Assertion, lying, promises and social contract

Suppose you have inherited a heavily-automated house with a DIY voice control system made by an eccentric relative who programmed various functions to be commanded by a variety of political statements, all of which you disagree with.

Thus, to open a living room window you need to say: “A donkey would make a better president than X”, where X is someone who you know would be significantly better at the job than any donkey.

You have a guest at home, and the air is getting very stuffy, and you feel a little nauseous. You utter “A donkey would make a better president than X” just to open a window. Did you lie to your guest? You knowingly said something that you knew would be taken as an assertion by any reasonable person. But, let us suppose, you intended your words solely as
a command to the house.

Normally, you’d clarify to your guest, ideally before issuing the voice command, that you’re not making an assertion. And if you failed to clarify, we would likely say that you lied. So simply intending the words to be a command to the house rather than an assertion to the guest may not be enough to make them be that.

Maybe we should say this:

1. You assert to Y providing (a) you utter words that you know would be taken to be an assertion to Y by a reasonable person and by Y, (b) you intend to utter these words, and (c) you failed to put reasonable effort into finding a way to clarify that you are not asserting to Y.

The conjunctive condition in (a) is a bit surprising, but i think both conjuncts need to be there. Suppose that your guest has the unreasonable belief that people typically program their home automation systems to run on political statements and rarely make political statements except to operate such systems, and hence would not take your words as an assertion. Then you don’t need to issue a clarification, even though you would be deceiving a reasonable person. Similarly, you’re not lying if you tell your home automation system “Please open the window” and your paranoid guest has the unreasonable belief that this is code for some political statement that you know to be false.

One might initially think that (c) should say that you actually failed to issue the clarification. But I think that’s not quite right. Perhaps you are feeling faint and only have strength for one sentence. You tell the home automation system to open the window, and you just don’t have the strength to to clarify to your guest that you’re not making a political statement. Then I think you haven’t lied or asserted—you made a reasonable effort by thinking about how you might clarify things, and finding no solution.

It’s interesting that condition (c) is rather morally loaded: it makes reference to reasonable effort.

Here is an interesting consequence of this loading. Similar things have to be said about promising as about asserting.

2. You promise to Y providing (a) you utter words that you know would be taken to be a promise to Y by a reasonable person and by Y, (b) you intend to utter these words, and (c) you failed to put reasonable effort into finding a way to clarify that you are not promising to Y.

If this is right, then the practice of promising might be dependent on prior moral concepts, namely the concept of reasonable effort. And if that’s right, then contract-based theories of morality are viciously circular: we cannot explain what promises are without making reference to moral concepts.

Do we have normative powers?

A normative power is supposed to be a power to directly change normative reality. We can, of course, indirectly change normative reality by affecting the antecedents of conditional norms: By unfairly insulting you, I get myself to have a duty to apologize, but that is simply due to a pre-existing duty to apologize for all unfair insults.

It would be attractive to deny our possession of normative powers. Typical examples of normative powers are promises, commands, permissions, and requests. But all of these can seemingly be reduced to conditional norms, such as:

• Do whatever you promise

• Do whatever you are validly commanded

• Refrain from ϕing unless permitted

• Treat what you are requested as a reason for doing it.

One might think that one can still count as having a normative power even if it is reducible to prior conditional norms. Here is a reason to deny this. I could promise to send you a dollar on any day on which your dog barks. Then your dog has the power to obligate me to send you a dollar, a power reducible to the norm arising from my promise. But dogs do not have normative powers. Hence an ability to change normative reality by affecting the antecedents of a prior conditional norm is not a normative power.

If this argument succeeds, if a power to affect normative reality is reducible to a non-normative power (such as the power to bark) and a prior norm, it is not a normative power. Are there any normative powers, then, powers not reducible in this way?

I am not sure. But here is a non-conclusive reason to think so. It seems we can invent new useful ways of affecting normative reality, within certain bounds. For instance, normally a request comes along with a permission—a request creates a reason for the other party to do the requested action and while removing any reasons of non-consent against the performance. But there are rare contexts where it is useful to create a reason without removing reasons of non-consent. An example is “If you are going to kill me, kill me quickly.” One can see this as creating a reason for the murderer to kill one quickly, without removing reasons of non-consent against killing (or even killing quickly). Or, for another example, normally a general’s command in an important matter generates a serious obligation. But there could be cases where the general doesn’t want a subordinate to feel very guilty for failing to fulfill the command, and it would be useful for the general to make a new commanding practice, a “slight command” which generates an obligation, but one that it is only slightly wrong to disobey.

There are approximable and non-approximable promises. When I promise to bake you seven cookies, and I am short on flour, normally I have reason to bake you four. But there are cases where there is no reason to bake you four—perhaps you are going to have seven guests, and you want to serve them the same sweet, so four are useless to you (maybe you hate cookies). Normally we leave such decisions to common sense and don’t make them explicit. However, we could also imagine making them explicit, and we could imagine promises with express approximability rules (perhaps when you can’t do cookies, cupcakes will be a second best; perhaps they won’t be). We can even imagine complex rules of preferability between different approximations to the promise: if it’s sunny, seven cupcakes is a better approximation than five cookies, while if it’s cloudy, five cookies is a better approximation. These rules might also specify the degree of moral failure that each approximation represents. It is, plausibly, within our normative authority over ourselves to issue promises with all sorts of approximability rules, and we can imagine a society inventing such.

Intuitively, normally, if one is capable of a greater change of normative reality, one is capable of a lesser one. Thus, if a general has the authority to create a serious obligation, they have the authority to create a slight one. And if you are capable of both creating a reason and providing a permission, you should be able to do one in isolation from the other. If you have the authority to command, you have the standing to create non-binding reasons by requesting.

We could imagine a society which starts with two normative powers, promising and commanding, and then invents the “weaker” powers of requesting and permitting, and an endless variety of normative subtlety.

It seems plausible to think that we are capable of inventing new, useful normative practices. These, of course, cannot be a normative power grab: there are limits. The epistemic rule of thumb for determining these limits is that the powers do not exceed ones that we clearly have.

It seems a little simpler to think that we can create new normative powers within predetermined limits than that all our norms are preset, and we simply instance their antecedents. But while this is a plausible argument for normative powers, it is not conclusive.

Trust versus prediction

What is the difference between trusting that someone will ϕ and merely predicting their ϕing?

Here are two suggestions that don’t quite pan out.

1. In trusting, you have to have a pro-attitude towards ϕing. But this is false. One can trust a referee will make a fair decision even when one hopes they will make a decision that favors one instead. And you can trust that someone who promised you a punishment will mete it out if you deserve it even if you would rather they didn’t.

2. In trusting, you rely on the person’s ϕing. But this is not always true. A promised benefit might be such that it doesn’t affect any of your actions, but you can still trust you will receive it.

But here is an idea I like. In trusting, you believe that the person will intentionally ϕ as part of her proper functioning, and you believe this on account of the person’s possessing the relevant proper functional disposition. In central cases, “proper functioning” can be replaced with “expression of virtue”, but trust can include non-moral proper function.

A consequence of this account is that it is impossible to trust someone to do wrong, since wrongdoing is never a part of a person’s proper functioning. For trust-based theories of promises, this makes it easy to see why promises to do wrong are null and void: for it makes no sense to solicit trust where trust is impossible.

This account of trust gives a nice extended sense of trust in things other than people. Just drop “intentionally” and “person”. In an extended sense, you can trust a dog, a carabiner, a book, or anything else that has a proper function. This seems right: we certainly do talk of trust in this extended sense.

Consent, desire and promises

I have long argued that desire is not the same as consent: the fact that I want you to do something does not constitute consent to your doing it.

Here is a neat little case that has occurred to me that seems to show this conclusively. Alice borrowed a small sum of money from me, and the return is due today. However, I know that I have failed Alice on a number of occasions, and I have an unpleasant feeling of moral envy as to how she has always kept to her moral commitments. I find myself fantasizing about how nice it would feel to have Alice fail me on this occasion! It would be well worth the loss of the loan not to “have to” feel guilt about the times I failed Alice.

But now suppose that Alice knows my psychology really well. Her knowing that I want her to fail to return the money is no excuse to renege on her promise.

There are milder and nastier versions of this. A particularly nasty version is when the promisee wants you to break a promise so that you get severely punished: one thinks here of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. A mildish (I hope) version is where I am glad when people come late to meetings with me because it makes me feel better about my record of unpunctuality.

Or for a very mild version, suppose that I typically come about a minute late to appointments with you. You inductively form the belief that I will do so this time, too. And it is a pleasure to have one’s predictions verified, so you want me to be late.

The above examples also support the claim that we cannot account for the wrong of promise-breaking in terms of overall harm to the promisee. For we can tweak some of these cases to result in an overall benefit to the promisee. Let’s say that I feel pathologically and excessively guilty about all the times I’ve been late to appointments, and your breaking your promise to show up at noon will make me feel a lot better. It might be that overall there is a benefit from your breaking the promise. But surely that does not justify your breaking the promise.

Or suppose that in the inductive case, the value of your pleasure in having your predictions verified exceeds the inconvenience of waiting a minute.

Objection: Promises get canceled in the light of a sufficiently large benefit to the promisee.

Response: The above cases are not like that. For the benefit of relief of my guilt requires that you break the promise, not that the promise be canceled in light of a good to me. And the pleasure of verification of predictions surely is insufficient to cancel a promise.

Promising punishment

I have long found promises to punish puzzling. The problem with such promises is that normally a promisee can release the promisor from a promise. But what’s the point of me promising you a punishment should you do something if you can just release me from the promise when the time for the promise comes?

Scanlon’s account of promising also faces another problem with promises to punish: Scanlon requires that the promisee wants to be assured of the promised action. But of course in many cases of promising a punishment, the promisee does not want any such assurance! (There are some cases when they do, say when they recognize the benefit of being held to account for something.)

Additionally, it seems that breaking a promise is wrong because of the harm to the promisee. But it is commonly thought that escaping punishment is not a harm. Here I am inclined to follow Boethius, however, who insisted that a just punishment is intrinsically good for one. But suppose we follow common sense rather than Boethius, or perhaps we are dealing with a case where the norm whose violation gains a punishment is not a moral norm.

Then there is still something interesting we can say. Let’s say that I promise you a punishment for some action, and you perform that action, but I omit the punishment. Even if the omission of the punishment is not a harm, you might feel a resentment that in your choice of activity you had to take my prospective punishment into account but I wasn’t going to follow-through on the punishment. There is something unfair about this. Perhaps the point is clearest in a case like this: I promise you a punishment each time you do something. Several times you hold yourself back due to fear of punishment, and then finally you do it, and out of laziness I don’t to punish. You then feel: “Why did I even bother to keep to the rule earlier?”

But note that even in a case like this, it seems better to locate the harm in my making of the promise if I wasn’t going to keep it than in the non-keeping of it. So, let’s suppose that the Boethius line of thought doesn’t apply, and suppose that I am now deciding whether to perform the onerous task of punishing you as per promise. What moral reason do I have to punish you now in light of the promise? Well, there are considerations having to do with future cases: if I don’t do it now, you won’t trust me in the future, etc. But we can suppose all such future considerations are irrelevant—maybe this is the last hour of my life. So why is it that I should punish you?

I think there are two mutually-compatible stories one can tell. One story is an Aristotelian one: it’s simply bad for my will that I not keep my promise. The other story is a trust-based one: I solicited your trust, and even if you want me to break trust with you, I have no right to betray your trust. Having one’s trust betrayed is in itself a harm, regardless of whether one is trusting someone to do something that is otherwise good or bad for one.

The Laws of Promising

On a conventionalist theory of promises, there is a social institution of promising, somewhat akin to a game, and a promise is a kind of communicative action that falls under the rules of that institution. But what makes a communicative action fall under the rules of the promissory institution? Well, one of the generally agreed on necessary conditions is that it must be intentional. So now it seems that a part of what makes something a promise is that it be intended to fall under the rules of the promissory institution. And this itself is a rule of the promissory institution.

Thus, the promissory institution needs to make reference to itself in its rules. Is this a vicious circularity?

Maybe not. The Laws of Badminton govern players of badminton. Indeed, the Definitions in the Laws start with: “Player: Any person playing Badminton”. Badminton is nothing but the game governed by these rules, and yet the rules constantly make reference to badminton via the concept of a player (and occasionally make explicit self-reference, as in law 17.6.1 that an umpire shall “uphold and enforce the Laws of Badminton”). Is this a vicious circularity? Here is a reason to think it is not. People can coherently decide to play the game defined by a set of rules referred to under some description such as “The rules posted on WorldBadminton.com/rules” or “The rules customarily in use in this club” or “The Laws of Badminton” or “The rules adopted by the Badminton World Federation” that in fact refers to the same set of rules. The rules can refer to themselves under some of these descriptions as well. We can then suppose that a player is someone who is achieving some measure of minimal success in intentionally following the rules under some such description.

The way to avoid vicious circularity here is that one needs some way of gaining reference to the rules from within the rules, and one can do so by means of an appropriate expression typically having to do with a physical embodiment of the rules, say in an inscription or in a customary practice.

Can make the same move with regard to promises? We could image a group of early humans sitting around and making up “the Laws of Promising” prior to any promises being made, with the Laws of Promising referencing themselves under some description like “The Laws promulgated in the Cave of the Lone Bear on the third full moon since the melting of the snow in the fourth year of the chiefdom of Jas the Bald.” And then the laws could cover communicative actions intended to fall under the Laws of Promising under some relevant description or other. But while we can imagine this, it is highly implausible as a historical claim.

I want to offer a weird alternative to the institutional theory of promises. Let’s first imagine that in your head there is a literal “book of promises” (made of waterproof paper, etc.), and that you can inscribe text in that book using a little pen that moves around in your head. But suppose that moving the pen is not a basic action. The only way to write p in the book of promises is to intentionally communicate to another person that you are inscribing p in the book. Such intentional communication causes, by some weird law of nature, the inscription of p into the book of promises. And then we suppose that it is a fundamental moral law that anything inscribed in the book of promises is to be done, subject to various nuances.

On this account, promising p is inscribing p into the book by intentionally communicating that you are inscribing p into the book. But note that you are not intending to promise: you are intending to inscribe into the book, which is different. So there is no circularity. (Compare here a mind-reading machine which serves you lunch if you press a button with the intention of getting lunch from the machine. There is no circularity.)

Is there such a book? A tempting simple thought is that there is: it is our memory. But that’s not right. Promises are normatively binding even if they are not remembered, though if they innocently forgotten one is typically not culpable for breaking them.

A dualist can suppose that the soul really does contain something like a book of promises, which is not directly available to introspection. When you make a promise, the content is “inscribed” into the “promise book”, and remembered as being inscribed. There is no other way to put things into the soul’s “promise book”, though if there is a God, he could miraculously inscribe things in the book. (Would we then be required to fulfill them? Well, it depends on what the moral rule is. If it says that one must do everything in the book, then we would be required to fulfill what God wrote in the book. But if it only says that one must do everything that one inscribed in the book, then what God inscribed in it may not need to be done.)

Utilitarianism, egoism and promises

Suppose Alice and Bob are perfect utilitarians or perfect amoral egoists in any combination. They are about to play a game where they raise a left hand or a right hand in a separate booth, and if they both raise the same hand, they both get something good. Otherwise, nobody gets that good. Nobody sees what they’re doing in the game: the game is fully automated. And they both have full shared knowledge of the above.

They confer before the game and promise to one another to raise the right hand. They go into their separate rooms. And what happens next?

Take first the case where they are both perfect amoral egoists. Amoral egoists don’t care about promises. So the fact that an amoral egoist promised to raise the right hand is no evidence at all that they will raise the right hand, unless there is something in it for them. But is there anything in it for them? Well, if Bob raises his right hand, then there is something in it for Alice to raise her right hand. But note that this conditional is true regardless of whether they’ve made any promises to each other, and it is equally true that if Bob raises his left hand, then there is something in it for Alice to raise her left hand.

The promise is simply irrelevant here. It is true that in normal circumstances, it makes sense for egoists to keep promises in order to fool people into thinking that they have morality. But I’ve assumed full shared knowledge of each other’s tendencies here, and so no such considerations apply here.

It is true that if Alice expects Bob to expect her to keep her promise, then Alice will expect Bob to raise his right hand, and hence she should raise her right hand. But since she’s known to be an amoral egoist, there is no reason for Bob to expect Alice to keep her promise. And the same vice versa.

What if they are utilitarians? It makes no difference. Since in this case both always get the same outcome, there is no difference between utilitarians and amoral egoists.

This means that in cases like this, with full transparency of behavioral tendencies, utilitarians and amoral egoists will do well to brainwash or hypnotize themselves into promise-keeping.

In ordinary life, this problem doesn’t arise as much, because as long as at least one person is more typical, and hence takes promises to have reason-giving force, or if public opinion is around to enforce promise-keeping, then the issue doesn’t come up. But I think there is a lesson here and in the previous post: for many ordinary practice, the utilitarian is free-riding on the non-utilitarians.

Promising to try

Here’s a natural thing to say. The sentence

1. “I promise to try to ϕ”

should be analyzed as straightforwardly an instance of the schema:

2. “I promise to ψ”

for an action ψ, in the special case where ψing is the action of trying to ϕ.

I am now fairly convinced that this is wrong: that (1) is not a mere special case of (2).

Here are two cases to make one more friendly to this.

• I promised you to try to call you tomorrow. Come tomorrow, I called you accidentally, i.e., without trying to. If the content of my promise was literally to try to call you, then I haven’t fulfilled that, and I have reason to call you, this time intentionally. But that’s silly.

• I promised to try to email you a paper tonight. Come tonight, I try, but my email software puts up the dialog: “Your email did not go through due to a temporary problem. The problemm is now resolved. Should I send it? Yes/No.” I press “No” on the grounds that my promise has been fulfilled: I already tried. That’s vicious, surely.

There are easy ways out of the two cases that are compatible with the straightforward analysis of promising-to-try. But the cases are nonetheless suggestive of the fact that “I promise to try to ϕ” should not be read too literally.

My promise to you to ψ typically accomplishes three things:

• It creates a reason for me to ψ

• It tells you that I will ψ

• It creates an obligation of apology or compensation if I do not ψ (regardless of whether I am culpable).

In particular, because it tells you that I will ψ, it normally creates an expectation in you that I will ψ, which is apt to lead to your organizing your life around my ψing.

I suggest that a promise to try to ϕ instead accomplishes these three things:

• It creates a reason for me to ϕ

• It tells you that I will make a reasonable effort to ϕ

• It creates an obligation of apology or compensation if I do not make a reasonable effort to ϕ.

In other words, I think that my promising to try to ϕ gives rise to exactly the same reason in me as promising to ϕ would. However, it holds back the assurance that I will ϕ, replacing it with an assurance that I will try. Now whether you expect me to ϕ will depend on your judgment of how likely my attempts are to succeed. And by using the weaker wording, I am typically implicating to you an uncertainty about success which should give you some evidence of my unreliability. Finally, my promising to try to ϕ weakens the duties of apology or compensation to only apply when I didn’t make a reasonable effort.

In other words, to promise and to promise-to-try are two different kinds of speech acts, and it is obviously useful to have both.

Do promises sometimes make otherwise wrong actions permissible?

Consider a variant of my teenage Hitler case. You’re a hospital anesthetist and teenage Hitler is about to have an emergency appendectomy. The only anesthetic you have available is one that requires a neutralizer to take the patient out of anesthesia—without the neutralizer, the patient dies. You know (an oracle told you) that if teenage Hitler survives, he’ll kill millions. And you’re the only person who knows how to apply anesthesia or the neutralizer in this town.

You’re now asked to apply anesthesia. You have two options: apply or refuse. If you refuse, the surgeon will perform the appendectomy without anesthesia, causing excruciating pain to a (still) innocent teenager, who will still go on to kill millions. Nobody benefits from your refusal.

But if you apply anesthesia, you will put yourself in a very awkward moral position. Here is why. Once the surgery is over, standard practice will be to apply the neutralizer. But the Principle of Double Effect (PDE) will forbid you from applying the neutralizer. For applying the neutralizer is an action that has two effects: the good effect of saving teenage Hitler’s life and the evil effect of millions dying. PDE allows you to do actions that have a foreseen evil effect only when the evil effect is not disproportionate to the good effect. But here the evil effect is disproportionate. So, PDE forbids application of the neutralizer. Thus if you know yourself to be a morally upright person, you also know that if you apply the anesthesia, you will later refuse to apply the neutralizer. But surely it is wrong to apply the anesthesia to an innocent teenage while expecting not to apply the neutralizer. For instance, it would be clearly wrong to apply the anesthesia if one were out of neutralizer.

So, it seems you need to refuse to apply anesthesia. But your reasons for the refusal wiil be very odd: you must refuse to apply anesthesia, because it would be morally wrong for you to neutralize the anesthesia, even though everyone is no worse or better off in the scenario where you apply anesthesia and neutralize it than in the scenario where the operation happens without anesthesia. To make the puzzle even sharper, we can suppose that if teenage Hitler has the operation without anesthesia, he will blame you for the pain, and eventually add your ethnic group—which otherwise he would have no prejudice against—to his death lists. So your refusal to apply anesthesia not only causes pain to an innocent teenager but causes many deaths.

The logical structure here is this: If you do A, you will be forbidden from doing B. But you are not permitted to do A if you expect not do B. And some are much better off and no one is worse off if you do both A and B than if you do neither.

Here is a much more moderate case that seems to have a similar structure. Bob credibly threatens to break all of Carl’s house windows unless Alice breaks one of Carl’s windows. It seems that it would be right for Alice to break the window since any reasonable person would choose to have one window broken rather than all of them. But suppose instead Bob threatens to break all of Carl’s windows unless Alice promises to break one of Carl’s windows tomorrow. And Alice knows that by tomorrow Bob will be in jail. Alice knows that if she makes the promise, she would do wrong to keep it, for Carl’s presumed permission of one window being broken to save the other windows would not extend to the pointless window-breaking tomorrow. And one shouldn’t make a promise one is planning not to keep (bracketing extreme cases, which this is not one of). So Alice shouldn’t make the promise. But no one would be worse off if Alice made the promise and kept it.

I wonder if there isn’t a way out of both puzzles, namely to suppose that in some cases a promise makes permissible something that would not otherwise be permissible. Thus, it would normally be wrong to apply the neutralizer to teenage Hitler. But if you promised to do so (e.g., implicitly when you agree to perform your ordinary medical duties at the hospital, or explicitly when you reassured his mom that you’ll bring him out of anesthesia), then it becomes permissible, despite the fact that many would die if you kept the promise. Similarly, if Alice promised Bob to break the window, it could become permissible to do so. Of course, we better not say in general that promises make permissible things that would otherwise be impermissible.

The principle here could be roughly something like that:

1. If it would be permissible for you to now intentionally ensure that a state of affairs F occurs at a later time t, then it is permissible for you to promise to bring about F at t and then to do so if no relevant difference in the circumstances occurs.

Consider how (1) applies to the teenage Hitler and window-breaking cases.

It would be permissible for you to set up a machine that would automatically neutralize Hitler’s anesthesia at the end of the operation, and then to administer anesthesia. Thus, it is now—i.e., prior to your administering the anesthesia—permissible for you to ensure that Hitler’s anesthesia will be neutralized. Hence, by (1) it is permissible for you to promise to neutralize the anesthesia and then to keep the promise, barring some relevant change in the circumstances.

Similarly, it would be permissible for you to throw a rock at Carl’s window from very far away (out in space, say) so that it would only reach the window tomorrow. So, by (1) it is permissible for you to promise to break the window tomorrow and then to keep the promise.

On the other hand, take the case where an evildoer asks you to promise to kill an innocent tomorrow or else she’ll kill ten today, and suppose that tomorrow the evildoer will be in jail and unable to check up on what you did. It would be wrong for you to now intentionally ensure the innocent dies tomorrow, so (1) does not apply and does not give you permission to make and keep the promise. (Some people will think it’s OK to make and break this promise. But no one thinks it’s OK to make and keep this promise.)

Principle (1) seems really ad hoc. But perhaps this impression is reduced when we think of promises as a way of projecting our activity forward in time. Principle (1) basically says that if it would be permissible to project our activity forward in time by making a robot—or by self-hypnosis—then we should be able to accomplish something similar by a promise.

The above is reminiscent of cases where you promise to ignore someone’s releasing you from a promise. For instance, Alice, a staunch promoter of environmental causes, lends Bob a large sum of money, on the condition of Bob making the following promise: Bob will give the money back in ten years, unless Alice’s ideals shift away from environmentalism in which case he will give it to the Sierra Fund, notwithstanding any pleas to the contrary from Alice. The current context—Alice’s requirements at borrowing time—becomes normative at the time for the promise to be kept, notwithstanding some feared changes.

I am far from confident of (1). But it would let one escape the unhappy position of saying that in cases with the above structure one is required to let the worst happen. I expect there are counterexamples to (1), too. But perhaps (1) is true ceteris paribus.

Gifts

Can you be entitled to a gift from someone?

1. Gratuitousness Intuition: Gifts are gratuitous, and if you’re entitled to receive something from value, then it’s a payment or award rather than a gift.

But there is one kind of case where you are entitled to a gift: when the gift has been promised to you.

So how to reconcile the promise case with the Gratuitousness Intuition? Presumably something like this: while the gift is owed you, the promise wasn’t. So, how do we now formulate the principle that gifts are gratuitous? We could proceed disjunctively:

2. For any gift g, you are either not entitled to g or you are entitled to g in virtue of being promised it without having been entitled to the promise.

But that’s not quite right, either. For suppose Bob gratuitously promises to promise a gift to Alice, and then fulfills this promise by promising the gift, and then fulfills the last promise by giving the gift. The gift is still a gift, even though the gift is the fulfillment of a promise that was itself required. But note that the gift is not the fulfillment of the first, gratuitous promise, so it’s not a counterexample to (2). Of course, we rarely promise to promise, but sometimes we do: a marriage engagement is a promise to issue a vow.

Perhaps we can replace (2) with something messy:

3. For any gift g, you are either not entitled to g or you are entitled to g in virtue of a chain of promises the first of which you weren’t entitled to.

But that doesn’t fix the other problem with (2), namely that it doesn’t fully capture the idea of gratuitousness. For something can be a fulfillment of a promise you weren’t entitled to and yet not be gratuitous. For suppose out of the blue I promise to pay you $400 if you mow my lawn. You mow my lawn. And now my $400 is a payment, not a gift. But you weren’t entitled to the promise.

We might get out of this by restricting (2) or (3) to unconditional promises. But something can be a gift while being a fulfillment of a conditional promise. For instance, I may promise you a gift should you reach the age of 90. It seems that that’s still a gift.

This is turning into a mess.

One possible solution is to go back to (1) and simply insist on it and bite some bullets. If I promise you a gift on your birthday, then what I give you on your birthday is not really a gift. The true gift was the promise. (But what if I make the promise and don’t fulfill it? Then it seems right to say that you haven’t got anything of value from me. But that may just be because broken promises turn out not to have been of value!)

Maybe even better we should give an Aristotelian story. There is the focal sense of a gift, and it satisfies (1). It is the first unowed promise that is a gift in the focal sense. But then the fulfillment of the promise is a gift in a derivative sense.

But gratuitousness is not sufficient for being a gift.

While we talk of business gifts as gifts, I think that if they are given in the hope of future gain, they aren’t really a gift. Similarly, if I promise you $40 to mow my lawn, then my promise is gratuitous, but it is given in the hope of future gain, namely your mowing my lawn.

And something can be partly a gift. If I promise you a million dollars to mow my lawn, then my promise is mostly, but not entirely, a gift.

Gifts are really hard to analyze.

The puzzle of engagements

The idea of a marriage engagement is kind of weird. On its face, it seems to be a promise to make a promise: the two people promise each other to exchange marriage vows. But if you’re promising to promise X, why don’t you just promise X right away?

I think there are two ways to save the idea of engagement given the above. One can raise the level of the marriage commitment or one can lower the level of engagement commitment.

The first approach would be to say that the marriage vows aren’t mere promises: they are vows, a covenant. A vow has a different, qualitatively higher--even sacred--binding force than a mere promise. If this is right, then we can learn something from the cultural practice of engagement, something about the higher level of normative commitment in marriage.

The second approach would be to demote engagement. Perhaps we can look at an engagement as akin to what the business world calls a “non-binding agreement in principle”.

Repentance and Satan's Apple

Suppose Alice is an misanthropic immortal who lives in a universe of happy people. Suppose, too, that Alice is an immortal. Then one day Alice does a really bad thing. She is unreasonably annoyed at all other people and instantly freezes everything besides herself.

What ought Alice to do? Well, she ought to unfreeze everything.

But when? If she delays unfreezing the universe by a week, she gets to enjoy a week without the annoyance of other people. And nobody will be any the worse for it. So, why not? But if a week, why not a month, or a millennium?

There seems to be nothing wrong with procrastinating when the action is just as well done later. So, why can’t Alice just continue procrastinating for eternity?

Maybe the thing to say is this. Alice ought to repent now. It is wrong to live unrepentantly, so one should repent as soon as possible. And repentance requires an intention to repair the damage that one has done insofar as one can.

But it is true that when the damage can be equally well repaired later, the repentant person does not need to do it immediately. We can even tweak the case so that the repair is better done later. Perhaps Alice will be slightly less grumpy each day, and so if she unfreezes people later, they will be better off as they will have a slightly less grumpy Alice to live with (this makes the case more like Satan’s Apple). And it’s clear that when the damage repair is better done later, it may be left for later.

I think what we need to say is this: The intention needs to have a reasonable level of specificity. When one is able to specify how and when one will do the repair, one needs to intend that. One cannot simply have the intention to do one of infinitely many things (unfreeze tomorrow or unfreeze the day after or …). Intentions, either in general or in the special case of the intentions of restitution that repentance calls for, must come with a plan of action. And so Alice needs to set herself a plan, rather than just vaguely leaving things for the future.

But can’t she just procratinate, even so? When I have an intention to do something, and a better idea comes along, there is nothing wrong with switching to the better idea. So, take the case where the repair is better done later. It seems that Alice can permissibly form the intention to unfreeze tomorrow, and tomorrow change her mind, and so on. But that would allow Alice to get away with never unfreezing, and yet without violating any further moral obligations (besides the ones she violated by the initial freezing).

It seems to me that to get out of this, one needs some way for making intentions be morally binding. Perhaps repentant Alice needs to promise herself or vow to God to unfreeze people on a particular day.

It seems that from our outlandish freezing scenario we can get some interesting conclusions:

• intentions of restitution need a significant amount of specificity; and

• there are ways of moral self-binding, such as self-promises or vows to god.

Sincerity and promises

It seems that for a promise to be sincere, you have to intend to keep it.

But this is false. Suppose you offer to lend me a microscope upon my promise to return it to you when you ask. I know that if I make the promise, then as soon as you ask me for the microscope’s return, your request will remind me of the promise, and I will fulfill it. So, I make the promise. Given that I know I will keep it, I am being sincere. But I don’t need to clutter my mind by forming any intention to keep the promise or to return the microscope.

So perhaps for a promise to be sincere, you need to believe you will keep it.

But this, too, is false. Suppose you’re my accountability partner and I promise to stop drinking, and suppose this is a promise I have broken so many times that I believe that I won’t keep it. But I intend to keep it. And you know my track record, so there is no deception. Again, I think there is no sincerity.

But if sincerity in promising needs neither the intention to keep the promise nor the belief that one will do so, what does it need? Perhaps the disjunction: I need to believe or intend (or, best, both). But normally I prefer to avoid disjunctive accounts.

Let’s think some more and go back to the accountability partner case. If you know my track record, you won’t count on my not drinking. For instance, you aren’t going to vouch for my sobriety to others, you won’t trust me around your liquor cabinet, etc. But suppose you didn’t know my track record. You just heard my promise and counted on it, vouching for me to others, etc. In that case, if I drink, you have two grounds for resentment: that I broke my promise and that I deceived you, leading you to count on good behavior I did not actually expect.

Here is what I think is going on. Normally, when I make you a promise, I do two things:

1. I obligate myself to you to perform the action, and

2. I testify to you that I will perform the action.

And I can betray you in either or both respects: I can break my obligation and I can testify falsely.

In the accountability partner case, in the presence of shared knowledge of my track record, the testimony about future behavior that normally comes along with a promise is canceled. In that case, all I do is I obligate myself to you. I expect to break that obligation, but I have good reason to undertake the obligation, namely that the probability that I will stay sober increases (though not enough to justify belief) because I will have an additional reason—my promise to you—to do so. (I think one needs the Principle of Double Effect here. My intended effect is an increased chance of staying sober. The unintended—indeed, counterintended—but foreseen effect is my breaking a promise to you.)

That still doesn’t answer the question of what the sincerity conditions are.

Here is one suggestion. Sincerity only concerns (2), the testimony aspect. In cases where the testimony is canceled, whether explicitly or implicitly (say, in light of shared knowledge), there is no sincerity condition on promising at all. There is only the creation of an obligation.

That doesn’t sound quite right. It seems that if I make a promise to an accountability partner who knows the dismal track record of such promises, I am still being insincere if I don’t intend to keep the promise. But what if the case is really weird, so that I am more likely to keep the promise if I don’t intend to do so when making it? (E.g., maybe I know that there is a neuroscientist who is going to observe my brain and if she detects that I am intending to keep the promise at the moment of making it, she will erase my memory of the promise, while if I don’t intend to keep it, the promise will still come to mind in my moments of temptation and make it less unlikely that I will stay sober.)

Maybe what is going on is this. When the testimony to future performance is canceled, it is normally replaced by an implicit testimony to the intention of future performance (or perhaps an implicature of such an intention?). So in the special case of promises to accountability partners who expect failure, one is deceiving the other party if one lacks the intention to keep the promise. And in the contrived cases where the intention would make it less likely that one would keep the promise, one should take the further step of informing the other party that one is not even intending to keep the promise.

I like the way that this story makes the accountability partner case be different from the standard case of a promise. I also like the modularity on this story. Promises normally have two ingredients, the exercise of a normative power to create an obligation, and testimony to future actions. We already knew that the second ingredient can occur without the first—mere predictions of one’s future actions are like that. It’s rather nice, then, that the first ingredient can also occur without the second.

I don’t know if the above story can be reconciled with the promise account of assertion. If not, so much the worse for the promise account of assertion.

Moles and traitors

Consider two different spies:

1. Betrayer: Alice is in a position of trust among the enemy. She is then recruited to work against those who trust her.

2. Mole: Bob is not yet in a position of trust among the enemy, but he is recruited to gain their trust, with a view to eventually working against them.

I assume that the enemy is morally in the wrong, and that just allows our side to work to undermine the enemy. But I think there is a moral problem with moles that betrayers don’t have which we can get at by considering a parallel distinction between two cases of people who promise the wrong thing:

3. Carl realizes that a promise he made is one that it is morally wrong to keep, and hence he does not keep it.

4. Danielle makes a promise knowing that it would be morally wrong to keep it, without intending to keep it.

Carl is acting well. He shouldn’t have made the promise, but since a promise of immoral activity is null and void, he rightly refuses to keep the promise. Carl may or may not have been culpable for making the promise, but in neither case should he keep it.

Danielle acts badly. She is insincerely gaining the trust of people. Her action is bad even if she knows that the promise is null and void.

Alice the Betrayer is like Carl. Alice attained a position of trust in a morally corrupt hierarchy. She shouldn’t have signed up for that. But whether she is culpable for that or not, it is right for her to go against that trust. Unjust commitments are null and void. While her fellows may in fact trust her to keep working on their side, they shouldn’t.

However, Bob is working to gain a trust he intends not to keep. This seems morally bad, even though it is a trust that he shouldn’t keep.

Distributive promises

Suppose I promise my class to grade all the weekly homework within three days. In week four, I fail and am late with grading. If the content of my promise was simply the proposition

1. that I grade all the homework within three days,

then after week four, then no matter how speedy I am with grading the homework, proposition (1) is just plain false. And this means that my promise no longer generates any reason for me to grade the homework in weeks five and onward within three days, which seems wrong. I should, instead, apologize for failing in week four, and work even harder in the succeeding weeks.

I think this is because the promise was distributive. It wasn’t a promise to make proposition (1) true. It was a promise that for each week of homework generated a separate promissory reason to grade that week’s homework within three days.

The normative force of the promise is rather like making a separate promise for each week of class:

2. I promise that in the first week, I will grade the homework in three days. I promise that in the second week, I will grade the homework in three days. … I promise that in the 15th week, I will grade the homework in three days.

But other cases of distributive promises aren’t as neatly handled. Suppose I promise my class:

3. If you come to office hours, I will try to answer any question you might have about logic.

Again, this is distributive. If I refuse to answer a question out of laziness, it doesn’t let me off the hook with regard to the next question. But if I analyze this as a sequence of separate promises, then that sequence has to be infinite:

4. I promise that if you ask me q₁ at t₁, I will try to answer. And if you ask me q₂ at t₁, I will try to answer. … And if you ask me q₁ at t₂, I will try to answer. …

where the list goes through all the possible questions about logic and all the possible times that fall within office hours. Have I really made an infinite number of promises? This seems implausible. Moreover, normally, we think that one cannot make a promise without knowing that one has done so. But I might not know that q₈ is a question about logic or that t₃ is a time within office hours (in fact, I might not even know that t₃ exists—I might think that there are no intervals finer grained than a Planck time, but there might be).

Or I could make a promise to God regarding my treatment of all future as-yet-unconceived persons who have some property. Again, this is distributive: failure in one case does not excuse me from trying in other cases. But if analyzed as a collection of promises about actual future persons, we get the weirdness that what I have promised depends on what I will do. So it would have to be a collection of promises about possible future persons. And it’s not clear that this makes sense except given some controversial metaphysical assumptions, such as the existence of haecceities.

So, I think distributive promises don’t reduce to non-distributive ones.

Maybe, though, one can try to handle the cases with some sort of a doctrine of approximate truth. Perhaps when I promise a proposition, if I am no longer in a position to make the proposition true, I am required to make it as approximately true as I can? I think this kind of a principle will lead to counterintuitive results. For suppose that there is some benefit to you from having p be exactly true, while close approximations to p are harmful to you, while some way of making p very false is much better for you. Then I shouldn’t strive for a close approximation to p. (Think of cases of medicinal dosage, perhaps.)

Unreleasable promises would be useful

Alice promises Bob to impose on him some penalty should Bob do a certain wrong. Bob does the wrong, and points out to Alice that imposing the penalty is some trouble to Alice, and that Bob is happy to release Alice from the promise.

If the promisee can always release the promiser from a promise, then in a case like this Bob may be exactly right. Deterrence thus would sometimes work better if one can make a promise that the promisee cannot release one from.

Of course, the fact that a normative power would be useful does not mean that the normative power exists. I doubt one can make a promise to another that the other cannot release one from.

One might, however, be able to vow the deterrent penalty to God. Or maybe just promise it to a third party (society?) who has no incentive to release one from the promise.

Partial fulfillment of promises

A classic joke: You arrive in the Soviet Union. At the airport you see two people working. One is digging holes in the ground. The other is filling them in. You ask them what they are doing. They say: “The guy who was supposed to be planting trees didn’t show up.”

So, suppose I promise to dig a hole in your yard and plant a tree there. But I couldn’t obtain the tree. Obviously, I shouldn’t dig the hole. Thus, sometimes, partial fulfillment of a promise is no use at all, or worse.

But it seems that sometimes partial fulfillment is my duty. If I promise to give you two T-shirts and but I only manage to obtain one, it seems I owe you that one. But even that depends on the context. Suppose the two T-shirts were to be for a party where a parent and their child were to wear matching clothes. Then one T-shirt might be useless.

Perhaps the story is this. When I can’t fulfill a promise, I need to make it up to you as best as possible. Partial fulfillment is a way of making it up, and it is a default component of making up. But sometimes it’s worthless, in which case I should ask you if there is some other way you’d like me to make up for it.

Causal theories of normative statuses

Utterances cause a variety of outcomes. For instance, a request often causes an action by another person, while saying “Alexa, turn on the lights” can cause the lights to turn on. This is not the paradigmatic thing that happens with performatives. With performatives, the outcome is (at least partially) constituted by the utterance. When the Queen utters the words of knighting, the newly created knight’s knightliness is not caused by but constituted by the utterance. One plausible argument for this is that causation has a speed of light limit, but knighting does not: the Queen could knight someone a light-year away, effective immediately.

So we have two kinds of outcome for an utterance: causal outcomes and constituted outcomes. It is plausible that sometimes utterances have both kinds. For instance, knighting someone can both constitute them as a knight and cause them to do knightly deeds.

It is widely, though perhaps often only implicitly, held that the normative statuses involved in marriages, promises and reasons of request are constituted outcomes of performative utterances.

It is, I think, worth thinking about what reasons we have to accept this performative constitution thesis. For here is another possibility: these social statuses are constituted by contingent normative properties that are caused to exist by the utterance. In such a case, the utterances producing these statuses are not performatives, but function causally, like the “Alexa, turn on the light” example.

If naturalism is true, so is the performative constitution thesis. For if naturalism is true, then normative properties supervene on physical properties, and there is no plausible physical property that is caused by uttering a promise on which the relevant normative property could supervene. Here is a quick argument: Any physical property that can be produced by promising can be produced impersonally by random quantum phenomena, but such random quantum phenomena will not result in the relevant normative properties of promise. Hence the physical act of promising must be a part of the supervenience base of the relevant normative properties.

But if naturalism is false, then we have a new possibility. It could be that marrying, promising and requesting non-physically cause relevant normative properties. The quick argument above no longer works, since random quantum phenomena need not have the power to produce these normative properties. In fact, even the speed-of-light argument concerning knighting doesn’t work, because non-physical causation need not have a speed-of-light limit.

Do we have good reason, beyond an incredulous stare, to dismiss the causal theory of these normative statuses?

I think classical theists have some reasons to opposed the causal theory. First, God has the power to directly cause all the kinds of effects we have the power to cause. So if I can cause myself to have the normative property of having promised you a dollar, God can directly cause me to have his normative property. But that’s absurd: for while God can directly cause me to promise you a dollar, it is a contradiction for the state of having promised to be caused by any means other than the making of that promise.

This is, however, only a limited opposition to the causal theory. For while God cannot directly cause me to be in a promissory state, it may well be that God can directly cause me to have the paradigmatic normative property constituting the promissory state, namely an obligation of performance with exactly the kind of weight that the promise carried. Thus, the first argument is compatible with a hybrid causal-constitutive view on which my making a promise causes the obligation but constitutes the obligation as a promissory one. Compare how my carving a statue would cause the statue but constitute it as hand-made.

The second argument against the causal theory is this. By divine simplicity, God’s contingent properties are all constituted by contingent entities outside of himself. But when God promises something, he acquires a contingent obligation. By divine simplicity, that obligation must be constituted by something contingent outside of God. And the most plausible candidate is that the it is constituted by the physical manifestation making up the promise (e.g., the voice that the promisee heard). So in the case of divine promises, neither the original causal theory nor the hybrid theory is plausible.

That said, the second argument is not very strong. For contingent beliefs are internally constituted in us and yet by exactly the same divine simplicity argument externally constituted in God. So while the fact that God’s promissory normative statuses are externally constituted gives us some reason to think ours are, this is far from conclusive. Moreover, what goes for promises may not go for other things. God (qua God) cannot marry. So the argument doesn’t apply to marriage.

In summary, if naturalism is false, then it could be the case that some of the normative statuses that are generally thought to be constituted by performative utterances are in fact caused by utterances, though classical theists have some reason to prefer the performative constitution theory in many cases.

Finally, note that there is a third option besides constitution and causation: something I call quasi-causation. If I pray for an effect, and as an outcome of my prayer, God produces the effect, I don’t want to say that my prayer caused God to produce the effect. It just seems contrary to divine transcendence to suppose we can cause God to do things. Yet there is something like causation going on here. Similarly, it could be that sometimes a normative status is not caused but merely quasi-caused by an utterance.

Catholics, in fact, are liable to think that the quasi-causal theory is at least true of one aspect of one case: sacramental marriage. In sacramental marriage, there is an intrinsic change in the parties entering the marriage as a result of the exchange of the marriage vows. But because the change happens due to God’s gracious activity, it probably cannot be said to be caused by the marriage vows. Rather, the change is quasi-caused by the marriage vows. However, it is not clear whether the relevant intrinsic change is a change with respect to a normative property.

All in all, there are many open questions here.

Do we need performatives?

In a performative, a social fact is instituted by a statement that simultaneously announces it:

• I hereby apply for the position.

• I dub this ship the Star of the South.

• I promise to pay you back tomorrow.

It seems we can distinguish two cases of institution of a social fact. Some social facts do not essentially require any party besides the instituter be apprised of the fact, and it is only the current contingent convention that those facts are instituted by an announcement. For instance, naming of persons is done by a public act in our society, but we could imagine (as happens in some piece of science fiction I vaguely recall) a society where people name themselves mentally, and then only reveal the name to their intimates. In that case, name facts already would obtain prior to their announcement, being instituted by a purely private mental act. In fact, in our society we handle the naming of animals in this way. You don’t need to tell anybody—not even Goldy—that your goldfish’s name is Goldy for the name to be that.

In the case of social facts that do not require anybody besides the instituter to be apprised of them, if we in fact institute them by means of a performative, that is a mere accident.

But some social facts of their very nature seem to require that some relevant party besides the instituter be apprised of the fact. For instance, it seems one cannot apply for a position without informing the organization in charge of the position, and one cannot promise without communicating this to the promisee. In those cases, it seems that the fact must be instituted by a performative.

That’s not quite right, though. The social fact of applying for a position can also be instituted by a pair of things: a performative instituting a conditional application and the truth of the antecedent of the conditional. “I hereby apply if no other applications come in by Wednesday night.” And in that case, the social fact can obtain without anyone other than God being apprised of it: even if no one yet knows that no other applications have come in by Wednesday night, it is a fact that one has applied. It seems that every social fact that is instituted by a performative announcing that very fact could be instituted by an appropriate conditional performative plus the obtaining of the antecedent.

But perhaps we can say something weaker. There seem to be social facts that logically require that they be partially instituted by someone’s apprising someone of something—but not necessary of the social fact in question. So while perhaps no particular performative is essential to instituting a particular social fact, some social facts may require some performative or other.

Promising to sing infinitely many duets

Suppose you and I are going to live forever in heaven. I promise you that I will play sing a duet with you infinitely many times. Is this a valid promise?

Here is an argument that it is not. It seems that if the promise is valid, it generates reasons to sing duets with you. But it doesn’t. The reasons generated by a promise are reasons to do things that contribute to the fulfillment of the promise. But singing a duet with you does not contribute to the fulfillment of the promise. Here is one way to see this. Suppose I am considering whether to sing the duet with you on Wednesday, September 1, 2060. Consider now these two potential promises that I could imagine myself to have made:

1. I will sing a duet with you on infinitely many of the days that are not September 1, 2060.

2. I will sing a duet with you on infinitely many days.

Then singing the duet with you on September 1, 2060 does nothing to promote the fulfillment of promise (1). But (2) is logically equivalent to (1)! For I sing a duet with you on infinitely many days if and only if I sing a duet with you on infinitely many days that are not September 1, 2060. So my singing the duet on September 1, 2060 will no more promote the fulfillment of (2) than it will promote the fulfillment of (1). So, the promise doesn’t generate reasons to sing duets.

But things aren’t so simple. For while it doesn’t generate reasons to sing duets, it could generate reasons to do other things that bring about my singing duets with you on infinitely many days that are not September 1, 2060. For instance, here is something I could do: I could promise you to sing a duet with you every Wednesday for eternity. Making that promise will promote both (1) and (2). For the promise to sing duets on Wednesdays does unproblematically generate a reason to sing a duet on every Wednesday, and this generation of reasons is likely to contribute to my singing a duet with you on infinitely many days.

Of course, there are other promises I could make you that would make (1) and (2) likely. I could promise to sing a duet with you every January 1. Or every January 1 of a prime-numbered year. It’s a difficult question which of these promises I should make. But I have reason to make some such promise, or do something else that is likely to motivate me infinitely often, say inculcate a habit in myself.

So the answer to the initial question is plausibly positive. But it is only plausible if there is something other than singing duets that one can do in fulfillment of the promise. If all I am facing are the individual daily choices whether to sing a duet or not, without any habituation, I cannot validly promise to sing the duet on infinitely many occasions, as it would not generate any reasons.