Contemporary philosophers are not alone in their failure to posit a theory of promise; it is difficult to find an extended discussion of promise anywhere in the literature. David Hume's account of promise in bk. 3 of A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) comes closest to qualifying as a full-bodied theory of promise. 9. This is George Eliot's phrase, found in her The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), P·498. 10. One wonders about the question itself. Asking people if promises are obligatory is like asking them if parents should dress their children warmly in the winter. "Other things being equal"-a favorite gambit of the analytic philosopher-the answer to both questions is an obvious yes. But the moral philosopher's task begins at preCopyrighted Material NOTES cisely the moment when other things are not equal, when parents must choose between health insurance and mortgage payments, between healthful food and warm clothes. I I. It is...