Answer:
REASONS TO KEEP OUR PROMISES
1. Introduction
Promises are valuable because they allow us to receive assurances that others will act in
certain ways and give these assurances ourselves. Assurances are worthwhile because they
can give us peace of mind, we can use them to establish and stabilize private schemes of
cooperation and, anyway, we often have good reason to want people to do (or not do) certain
things. The obligation to keep a promise derives in some way from the value that assurances
provide.1
Accounts of our fiduciary obligations divide over the role they assign to social practices.
David Hume and John Rawls argue that promising creates in others the relevant assurances
only if there exists a social practice of promising in which most everyone knows that people
generally fulfill their promises. These philosophers think that our fiduciary obligations
depend essentially on an institution of promising, but they disagree about why we have an
obligation not to violate its rules. Hume seems to think that promise-breaking is wrong in
virtue of impartial disapproval towards acts that undermine the practice of promising while
Rawls argues that it is wrong to break a promise because doing so exploits a just institution of promising from which we have voluntarily benefited.2
In contrast to these practice views,
Thomas Scanlon maintains that our obligation to keep a promise does not necessarily depend
on any social convention; instead, he argues that we ought to keep our promises because we
have a duty not to frustrate certain expectations that our promising can induce in others.3
These three views are often presented as competing accounts of the most fundamental
reason why we should keep our promises. I believe that none of them, however, can explain
our fiduciary obligations in all (or most) cases that involve binding promises. Scanlon’s
expectation view is subject to a fatal circularity in paradigm cases in which our only reason
to keep a promise is an awareness that, having made a promise, we are obligated to keep it.
Hume’s view cannot explain why we ought to keep a promise the breaking of which is
unlikely to undermine the institution of promising. And Rawls’ view (along with Hume’s)
cannot explain why it is wrong to break promises that are made when no social practice of
promising exists. Moreover, neither practice views nor expectation views alone can fully
explain the wrongs involved in breaking promises that both invoke the rules of a social
practice of promising and lead others to form certain expectations about our actions. This
suggests that there is no single, fundamental reason why we should keep our promises.
After arguing for these claims, I go on to sketch an alternative account according to
which a family of fiduciary principles, including ones similar to those suggested by Hume,
Rawls and Scanlon, explains why we ought to keep our promises. A principle is a fiduciary
principle if it explains why one or more promises are binding. On this view, no single fiduciary principle explains why all binding promises generate obligations and often one or
more fiduciary principle will apply in a given case, possibly over-determining why we should
keep that promise. For example, principles of the sort proposed by Rawls and Scanlon would
each give us sufficient reason to keep a promise that invokes the rules of a just institution of
promising and also arouses certain expectations in others. A pluralist account of this sort, I
argue, provides a better framework for understanding the nature of our fiduciary obligations.