Promises and Practices Revisited

Promising is clearly a social practice or convention. By uttering the formula, "I hereby promise to do X," we can raise in others the expectation that we will in fact do X. But this succeeds only because there is a social practice that consists (inter alia) in a disposition on the part of promisers to do what they promise, and an expectation on the part of promisees that promisers will so behave. It is equally clear that, barring special circumstances of some kind, it is morally wrong for promisers to fail to do what they have promised to do. What is perhaps less clear is how the moral wrongness that is involved when promises are broken is related to the social practice that makes promising possible in the first place.

This question is at the center of T. M. Scanlon's pioneering recent work on promising. Fundamental to the account he offers—first in "Promises and Practices" and more recently in What We Owe to Each Other—is his rejection of the view that the "wrong involved in breaking a promise is a wrong that depends essentially on the existence of a social practice of agreement-making." ¹ On Scanlon's account, we can understand why it is wrong to break one's promises without making any reference to the fact that promising is a social practice or convention.

We agree with Scanlon that the moral wrong involved in breaking promises is not simply the wrong involved in flouting the terms of a social practice. But we do not agree that the moral obligation to fulfill one's promises can be understood without reference to the fact that promising is a social convention. Our aim in the present article is to defend these conclusions. We show that Scanlon's favored theory is vulnerable to a circularity objection that he himself formulates, an objection that derives from his rejection of the practice view, which Scanlon's ingeni-ous and subtle arguments do not succeed in deflating. After developing these conclusions we sketch a hybrid account, which builds on the conventional character of promising at a crucial point. We argue that the hybrid account can avoid the circularity objection to which Scanlon's theory is vulnerable, without sacrificing his basic insight that the obligation to fulfill one's promises is not simply the obligation to abide by the terms of social practices. The result is an improved framework for understanding the distinctive way in which promising to do something generates a moral obligation of fulfillment.

I. The Practice View

At its core, the social practice of promising consists in the fact that members of a certain group have, and are known by one another to have, a policy of doing X (unless certain excusing conditions obtain), whenever they have performed communicative acts of some recognized type, such as uttering the formula, "I hereby promise to do X." This social practice is an instrumental good. It is, as John Rawls puts it, "a rational means whereby men can enter into and stabilize cooperative agreements for mutual advantage." ²

To arrive at such agreements, party A typically needs to assure party B that if B cooperates, A will also cooperate. In some instances, A can assure B of this by communicating to B that A already has sufficient reason to cooperate if B does his part. For example, they may be working on some joint project, which requires the contributions of both. In this case, A can assure B that because A wants the joint project to succeed, he has reason to do his part, provided B does his. Often, however, A cannot communicate to B that A has reason to cooperate, if B does his part, because it is clear that he has no such reason. Consider the example at the crux of David Hume's discussion of promising, in which farmer A wishes to persuade farmer B to help with A's...