Few moral judgments are more intuitively obvious and more widelyshared than that promises ought to be kept. It is in part this fixedplace in our intuitive judgments that makes promises of particularinterest to philosophers, as well as a host of social scientists andother theorists.

Another feature of promises that make them a topic of philosophicalconcern is their role in producing trust, and by so doing facilitatingsocial coordination and cooperation. Because of this promises andrelated phenomena, such as vows, oaths, pledges, contracts, treatiesand agreements more generally are important elements of justice andthe law, and, at least in the Social Contract tradition, of thepolitical order as well.

Promises are of special interest to ethical theorists, as they aregenerally taken to impose moral obligations. Thus an explanation ofhow such promissory obligations come about and how they function isnecessary for a complete moral theory.

And if indeed promises produce moral obligations, they are of apeculiar sort. Unlike paradigmatic moral duties, the duty not to harmfor example, promissory obligations are not owed equally to everyone,but rather only those we have promised. Further, promissoryobligations are voluntary; we don’t have to make promises, butwe must keep them when we do.

And promissory obligations aren’t just contingent upon acts ofthe will, like the obligations we might incur by deliberately damagingsomeone’s property, but (at least it seems on first reflection)they are immediately createdby acts of the will. When Ipromise to do something, it seems thatby so doing I havecreated the obligation to do it.

This last feature makes promissory obligations a special puzzle forethical theories. The idea that we simply manufacture promissoryobligations by speaking them, like an incantation, is decidedlymysterious. As Hume acidly remarked in theTreatise(1739–40):

I shall further observe, that, since every new promise imposes a newobligation of morality on the person who promises, and since this newobligation arises from his will; it is one of the most mysterious andincomprehensible operations that can possibly be imagined, and mayeven be compared totransubstantiation orholyorders, where a certain form of words, along with a certainintention, changes entirely the nature of an external object, and evenof a human creature. (Treatise, 3.2.5; emphasis in theoriginal)

The philosophical work on these topics is body of literature thatspans the ages. Although promising as a phenomenon is rarely the solesubject of a major work, it is a subject treated by many majorfigures. From the ancients to the medievals to the moderns and beyond,theorists have sought to explain the normative force of promises.While the bulk of the corpus is in ethical and political theory andthe related fields of legal theory and applied ethics, work onpromises has also been done in the philosophy of language, actiontheory, rationality theory, game theory and other areas.

There are a variety of methods of classifying promissory theories inthe literature. Atiyah (1981), Downie (1985), Vitek (1993), Shiffrin(2008), Owens (2012), van Roojen (2013), Liberto (2016b), and manyothers have given the matter some attention, and while there issignificant overlap, there are some differences as well. Typicallytheorists sort theories by reference to the way in which promissoryobligations are generated. On this standard taxonomy the main types ofpromissory theory are: Normative power views, Conventionalist views,Expectation views, and Joint Commitment views

• 1. Normative Power Theory
  • 1.1 Ancient Views
  • 1.2 Natural Law Views
  • 1.3 Contemporary Views
• 2. Conventionalism
  • 2.1 Ontological and Normative Conventionalism
  • 2.2 Paradigmatic Conventionalism
  • 2.3 Hybrid Theories
• 3. Expectation Theory
  • 3.1 Assurance
  • 3.2 Reliance
  • 3.3 Trust
• 4. Interpersonal Commitments
  • 4.1 Joint Commitment
  • 4.2 Second Personal
• 5. Issues in Promissory Theory
  • 5.1 Problematic Promisees and the Uptake Condition
  • 5.2 Promises to the Self and the Promisee Release Condition
  • 5.3 Vows, Oaths and Related Phenomena
    • 5.3.1 Vows
    • 5.3.2 Oaths
  • 5.4 Promissory Reasons
• 6. Promises and Other Fields
  • 6.1 Promises and Speech Acts
  • 6.2 Promise, Contracts and the Law
  • 6.3 Promises and Consequentialism
    • 6.3.1 Act Utilitarianism
    • 6.3.2 Rule Utilitarianism
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Normative Power Theory

On these theories promising is a special sort of power we have overour normative circumstances, the power to invoke obligations bypromissory utterance. What separates this approach from the others isthe self-contained nature of promises: promisors obligate themselvesdirectly, by their own powers, rather than indirectly, either byappeal to a convention or by engendering expectations or commitmentsin the promisee.

Traditional normative power views, like the one Hume is mocking in thequote above, ground such a power in one of the various traditions thatgo under the general title “Natural Law”, like thevirtue-based views of the ancients and the divinity-based views of themedieval theologians. Modern (in the philosophical sense) normativepower views generally ground the power in the rights or interests ofpromisors.

1.1 Ancient Views

Representative of the ancient view, for Aristotle promise-keeping isdirectly mandated by the virtues, in particular those of justice, aswell as liberality in cases of purely gratuitous promises:

Let us discuss them both, but first of all the truthful man. We arenot speaking of the man who keeps faith in his agreements, i.e., inthe things that pertain to justice or injustice (for this would belongto another excellence[this would be the virtue of justice]), but theman who in the matters in which nothing of this sort is at stake istrue both in word and in life because his character is such. But sucha man would seem to be as a matter of fact equitable. For the man wholoves truth, and is truthful where nothing is at stake, will stillmore be truthful where something is at stake; he will avoid falsehoodas something base, seeing that he avoided it even for its own sake;and such a man is worthy of praise. He inclines rather to understatethe truth; for this seems in better taste because exaggerations arewearisome. (Nicomachean Ethics, iv. vii,1127a–1127b)

The Roman Jurists like Cicero and Gaius developed this sort of viewfurther, crucially conceiving of a specific moral duty to keeppromises, and a specific (and for Cicero particularlyRoman)virtue of fidelity to promises (see Cicero,De Officiis 1.8)as well as formalizing promissory obligations, by reference to aspecific procedure called thestipulatio or stipulating:

A verbal obligation is created by question and answer in such form as:“Do you solemnly promise conveyance? I solemnly promiseconveyance”; “Will you convey? I will convey”;“Do you promise? I promise”; “Do you promise on yourhonour? I promise on my honour”; “Do you guarantee on yourhonour? I guarantee on my honour”; “Will you do? I willdo” (Gaius,Inst. 3.92, cited in Swain 2013)

1.2 Natural Law Views

And the tradition is also later enlarged by Scholastic theorists, mostimportantly Aquinas (Aquinas,Summa Theologica II, q.88 &q.110). Aquinas used Aristotelian assumptions and techniques to expandand detail the theory, deriving the duty to keep a promise from theintentions of the promisor and the underpinning virtues (see Gordley1991: 10ff).

Aquinas discusses promises indirectly, in his treatment of vows, whichhe takes are promises made to God. His adaptation of Aristotelianvirtue theory to the precepts of the natural law made for someimportant changes in the theory—principally a shift in focus tothe will of the promisor as the agent of obligation. For Aquinas, apromise is essentially the agent “binding” himself(i.e., generating an obligation) by act of will:

A vow denotes a binding to do or omit some particular thing. Now oneman binds himself to another by means of a promise, which is an act ofthe reason to which faculty it belongs to direct. For just as a man bycommanding or praying, directs, in a fashion, what others are to dofor him, so by promising he directs what he himself is to do foranother. […] Now a promise is the outcome from a purpose ofdoing something: and a purpose presupposes deliberation, since it isthe act of a deliberate will. Accordingly three things are essentialto a vow: the first is deliberation; the second is a purpose of thewill; and the third is a promise, wherein is completed the nature of avow. Sometimes, however, two other things are added as a sort ofconfirmation of the vow, namely, pronouncement by word of mouth,according to Psalm 65:13, “I will pay Thee my vows which my lipshave uttered”; and the witnessing of others. Hence the Mastersays (Sent. iv, D, 38) that a vow is “the witnessing of aspontaneous promise and ought to be made to God and about thingsrelating to God”: although the “witnessing” maystrictly refer to the inward protestation. (Summa, II-II,q.88)

Still later on, important early modern commentators on promising inthe Natural Law tradition such as Locke (1689,Two Treatises OnGovernment, II-II:14), Reid (1788,Essay on the Active Powersof Man, 2), Grotius (1625,De iure naturae, ii. xi.),Pufendorf (1672,De iure naturae et gentium, iii. v. 9),Stair (1681/93,Institutions of the Laws of Scotland, I.X.1), and others developed the doctrine in new directions.

This natural law tradition waned in popularity among philosophersduring the modern period, with influential early theorists like Hobbesand Hume adopting conventionalist sorts of views. This is of a piecewith the turn to more naturalistic views in many different areas ofwestern philosophy, but the tradition never disappeared. Through theworks of later natural lawyers in Spain and elsewhere, (Suarez,Molina), the tradition greatly influenced the development of Europeanprivate law doctrine—the doctrine underlying things likecontract and tort law. See the section below on therelationship between promissory theory and contract law for more. For an excellent overview of these issues, see chapter 1 ofJames Gordley’sThe Philosophical Origins of Modern ContractDoctrine (1991).

1.3 Contemporary Views

By the twentieth century newer versions of normative power views beganto appear. Unsurprisingly, these neo-normative power views wereinitially most popular among theorists with a significant legal theorybent, e.g., H. L. A. Hart (1955) and Joseph Raz (1972, 1977, 1984,2012). But philosophers without any such link have also adopted them,some examples being Gary Watson (2004) and David Owens (2006,2008, 2012).  

The new normative power views generally ground the power the same wayother elements of Hohfeldian (1919) systems (e.g., rights andprivileges) have been grounded, by appeal to our interests (seeFeinberg 1970). Perhaps the paradigm of such a view is HLAHart’s appeal in his seminal “Are There Any NaturalRights?” (Hart 1955), where he makes promissory obligations outto rest on “special rights” generated by the parties, inthe interests of “freedom of choice”:

When rights arise out of special transactions between individuals orout of some special relationship in which they stand to each other,both the persons who have the right and those who have thecorresponding obligation are limited to the parties to the specialtransaction or relationship. […]

(i) The most obvious cases of special rights are those that arise frompromises. By promising to do or not to do something, we voluntarilyincur obligations and create or confer rights on those to whom wepromise; we alter the existing moral independence of theparties’ freedom of choice in relation to some action and createa new moral relationship between them, so that it becomes morallylegitimate for the person to whom the promise is given to determinehow the promisor shall act. That which corresponds very well to thedistinction between a right, which an individual has, and what it isright to do. The promisee has a temporary authority or sovereignty inrelation to some specific matter over the other’s will which weexpress by saying that the promisor is under an obligation to thepromisee to do what he has promised. To some philosophers the notionthat moral phenomena—rights and duties or obligations—canbe brought into existence by the voluntary action of individuals hasappeared utterly mysterious; but this I think has been so because theyhave not clearly seen how special the moral notions of a right and anobligation are, nor how peculiarly they are connected with thedistribution of freedom of choice […] (Hart 1955:183–184)

Hart’s proposal was the harbinger of a revival of these sorts oftheories, first among legal theorists and then to moral philosophersmore generally. One of the earliest and most influential authors totake up Hart’s idea is Joseph Raz. First appearing in his 1977essay “Promises and Obligations” (Raz 1977) and later inhis bookThe Morality of Freedom (1986) and elsewhere (seeRaz 1982, 2014) Raz advances a normative power view that explicitlygrounds the promissory power in our interests in self-binding forcooperation and coordination:

Normative powers are the abilities of people (or institutions) tochange normative situations or conditions (i.e., to impose or repealduties, to confer or revoke rights, to change status etc.) by actsintended to achieve these changes, where the ability depends on(namely is based on, grounded on, justified by) the desirability (thevalue) of those people (or institutions) having them.

In the case of promises the value of the power is that it expandspeople’s ability to fashion their lives, or aspects of theirlives, by their actions. Through their promises they commit themselvesto others. Up to a point, promises are analogous to decisions thatconstitute reasons for the deciders to perform the act they decided toperform. Both are ways of opening up options through closing otheroptions, normatively speaking. Decisions, as well as having goals,facilitate undertaking complex activities (giving a ball, writing asymphony, etc.) that require concerted actions. Promises, beingcommitments to others, facilitate co-operation, the forging ofrelations that presuppose dependence, trust and joint actions, andmore. For the sake of brevity I will refer to the value of havingthese powers as the value of enhanced control (of one’s life),though a somewhat different explanation of their value is requiredwhen the powers are held by institutions. (Raz 2014: 61)

David Owens (2006, 2008, 2011, 2012), in a recent and widelyinfluential approach, proposes a power based in what he calls our“authority interest”, or the interest we have in having acertain practical authority over others, the authority that being therecipient of a promise gives us. This power is one of a family of suchpowers, whose purpose is to serve our interest in being able to shapethe normative landscape by declaration, an interest that takes atleast two forms: theauthority interest, which underwritespromissory obligation and thepermissive interest thatunderwrites the power of consent:

I shall argue that promising exists because, at least when it comes toeach other’s actions, human beings often have what might becalled an authority interest: I often want it to be the case that I,rather than you, have the authority to determine what you do. If youpromise me a lift home, this promise gives me the right to require youto drive me home; in that sense, it puts me in authority over you. Somuch is obvious. What I claim is that human beings often want suchauthority for its own sake (not just to facilitate prediction orcoordination). I often have an interest in having the right todetermine whether you’ll give me a lift, over and above anyinterest I have in knowing what you (or we) will actually do. And Iclaim that promising exists because it serves this authority interest.(Owens, 2006: 51)

Seana Shiffrin (2008, 2012b) has also recently proposed a novelnormative power view, one that grounds the power in our interests informing and maintaining relationships with others, rather thanauthority or coordination. On Shiffrin’s view promises are of apiece with other commitments that are integral to the structure ofintimate relations between persons:

[…]The power to make binding promises, as well as to forge avariety of other related forms of commitment, is an integral part ofthe ability to engage in special relationships in a morally good way,under conditions of equal respect. (Shiffrin 2008: 485)

These recent developments have spawned a burgeoning literature, with afocus on the issue of normative powers themselves, e.g., Chang (2013,2020), Westlund (2013, 2018), Nieswandt (2017), as well as theirpropriety for explaining promissory obligation, e.g., E. Taylor(2013), Fruh (2014, 2019), Molina (2019), Melenovsky (2017) andothers.

2. Conventionalism

Conventionalism about promises refers, in the vaguest sense, to viewsthat invoke the promising convention (or the promising“practice”, “institution”,“system”, or “game” to mention some of theother names that it goes by in the literature) as central to theirexplanation of the provenance of promises and promissoryobligations.

There are a number of different ways of making this idea more precisein the literature (E. Taylor 2013, Neiwenstadt 2019a, van Roojen 2020,Cohon 2021,inter alia). My survey of this literature leadsto me to propose a distinction between two sorts of conventionalism,ontological and normative.

2.1 Ontological and Normative Conventionalism

The first of these, ontological conventionalism, is the idea thatpromises are ontologically dependent upon the convention, so thatpromises could not exist, or could not be properly understood aspromises, without the promising convention. One way of understandingthis is via the framework found in Rawls’ 1955 articleTwoConcepts of Rules.

Rawls distinguished between what he called the “summary”conception of rules, in which rules are merely “rules ofthumb”, i.e., guides to established actions—like the rulesof effective writing, and the “practice” view of rules,where the rules define a practice, which in turn defines the actionsregulated by the rules. Rawls calls these latter sort“constitutive” rules.

Constitutive rules, like the rules of baseball, are necessary for usto perform (and even understand) game-based actions like“striking out” or “hitting a home run” (Rawls1955). So on views that are ontologically conventionalist, promisesare like home runs, i.e., they are only intelligible within the boundsof the convention—they are artefacts of it.

The second thing meant by the term “conventionalist” iswhat I call Normative Conventionalism. This is the idea that theconvention explains the normative force of the promissory obligation,in a particular way. On these views individual promises are obligatorybecause of some prior obligation to the convention or its members assuch.

This appeal can be made in different ways, by pointing to differentelements of the convention and the ways in which reneging might affectit. One standard way is to argue for a duty to uphold the convention,on some basis, as well as an appeal to the damage one might do to theconvention by reneging.

The two qualities go naturally together, and many contemporarytheories make both claims, although they are sometimes not careful todistinguish them. But they are independent qualities, and they can anddo come apart. This can be seen by considering two earlyconventionalist theories, those of Hobbes and Hume.

Hobbes thinks that keeping promises is only rational (and thuspromises are obligatory) due to the fear of punishment for reneging,punishment that only follows from the establishment of the civil stateand a system of promissory exchange backed by the power of thatstate:

Covenants Of Mutuall Trust, When Invalid

If a Covenant be made, wherein neither of the parties performepresently, but trust one another; in the condition of meer Nature,(which is a condition of Warre of every man against every man,) uponany reasonable suspition, it is Voyd; But if there be a common Powerset over them bothe, with right and force sufficient to compellperformance; it is not Voyd. For he that performeth first, has noassurance the other will performe after; because the bonds of wordsare too weak to bridle mens ambition, avarice, anger, and otherPassions, without the feare of some coerceive Power; which in thecondition of meer Nature, where all men are equall, and judges of thejustnesse of their own fears cannot possibly be supposed. Andtherefore he which performeth first, does but betray himselfe to hisenemy; contrary to the Right (he can never abandon) of defending hislife, and means of living.

But in a civill estate, where there is a Power set up to constrainthose that would otherwise violate their faith, that feare is no morereasonable; and for that cause, he which by the Covenant is to performfirst, is obliged so to do.

The cause of Feare, which maketh such a Covenant invalid, must bealwayes something arising after the Covenant made; as some new fact,or other signe of the Will not to performe; else it cannot make theCovenant Voyd. For that which could not hinder a man from promising,ought not to be admitted as a hindrance of performing.

But Hobbes also thinks that promises, and their cognates, exchanges,agreements and covenants and contracts, arise not from any convention,but rather from our power to transfer innate rights we have to eachother:

Renouncing (or) Transferring Right What; Obligation Duty Injustice

Right is layd aside, either by simply Renouncing it; or byTransferring it to another. By Simply RENOUNCING; when he cares not towhom the benefit thereof redoundeth. By TRANSFERRING; when heintendeth the benefit thereof to some certain person, or persons. Andwhen a man hath in either manner abandoned, or granted away his Right;then is he said to be OBLIGED, or BOUND, not to hinder those, to whomsuch Right is granted, or abandoned, from the benefit of it: and thathe Ought, and it his DUTY, not to make voyd that voluntary act of hisown: and that such hindrance is INJUSTICE, and INJURY, as being SineJure; the Right being before renounced, or transferred. So thatInjury, or Injustice, in the controversies of the world, is somewhatlike to that, which in the disputations of Scholers is calledAbsurdity. For as it is there called an Absurdity, to contradict whatone maintained in the Beginning: so in the world, it is calledInjustice, and Injury, voluntarily to undo that, which from thebeginning he had voluntarily done. The way by which a man eithersimply Renounceth, or Transferreth his Right, is a Declaration, orSignification, by some voluntary and sufficient signe, or signes, thathe doth so Renounce, or Transferre; or hath so Renounced, orTransferred the same, to him that accepteth it. And these Signes areeither Words onely, or Actions onely; or (as it happeneth most often)both Words and Actions. And the same are the BONDS, by which men arebound, and obliged: Bonds, that have their strength, not from theirown Nature, (for nothing is more easily broken then a mans word,) butfrom Feare of some evill consequence upon the rupture.

The distinction helps us perhaps understand a bit better the obvioustension between these two claims on Hobbes’ part. How is it thatHobbes can say that promises and contracts are matters of the will, inone section, but then null and void in the state of nature in thesubsequent? Because in the first gloss Hobbes is saying what a promiseis, ontologically speaking, and in the second he is speaking of whatgenerates its normative force.

So Hobbes’ theory is normatively, but not ontologically,conventionalist. He takes it that the normative force of a promiseflows from the convention, while the promise itself is created by anact of the will in transfer of rights.

For Hume, the reverse is true. Hume thinks that promises areconventional in the ontological sense—they are artefacts of ahuman convention, and fidelity, the virtue of justice that attendthem, is also artificial for this reason. This he contrasts withother, natural virtues, like caring for offspring, which areinnate.

I say, first, that a promise is not intelligible naturally, norantecedent to human conventions; and that a man, unacquainted withsociety, could never enter into any engagements with another, eventhough they could perceive each other’s thoughts by intuition.[…]

Now it is evident we have no motive leading us to the performance ofpromises, distinct from a sense of duty. If we thought, that promiseshad no moral obligation, we never should feel any inclination toobserve them. This is not the case with the natural virtues. Thoughthere was no obligation to relieve the miserable, our humanity wouldlead us to it; and when we omit that duty, the immorality of theomission arises from its being a proof, that we want the naturalsentiments of humanity. A father knows it to be his duty to take careof his children: But he has also a natural inclination to it. And ifno human creature had that indication, no one could lie under any suchobligation. (Treatise, 3.2.5)

But Hume also thinks that the primary role of the convention inproducing individual promissory obligations is indirect. Hume takes itthat the appreciation of the convention produces in people both thesentiments themselves that are, for Hume, the mark of the moral, aswell as the dispositions to foster and encourage those sentiments inthemselves and others:

There needs but a very little practice of the world, to make usperceive all these consequences and advantages. The shortestexperience of society discovers them to every mortal; and when eachindividual perceives the same sense of interest in all his fellows, heimmediately performs his part of any contract, as being assured, thatthey will not be wanting in theirs. All of them, by concert, enterinto a scheme of actions, calculated for common benefit, and agree tobe true to their word; nor is there any thing requisite to form thisconcert or convention, but that every one have a sense of interest inthe faithful fulfilling of engagements, and express that sense toother members of the society. This immediately causes that interest tooperate upon them; and interest is the first obligation to theperformance of promises.

Afterwards a sentiment of morals concurs with interest, and becomes anew obligation upon mankind. This sentiment of morality, in theperformance of promises, arises from the same principles as that inthe abstinence from the property of others. Public interest,education, and the artifices of politicians, have the same effect inboth cases. The difficulties, that occur to us, in supposing a moralobligation to attend promises, we either surmount or elude.(Treatise, 3.2.5)

So Hume’s promissory theory is ontologically conventionalist,but not normatively so. Rather promises are obligatory by way of themoral sentiments, like all other moral obligations. This point iselegantly made in a recent piece, “Hume’s Practice Theoryand its Dissimilar Descendants” (Cohon 2021)

2.2 Paradigmatic Conventionalism

Perhaps a better way of understanding contemporary conventionalisttheories is that they are paradigmatically both normatively andontologically conventional about promises. Such a theory is offered byJohn Rawls, in his seminalA Theory of Justice (1971).

Rawls conceives of promises not assui generis moral actions,but as essentially institutional artifacts, and thus promissoryobligations as institutional obligations, grounded in the same manneras all such obligations. These institutions are comprised of sets ofrules that prescribe and proscribe certain sorts of behavior for theparticipants in the institution. The dicta of the rules are thecontents of moral obligations. Rawls in turn grounds institutionalobligations in what he calls the principle of fairness.

The principle of fairness is a basic moral principle, chosen bycontractors in the OP. But unlike its more famous Rawlsian cognate thedifference principle, the principle of fairness is an individualprinciple, one that applies directly to individuals in the society, asopposed to the basic institutions of the society themselves. Rawlslays out the principle of fairness in the following way:

…[A] person is required to do his part as defined by the rulesof an institution when two conditions are met: first the institutionis just (or fair)…and second, one has voluntarily accepted thebenefits of the arrangement or taken advantage of the opportunities itoffers to further their own interests. (1971: 111–112)

So there are two conditions on an action’s being aninstitutional obligation in the Rawlsian sense: (1) The institutionwhose rule calls for the action is just, and (2) The person has“voluntarily accepted the benefits” of theinstitution.

Rawls then introduces three theoretical elements to explain promissoryobligations in particular. The first is what he calls the rule ofpromising, or the central rule that constitutes the promisingconvention:

[I]f one says the words “I promise to doX” inthe appropriate circumstances, one is to doX, unless certainexcusing conditions obtain. (Rawls, 1971: 345)

Rawls doesn’t go into the circumstance and conditions mentionedin the rule in any great detail, but he does note that a promise mustbe voluntary and deliberate. He also notes that a proper rendition ofsuch clauses is necessary to evaluate whether the institution ofpromising the rule defines is just (1971: 346). The second piece oftheory Rawls employs is the notion of a bona fide promise. A bona fidepromise is a promise that arises in accordance with the rule ofpromising, when the practice [of promising] it represents is just.

And the third piece of theory is a moral principle targeted topromises directly, what Rawls call the Principle of Fidelity. Theprinciple of fidelity is merely a derivative of the principle offairness, fashioned specifically for the institution of promising. Andit says simply that “[B]ona fide promises are to be kept”(1971: 347).

Thus Rawls’ explanation for the obligatory force of promises isroughly: If you make a promise under a just promising institution,then you are obligated to uphold that institution (and obey its rules)because to do otherwise would be to “free-ride” on theinstitution in a manner forbidden by the principle of fairness.

So, unlike Hobbes and Hume, for Rawls the convention is both source ofpromises as a phenomenon and the source of the moral justification forpromissory obligation. Individual promises are “moves” inthe promising game, as home runs are moves in baseball, and promissoryobligations are grounded in the value of the convention directly.

Another important contemporary branch of conventionalist theory ispropounded by John Searle (1965,inter alia) Like Rawls,Searle takes promises to be essentially institutional actions, madepossible by the very rules of the promising convention. Similarly,promissory obligations are a kind of institutional obligation, onethat attends those already bound by the institution. And ultimately,the normative force of the individual promises is grounded in thevalue of the convention as a whole. See the Promises and Speech acts (section 6.1) below for further information.

2.3 Hybrid Theories

By the late twentieth century, outside of the legal academy, this sortof dual conventionalism was the dominant view among theorists who tookup these issues. Thomas Scanlon’s influential work propoundingan expectational view of promises, takes this tradition as itstarget.

In “Promises and Practices” (1990), Scanlon argued that(among other things) the conventional view gets the harm of breaking apromise wrong. On the conventional view, when someone breaks apromise, they harm the convention of promising as a whole, and byextension, all those who rely on it. But this clashes with our firmintuition that a broken promise harms primarily the jiltedpromisee.

One possible response to this open to a conventionalist is to movetowards a “hybrid” theory, one that invokes the conventionto explain the source of the trust of the promisee, but explains theharm done in breaking a promise (and thus the ground of the obligationto keep one) as one of betraying that trust as per the expectationalview

This is roughly the route that Kolodny and Wallace take in theirproposal for an expectational/conventional hybrid sort of theory inresponse to Scanlon, in a piece called “Promises and PracticesRevisited” (2003). They argue there that the two different sortsof principles would satisfy two different demands—the appeal tothe convention would explain the moral obligation, while the appeal toexpectations would account for the directed wrongness ofpromise-breaking.

We can understand this move as a conscious return to the bifurcatedconventionalism of Hobbes and Hume, save in this case the view isontologically conventional, but normatively expectational, as opposedto a natural law/normative power hybrid of Hobbes.

This hybrid proposal, and the criticisms that prompted it, have alsospawned a growing discussion among theorists (see Cureton 2015;Shockley 2008; Roth 2016; van Roojen 2013; and Melenovsky 2017, amongothers).

3. Expectation Theory

As just mentioned, another approach to promissory obligations is anappeal to the expectations that promises create in their promisees.Theories of this sort claim that promises are designed to invokeexpectations of performance in the promisee, and that the betrayal ofthose expectations is the wrong in breaking a promise, and thus thesource of the promissory obligation.

Expectational approaches were initially adopted by consequentialistslike Bentham (A Comment on the Commentaries, 1-1-6), Sidgwick(The Methods of Ethics, 3–6), Narveson (1967, 1971),Singer (1972), and Árdal (1968, 1976). But in the past 50 yearsmany theorists with other normative frameworks have also put forwardsuch views, e.g., McNeilly (1972), MacCormick (1972), Anscombe (1981:Ch. 1), Thomson (1990: Ch. 12), T. M. Scanlon (1990, 1999: Ch. 7),Foot (2001: Ch. 1), and Friederich and Southwood (2011).

We can distinguish (along with Friederich & Southwood [2009,2011], among others) between three sorts of expectational theories onthe basis of what they propose is required on the part of the promiseeto incur the obligation. The three candidates are assurance, relianceand trust.

3.1 Assurance

Assurance views require that the promisee seek and care for thepromisor’s assurance of performance. In other words, thepromisee must want to be assured of the fact of the promisor’spromissory fulfillment. The paradigm of this sort of view isScanlon’s (1990, 1998)

Scanlon claims that promissory obligations derive from another sort ofmore basic moral obligations, specifically obligations not to“unfairly manipulate” others. One has a moral duty to keepone’s promises because making a promise will lead others tobelieve that you will do what you promise. Breaking the promise isthen tantamount to deceiving those one promised, and since one has amoral duty not to do this, one has a moral duty to keep one’spromises.

Scanlon’s principle governing a promise’s generation of anobligation (the Principle of Fidelity, or Principle F) is:

Principle F: If (1)A voluntarily and intentionallyleadsB to expect thatA will doX (unlessB consents toA’s not doing so); (2)A knows thatB wants to be assured of this; (3)A acts with the aim of providing this assurance, and has goodreason to believe that he or she has done so; (4)B knowsthatA has the intentions and beliefs just described; (5)A intends forB to know this, and knows thatB does know it; (6)B knows thatA has thisknowledge and intent, then, in the absence of special justification,A must doX unlessB consents toX’s not being done. (Scanlon 1998: 304)

Principle F is reasonable (i.e., a real moral principle with normativeforce) because the reasons potential promisees have not to be deceivedoutweigh the reasons potential promisors have to deceive.

On Scanlon’s view, it is enough that the promisee come toreasonably believe in the promisor’s fulfillment for a breach tobe a wrong. The promisee need not suffer a loss, other than byepistemic disappointment, to be wronged.

3.2 Reliance

A more demanding requirement is that a promisee must in fact sufferfrom some loss or harm in order for a wrong to have occurred, and thisis what another expectational tradition, reliance views, propose. Theparadigm of a contemporary reliance view is Thomson’s(1990).

For Thomson, a promise is an invitation to rely on thepromisor’s performance, where that means expect and plan aroundthat future performance, and not merely come to believe or expectit.

Something like a reliance understanding of promises plausiblyunderlies the private law doctrine of “consideration”,which indemnifies promisees for costs incurred as a result of suchreliance (seePromise and Contract section 6.2 below).

3.3 Trust

The third sort of expectational view, trust views, explain promises asinvitations to trust, where that concept is subtly different andsomewhat more demanding than expectation or reliance. Friederich andSouthwood (2011) pioneer this approach:

At the heart of the Trust View is the idea of invitingsomeone totrust one to do something. To explicate this idea, consider firstwhat it means for someone totrust one to do something. orsomeone to trust one to do something she must have a certainfaith oroptimism in one’s character insofaras one’s doing it is concerned. (Friederich & Southwood2011: 278)

Further, the trusting relation requires that the promised acttypically be important to and desired by the promisee. So on the trustview, promises are simultaneously invitations to trust in thepromisor’s execution and acknowledgments of the importance andvalue of the promised act, as well as the other moral characteristicsintegral to the trusting relation. Promissory obligations are formedon the basis of the acceptance, or “uptake”, in thejargon, of these invitations to trust.

All three sorts of expectation theory employ a condition of promissoryuptake, as mentioned above. This has led to a separate set ofdiscussions among scholars as to the nature of this condition.

There are a number of criticisms and objections in the literature tothe expectational approach to promissory obligations. One group ofproblems revolves around the claim that by making promises out to bemerely expectation-producing mechanisms, expectationalists collapsethe distinction between promising and other things, like advising,warning and threatening (see Raz 1972; Peetz 1977; see alsoÁrdal 1979, in response).

Adjunct to these problems is the charge that the expectationalistcan’t explain why promissory expectations produce obligations,in a way that other expectations don’t (see Raz 1972; Owens2006). Elinor Mason, in a recent article on Scanlon’s theoryargues in favor of the collapse, claiming that promises are just onesort of inducement to trust, and the harm of breaking a promise isexactly the harm of misleading that might be performed by lying orotherwise deceiving (Mason 2005).

Another traditional problem for expectational views is a charge ofcircularity (see Robins 1976; Prichard 1949; Warnock 1971). Theproblem is this: When I promise someone to do something then, if allgoes well, as a result of my promise they come to trust that I will dothat thing. But this trust, on the expectational view, is the sourceof my obligation to do what I promise. So it seems that the trust ofmy promisee is both the cause and the effect of my promise, and thisseems an unacceptable circle. The problem is best framed in epistemicterms, as one of the reason that a promisee has to trust a promisor.The intuitively obvious reason for the trust a promisee has is thatthe promisor has promised, and as such has placed herself under amoral obligation to do the deed. This belief, combined with beliefsabout the moral rectitude of the promisor, give the promisee a soundreason to believe that the promisor will keep her promise. The problemfor the expectational view is that the promisee, on such a view,can’t rely on the fact of the promissory obligation as a reasonto trust, since on this view that obligation rests on the prior factof the trust itself. If the trust of the promisor is the ground of themoral obligation to keep a promise, then prior to the promisee comingto trust the promisor, no such obligation exists. So when the promiseegoes searching for a reason to trust, the standard one is barred fromconsideration.

Moreover, if an expectationalist aims to offer a theory that explainspromissory obligation without the invocation of a convention orpractice of promising (like Scanlon does), then the other standardroute to explaining promise trust is blocked. If there is a conventionin place that governs promises, and if that convention is such as toinspire confidence in promisees that promisors will keep theirpromises, then promises can be said to generate the necessaryexpectations. But such a view is incompatible with the claim thatconventions aren’t necessary to explain promissory obligations.These objections are pressed against Scanlon’s theory by N.Kolodny and R. J. Wallace (2003).

Another traditional set of problems with the expectational approach istheir difficulty in handling cases where the expectations thatnormally attend a promise are lacking. The Desert Island/Deathbedcases are one such problem, where the expectations are lacking becausethe promisee is dead. Scanlon discusses another sort of case, theProfligate Pal (Scanlon 1998: 312) where the promisee fails to havethe standard expectations because the promisor (the profligate pal)has made and broken too many promises in the past. In such casesexpectationalists must either admit that there is no obligation tokeep the promise, which seems very counterintuitive, or come up withsome reason for the obligation apart from the fact that the promisecreated expectations in the promisee. See the section coveringpromises to the dead [§5.1], for more information.

4. Interpersonal Commitments

In the last twenty years a new sort of theory of promissoryobligations has emerged. This approach makes promissory obligationsout to be one of a number ofSui Generis obligations (andother normative phenomena) that arise from interpersonal exchange. Thetwo pre-eminent views are those of Stephen Darwall (2006, 2009, 2011)and Margaret Gilbert (1993, 2011, 2013).

4.1 Joint Commitment

Gilbert’s theory, sketched in her “Three Dogmas aboutPromising” (2011) makes promissory obligations a matter of“joint commitment”, jointly made by two or more parties.Whereas a personal decision is a personal commitment, a promise is ajoint commitment of promisor and promisee. More fully a promise is ajoint commitment to endorse as a body a plan such that one person (thepromisor) do such and such, where a joint commitment is not composedof two or more personal commitment (in Gilbert's sense) though each ofthe parties is committed through it:

A joint commitment is not a composite of two or more personalcommitments. It is a commitment of two or more persons by two or morepersons. [. . . .]  In order to create a new joint commitmenteach of the would-be parties must openly express to the others hisreadiness together with the others to commit them all in the pertinentway. Once these expressions are common knowledge between the parties,the joint commitment is in place—as they understand. Each istherefore now committed to do what he can to promote satisfaction ofthe joint commitment in conjunction with the actions of the rest.(Gilbert 2011: 92–3)

Gilbert’s work has spurred a number of commentators, and thereis a vibrant sub-literature on her theories and related matters, seeSheehy (2002), Carassa & Colombetti, (2014), Melenovsky (2017),Helmreich (2018), Kenessey (2020, among others

4.2 Second Personal

Stephen Darwall’s view makes promissory obligations out to be aspecies of what he has called “second-personal” normativephenomena. Second-personal phenomena are many and varied, and Darwallplaces promises in the category of “transactions”, whichare a group, including contracts and other mutual arrangements, inwhich the basic second-personal authority (i.e., the power we have to“make claims and demands on one another”) generatesobligations to perform what is outlined in the transaction. Thissecond-personal authority is in turn a normative basic, and Darwallargues that this sort of authority is necessarily assumed in all casesof agreed-upon arrangement.

Darwall assumes that transactions can engender obligations without anexplicit “agreement”. As an example of this he citesaccepting an invitation. As well Darwall’s second-personalauthority story gives rise to explicitly moral obligations, throughthe mechanism of contractualism: roughly, the sort of authority wehave to enter agreements is the sort necessary to ground ahypothetical contractualism of the Scanlonian sort.

To begin with the most obvious point, promises are always to someperson or persons. There must be a promisee who is given by virtue ofthe promise an ensemble of rights and prerogatives she would otherwisenot have had. But it is also important, as I shall be arguingpresently is true of all transactions, that it is part of the veryidea of a promise that thepromisee already has some rightsand prerogatives (hence some (second-personal) authority to makeclaims and demands) with respect to the promisor, as indeed withrespect to every other person, independently of the promise. Inparticular, the (would be) promisee has the authority to refuse toaccept a promise. A promise’s existence is conditional on itsacceptance (or at least not being rejected) by the promisee. I simplycannot make a promise to you if you refuse to accept it.

In this way, a promise is like a gift; it must be accepted or notrejected to be given at all. Otherwise, I will have no more than triedto promise (or give a gift). Various other rights and prerogativesderive from the would-be promisee’s authority to reject thepromise. Just as it is part of the very idea of a gift that it cannotbe forced on someone, so also does a would-be promisee have standingto demand that he be genuinely free to reject it—that hisacceptance not be forced, manipulated, extracted by deception, and soon. (Darwall, 2011: 269–70)

Darwall’s work has also led to a new sub-section of theliterature, see Watson (2007), Korsgaard (2007), Carassa &Colombetti (2014), Zylberman (2014), Schofield (2014), Dougherty(2015), Kenessey (2020), Roth (2021) among others.

5. Issues in Promissory Theory

There are also a number of theoretical issues in promissory theorythat have garnered significant attention from philosophers of late. Apartial list of these below, along with some pointers to the relevantliterature:

5.1 Problematic Promisees and the Uptake Condition

One source of discussion are the issues surrounding promisees that aresomehow different from the paradigm promisee. The paradigm promisee isaware of the promise, acknowledges and confirms the promissoryarrangement, welcomes or at least doesn’t spurn the promised actand expects and/or relies on its execution or the subsequent state ofaffairs. In the literature these are called “uptake”conditions (the term was coined by Thomson [1990: 301]).

Most promissory theories employ some sort of uptake condition, fordifferent reason (see Liberto 2018) with expectational theoriesgenerally having the more demanding ones. But not all plausiblepromisees can satisfy these conditions. These are problematicpromisees, cases where a promise to them seems intuitively valid, butthe promisee fails to satisfy the uptake condition.

A paradigm example of such problematic cases are promises to the deador dying, since those promisees can’t be disappointed or harmed.That is, unless one subscribes to the view that the dead can beharmed, and whether or not this is even possible is a question thatthinkers have also spent some time on (see Boonin 2019, for a surveyof the philosophical literature here). Like promises to the self,promises to the dead are a commonplace in both prose and poetry takeJane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or JStafford’s The Cremation of Sam McGee

One such sort of case that arose in the mid-twentieth century is theso-called “Desert Island” case, where a promise is made inisolation (on a desert island) to someone who then dies. The case waswielded against act utilitarians, as an example of a sort of case thatthe expectationalist sort of views they espouse can’t answer(see Nowell-Smith 1956; Narveson 1963: 210; Cargile 1964; Narveson1967: 196–7).

But recently scholars have widened the criticism. Nick Leonard(forthcoming) argues that, like the dead and dying, promisees who failto have the standard cognitive capacity to rely on promises wouldcertainly fail the uptake condition for expectational theories. Heimagines in this role small children, or people with severe cognitivelimitations. Such promisees are intuitively owed fidelity, butexpectational promissory theories can’t accommodate thisjudgment, since the promisees don’t have the required uptake,i.e., they fail to form expectations or reliance. Further Leonardargues that joint commitment views are similarly cognitivelydemanding, requiring as they do complex and sophisticated mentalstates like mutual intentions.

Similarly James S. Taylor (2021) argues that authority views likeOwens’, that appeal to the possible exercise of power over thepromisor by the promisee, can’t accommodate dead or absentpromisees. And Hallie Liberto (2018) through a set of subtle andclever cases, argues that uptake conditions in both authority andjoint commitment views might be violated even by perfectlyparadigmatic promisees. The cases involve promisees that are eitherdelayed, absent or not yet specified at the time of the creation ofthe promissory obligation. Liberto argues that uptake has what shecall a “backward reach”, meaning that it must be able tobe satisfiedafter the promissory obligation hasattached.

Albrecht (2018), argues that these sorts of promises to the dead ormissing, to young children, to oneself, give rise to“asymmetrical” promises. On what Albrecht calls“transactional” sorts of promissory theories a promise isan exchange of rights (or authority, or whatever the specificmechanism is) which transaction occurs between independent agents. Butin certain cases, where the promisee is unable to fulfil their pat ofthe transaction, the promisor can stand in for her as a proxy. Butthis only occurs, says Albrecht, in cases where the promisor is insome way already responsible for the promisee. So, when we promise ouryoung children t, say, get them a good education, we act to accept thepromise on their part, as a proxy for them, in our role as parent, inthe same way we might receive money or other things on theirbehalf.

In another vein, A. S. Roth (2016) argues that the uptake conditionmust be understood as the promiseeintending that thepromisor perform, as opposed to “expecting” or“trusting” such. This construal allows him to respond tothe circularity worry inherent in expectational views. (see thesection coveringexpectationalism [§3.3]).

Following Scanlon, Roth analyses the circularity worry in epistemicterms, as a lack of justification for the belief in performance on thepart of the promisee. But, argues Roth, intentional beliefs, of thesort we form when we form an intention to do some act don’ttypically require epistemic justification. If I intend to take a walk,I come to believe that I will, and that belief is reasonable (ceterisparibus) without any other evidence that I will do so.

So (argues Roth) if we construe the promisee as intending that thepromisor perform the promised act, and if we take intentionsas cognitive, i.e., as partly constituted by beliefs, then we canavoid the need for justification, and thus the circularity, sincebeliefs of this sort don’t typically require justification:

By offering a sufficiently attractive invitation (which most promisesare), the promisor leads the promisee to accept. And the promiseeaccepts by intending the promisor’s action. So we have a case ofthe promisor leading the promisee to a belief (as required byPrinciple F), but not in a way that requires evidence. For, ifCognitivism is true, the expectation that comes with the intention toϕ is normally not based on evidence. […] Notice, also,that the process described is entirely compatible with the expectation(hence acceptance) being voluntary. An attractive invitation was madeand voluntarily accepted: the promisee voluntarily intends thepromisor’s action, and given Cognitivism, thereby forms theexpectation. (Roth 2016: 111)

This turn has also sparked some recent discussion, see Sharadin(2018), Shaver (2019), Dannenberg (2019), Kenessey (2020) and Lichter(2021)

5.2 Promises to the Self and the Promisee Release Condition

Another sort of problematic case that has come in for some recentattention is the case of promising oneself. The idea of the selfpromises is a commonplace, in the vernacular as well as in poetry andprose (see Migotti 2003). But how self promises might produceobligations is a difficult question to answer for many promissorytheories.

Traditionally self promises (and their counterparts, pledges,resolutions and similar commitments) have been discounted as properpromises, but there have been a number of recent attempts to vindicateself promises in the literature, and provide some positive explanationfor their normative force.

Connie Rosati, in her influential piece “The Importance of SelfPromises” (2011) argues that self promises are, rather than aperipheral phenomena, the paradigmatic instance of promising—asthey are exercises of our authority over ourselves. This idea is notwithout antecedent—R.S. Downie says something similar in his1985 “Three Accounts of Promising”, as Rosatiacknowledges. But Rosati’s account is moredeveloped—appealing to Owens-style authority and Darwall’ssecond-personal normative framework.

Jorah Dannenberg (2015), in a Neitszchean vein, argues that selfpromises are a way of solidifying our wills, protecting our valuedchoices from deterioration in the face of time and trials. And JanisSchaab (2021) argues against what she calls the“incoherence” argument against the possibility of onereleasing oneself from a promise.

A central issue in this sub-literature is this last—the problemof promisee release. This problem goes all the way back to Hobbes, whosays of self promises:

Nor is it possible for any person to be bound to himselfe ; because hethat can bind, can release; and therefore he that is bound to himselfeonely, is not bound. (Leviathan part II, ch. 26)

In cases of self promise, since the promisor is also the promisee, andso can release herself, then we are faced with Hobbes’challenge. Many authors have grappled with this puzzle—some,like Liberman (2019) move to drop the promisee release condition, andclaim that some sorts of self promise, like vows, cannot be revoked.Others, like Habib (2009) and Schaab (2021), look to accept promiseerelease and explain Hobbes’ difficulty away.

5.3 Vows, Oaths and Related Phenomena

Another set of promissory issues that has received some recentattention from scholars concerns other phenomena of what we might call“self-binding”, things like vows, oaths, pledges andresolutions. In promissory theory proper, there has been some focus onthese with the end of informing a comprehensive promissory theory, onethat might go some distance to explain these related phenomena.

5.3.1 Vows

Work on vows has occurred in different contexts, and between differentvoices, within and outside of philosophy. Wedding vows and religiousvows in particular have been the object of some recent work.

Kyle Fruh (2019) surveys the difficulties some promissory theories,and in particular expectational theories have in accommodating thesenotions, and offers that any reasonably successful theory of promiseswould likely have to explain these phenomena as well. He calls thisthe “breadth” requirement:

Oaths and vows partially fill out what I call the “breadthcriterion”: Theories of promising should cover not onlycustomary, interpersonal promises but also sibling phenomena,including oaths and vows. Promises, oaths, and vows are all forms ofvoluntary binding commitments; indeed, the terms are often usedinterchangeably. They should be taken up into theory together. Thefamiliar and powerful grounds for this intuitive idea are at leasttwofold: It is more parsimonious to have a single theory that coversthe entire family rather than developing distinct theories for each ofthe phenomena, and if there is such a theory, its explanatory powerwill compare favorably to theories that fail to cover some of thephenomena in question. A theory of promising that is silent aboutoaths and vows is one we have less reason to accept than one that canilluminate the capacity of oaths and vows to produce moralobligations. Provisionally at least, the breadth criterion should beapplied to competing theories of promising. (Fruh 2019: 859)

On vowsper se, in addition to Fruh’s work, noveltheories of the obligation of vows have been advanced by AlidaLiberman (2019), who makes vows out to be a species of resolution.

In another vein, Elizabeth Brake, in her widely read 2011 piece“Is Divorce Promise Breaking” argues that wedding vowscan’t be construed as promises, on pain of saying that divorceis promise breaking. Brake argues for this and other reasons, weddingvows shouldn’t be taken as promises at all.

Brake’s work has in turn spurred further dialogue on weddingvows as promises, see Gheaus (2017), Cowley (2020), and Liberman(2021).

5.3.2 Oaths

Like promises, oaths play a part in many different human undertakings.In politics, at least among democracies, oaths of office for those inpositions of power are the norm. In the professions oaths like theHippocratic oath sworn by doctors, are also very common. In cases oftestimony in court, testimonial oaths are standard, and witnesses areasked to swear oaths of veracity for their affidavits or othertestimony.

Traditionally oaths were understood as a separate species ofobligation-producing commitment, a “calling to witness” ofGod to bolster a claim to veracity on the part of the swearer.Aquinas, for example divides them into four types: Calls to witnesstruths of the past or present, which he calls declaratory oaths, andclaims of some future conduct, which are promissory oaths. Further,oaths can be either simple invitations to witnessings, which aresimply oaths, or they can be invitations to punish the swearer fordefault, which are curses:

[O]aths are taken for the purpose of confirmation. Now speculativepropositions receive confirmation from reason, which proceeds fromprinciples known naturally and infallibly true. But particularcontingent facts regarding man cannot be confirmed by a necessaryreason, wherefore propositions regarding such things are wont to beconfirmed by witnesses. Now a human witness does not suffice toconfirm such matters for two reasons. First, on account of man’slack of truth, for many give way to lying, according to Ps. 16:10,“Their mouth hath spoken lies [Vulg.:‘proudly’]”. Secondly, on account of [his] lack ofknowledge, since he can know neither the future, nor secret thoughts,nor distant things: and yet men speak about such things, and oureveryday life requires that we should have some certitude about them.Hence the need to have recourse to a Divine witness, for neither canGod lie, nor is anything hidden from Him. Now to call God to witnessis namedjurare (to swear) because it is established asthough it were a principle of law (jure) that what a manasserts under the invocation of God as His witness should be acceptedas true. Now sometimes God is called to witness when we assert presentor past events, and this is termed a “declaratory oath”;while sometimes God is called to witness in confirmation of somethingfuture, and this is termed a “promissory oath”. But oathsare not employed in order to substantiate necessary matters, and suchas come under the investigation of reason; for it would seem absurd ina scientific discussion to wish to prove one’s point by an oath.(Summa II-II q.89-Art. i)

A person is called to give witness, in order that he may make knownthe truth about what is alleged. Now there are two ways in which Godmakes known whether the alleged facts are true or not. In one way Hereveals the truth simply, either by inward inspiration, or byunveiling the facts, namely, by making public what was hithertosecret: in another way by punishing the lying witness, and then He isat once judge and witness, since by punishing the liar He makes knownhis lie. Hence oaths are of two kinds: one is a simple contestation ofGod, as when a man says “God is my witness”, or, “Ispeak before God”, or, “By God”, which has the samemeaning, as Augustine states [*See argument On the contrary]; theother is by cursing, and consists in a man binding himself orsomething of his to punishment if what is alleged be not true.(ibid., Reply Obj. 3)

So oaths are ways of bolstering one’s claim to veracity bycalling on God to witness your claim. If your claim is about yourfuture conduct, then the oath can be understood as a promise, with Godas the promisee. You can invite god to witness alone, on the tacitunderstanding that he sees and knows all and will take account, or youcan invite him to punish you for falsity directly, e.g “May Godstrike me down” or “God blind me”(“blimey”).

Recent philosophical work has tended to recapitulate this analysis,absent the divine promisee. This broadens the appeal, certainly, butit means a substantial change in the nature of the grounding of theobligation.

Thomas Scanlon, in his influential 1990 piece “Promises andPractices”, is an example of this. Scanlon offers roughly thesame meaning of the term, and rehearses the Thomistic distinctionsbetween testamentary and promissory oaths, but he makes oaths out tobe not invitations to witness or punish, but rather invocations ofimportant or sacred objects or ideas:

In an oath a person says, in support of a claim to be telling thetruth or to have a sincere and reliable intention to do a certainthing, “I swear to you by …”, naming here somethingto which he or she is assumed to attach great value, such as God, theBible, or the memory of a loved one. It is not necessary that thevalue appealed to involve a code of honor or convention oftruth-telling. What is claimed is simply that the speaker’ssincerity in making the present claim is comparable to the sincerityof his or her devotion to the value named. It would cheapen such avalue, and hence be incompatible with true devotion to it, to invokeit for personal advantage in support of an insincere claim. Of course,some think that it is incompatible with holding something sacred toinvoke it in sup port of any claim, which is why some religions forbidthe use of holy texts or the name of God in this way. (Scanlon 1990:223)

This move allows the analysis to survive the removal of God as apromisee, but subtly substitutes the receiver of the vow (“Iswear toyou…”) in its place.

Fruh (2019) resists this move, and disputes the understanding of oathsas “directed” toward a counterparty. He argues at somelength against the plausibility of various candidate counterparties(promisees) for standard oaths. Rather, for Fruh oaths should beunderstood as asui generis form of voluntary obligation,different from promises and vows in that it is without a“counterparty”. Liberman (2021) instead argues that oathand vows should be understood as “exceptionlessresolutions”, both without counterparty, and both different thantraditional promise.

5.4 Promissory Reasons

Another set of issues that have been discussed in the literature wemight call issues of promissory psychology. These are issuesconcerning the mental states of promisors and promisees, and the rolethese play in producing, explaining or justifying promissoryobligations. The main focus is on promissory reasons.

What reasons do promisors have to keep promises? How do thesepromissory come about and how do they function? How strong are they,and what, if any, reasons may override them? These are just some ofthe most common questions in this area, and the literature on them isquite large, too large to adequately survey here, so I will just notesome important foci. Of particular interest are the answers to thesequestions provided by Joseph Raz (1975, 1982, 1986, 2012).

Raz proposes a system of practical rationality with two sorts ofreasons, of first and second order. First order reasons are reason foror against courses of action, while second order reasons are reasonsabout reasons themselves. Exclusionary reasons are second orderreasons that exclude other, first order reasons. Promises, says Raz,produce (in the promisor) both first order reasons to perform thepromised act as well as second order exclusionary reasons to bar fromconsiderations most first order reasons that counsel against keepingthe promise.

Let us say that a person doesA for the reason thatp if and only if he doesA because he believes thatp is a reason for him to doA. A person refrainsfrom doingA for the reason thatp if and only if itis not the case that he doesA for the reason thatp. In other words a person refrains from acting for a reasonif he does not do the act or does it but not for this reason.“Refrains” is used here in an extended sense which doesnot imply that the agent intentionally avoids acting for the reason. Asecond order reason is any reason to act for a reason or to refrainfrom acting for a reason. An exclusionary reason is a second orderreason to refrain from acting for some reason. (Raz 1975: 487)

Moreover, on the Razian picture exclusionary reasons are“content independent” reasons. This is the notion(original with Hart [1958, 1982] cited in Sciaraffa 2009) that areason for action is independent of the “content” or“nature” of the action they implicate:

There is a vibrant literature, spanning many decades, engaging withRaz’s intriguing suggestions. see Sciaraffa (2009) for a surveyof some of the earlier literature on this. More recent work can befound in McBride (2015), MacMahon (2018), Molina (2019), Murphy(2020), Kimel (forthcoming), and others. Much of this work is in legaltheory, on the philosophical underpinnings of private law.

6. Promises and Other Fields

In addition to the various positive theories of promising, there arealso several other issues of philosophical interest concerning theintersection of promissory theory and other fields or theoreticalframeworks. In the following sections I try and outline some of these,and provide some guides to the literature.

6.1 Promises and Speech Acts

Promises have often been cast as speech acts, or actions that weperform by speaking. Thelocus classicus for this issue is J.L. Austin’s 1962 bookHow to Do Things with Words. Init Austin defines two sorts of speech acts, or“performatives”: illocutions and perlocutions. Illocutionsare those actions that we perform by uttering the words alone. Austinlists requesting, warning and announcing as examples. Alternatively,perlocutions are actions performed by speaking which require someparticulareffect of the speech in order to be successful.Austin cites persuading, explaining and alarming as examples of thelatter sort of locution.

Austin takes promising to be an illocutionary act, that is, he takesit that promising ismerely a matter of a certain form ofutterance, under certain conditions. Moreover the reason he takes thisto be is that he thinks that promising is aconventional act,one that invokes a certain practice to formalize the action. Austinthinks that in this way promises are just of a piece with many sortsof obligation-producing actions, such as betting, buying andcontracting (Austin 1962 [1975: 19])

Austin’s linguistic distinction mirrors the crucial differencebetween the expectational and conventional theories of promising. Onthe conventionalist view that Austin adopts, promises are“conventional” moves in the game, and as such one promisesby “making the right moves”, i.e., saying the right sortsof things and otherwise obeying the rules of the game.

Searle, taking up the speech-act framework pioneered by J. L.Austin—similarly makes promises out to be a particular form ofspeech act—(see Searle 1963, 1965, 1965, 1979) a non-verbalaction affected by speech, of a piece with “ordering” and“agreeing”. Searle, like Austin, is a paradigmaticconventionalist his work has been widely influential, and has helpedto grow the literature on both promises and speech act theory (cf.Searle et al. 1980,inter alia)

The investigation of promises as speech acts is furthered in the workof Rawls (1955), William Alston (1964, 1994), John Searle (1963, 1965,1979, 1980, 1985), David Jones (1966), Otto Hanfling (1975), andMichael Pratt (2003, 2007), Christina Corredor (2001), and VincentBlok (2013) among others. See Harris and McKinney (2021) for acontemporary survey

6.2 Promise, Contracts and the Law

The relationship between the law, contracts and promises is a long andtangled one. From its ancient origins promissory theory has beenintertwined with issues of contracts and agreements more generally.And since at least the time of Aquinas and especially with the worksof the later Natural Lawyers like Grotius and Pufendorf, scholarlywork on promising has been done at least in part with an eye towardsinforming the law of contract. This in turn gave rise to a traditionon the part of legal theorists of surveying such scholarship in theirwork on both historical and contemporary issues in the law ofcontract. Finally, the law itself has methods for dealing withpromises (as they are obviously the sorts of things that might lead tolegal wrangling). Thus the legal practice regarding promises has someinterest to theorists of promising as well. The result is twointerlinked scholarly traditions and bodies of work.

Perhaps the first question on the mind of legal and philosophicalhistorians is the issue of the degree to which, if any, contractualobligations are grounded in promissory obligations in contemporarylegal regimes. This question is complicated by the differenttraditions and cultures involved in the long path to contemporary law,i.e., natural law theory, virtue theory, rights theory, the (anglo)common law, the continental civilian law, canon law and othertheoretical approaches, which are in turn variously situated in theUK, on the European continent, and in the anglo territories (Scotland,Australia, Canada the US, etc.). The answer to the question isdifferent in different traditions and places, and the contemporary lawis the result of some complicated amalgamation of these differenttraditions over time. For an overview of these issues, see, e.g.,Gordley (1991), Ibbetson (1999), Markovits (2011), Swain (2013), orFried (1981, 2015).

One central dialectic within this corpus has the “normativepower” tradition of the natural lawyers pitted against the moreexpectational views of the English common law. As Atiyah notes (1981:ch. 6), there is a tension between the Natural Law promissory theoryand the actual law of contract and promise plainly evident in theBritish common law. One source of the tension is the common lawdoctrine of “consideration”, which mandates that onlypromises given with “consideration”, i.e., given inexchange for something of value, are enforceable in the law. In otherwords, mere promises, given without consideration, are traditionallynot indemnified by the law.

Further, as Lon Fuller and William Perdue pointed out in aninfluential 1936/37 article “The Reliance Interest in ContractDamages”, the damages awarded by courts to those who have had apromise or contract broken is best understood as being proportional tothe harm the plaintiff suffered in relying on the promise. These andother considerations argue for a theory of promises based onexpectations and reliance, i.e., an expectational theory, as opposedto one based on conventions or natural duties, and this is what anumber of philosophers and legal theorists have done. This debate hasspawned a sizable literature (see Swain 2013 for a good overview ofthis work).

Charles Fried’s widely influential bookContract asPromise (1981) re-kindled this debate in American legal circles.Fried argued that the traditional approach, which made contractualobligation out to be grounded in promissory obligation, was slowlybeing usurped by the consequentialist-flavored approaches of theEnglish common law, and he aimed his book as a polemic against thismovement.

Fried took on these arguments directly, and the corpus of work thatsprang from the book greatly enlarged the debate. In 2012 a specialconference and subsequent issue of the Suffolk University Law Reviewrevisited Fried’s work, 30 years on. This new corpus of workprovides us with some interesting new explorations. As an example ofthis, see Brian Bix’s assessment in his essay (2012). Subsequentto this Fried released an updated version of the book in 2015, whichin turn has spawned a more recent literature (see Markovits 2020;Saprai 2013; Bix 2017; Encarnacion 2018)

And the legal academy continues to work on the relation between theconcepts and the theoretical foundations of contract law, withscholars like Markovits (2011), Shiffrin (2006, 2012), Pratt (2007,2014) Encarnacion (2018), Saprai (2017) and many others contributing.For an excellent overview of the theoretical work see the SEP entry oncontract law.

6.3 Promises and Consequentialism

Consequentialism has always had a fraught relationship with promisesand promissory obligation. It has been a traditional challenge toconsequentialist views, particularly earlier, act-based forms, toexplain promissory obligations, as they aren’t necessarily“felicific”, or productive of the most good. Of course,not all consequentialist views are of this sort.

Consequentialist theories of promissory obligation fall into two broadcamps: Act utilitarians are expectationalists—generally explainpromissory obligations as arising from the negative consequences ofbreaking the promise. Rule utilitarians are conventionalists, anddefend promissory obligations on the grounds that the rule ofpromise-keeping is productive of the best consequences.

6.3.1 Act Utilitarianism

Act utilitarians evaluate individual actions in light of the netutility produced by that action as compared to alternative actions.The right action is that which promotes the maximum net utility. Onthe face of it, this entirely general and comprehensive maxim leavesno room for considerations of prior promise. The fact that an agentpromised someone something has no direct relevance to an actconsequentialist appraisal of that agent’s action at the timethe promise is meant to be kept. If breaking the promise would promotemore utility than keeping it, then the theory seems to mandatebreaking the promise.

This counter-intuitive result has been offered as a criticism of actutilitarianism since its inception. That act utilitarians havedifficulty in accounting for the force of promises is a touchstone forcritics (see Prichard 1949; Ross 1930; Hodgson 1967).

But act utilitarians do have some resources to accommodate our moralintuitions about promises, and the sort of theory they employ is heldby more than just utilitarians .The act utilitarian explanation forpromissory obligations is that these obligations arise from thenegative consequences that attend the breaking of promises, wherethese negative consequences are, at least in part, created by theeffects of the promise on the promisee, specifically, the creation inthe promisee of the expectation that the promisor will keep herpromise. A sample list of utilitarianism that have either offered ordefended such a view: Bentham (A Comment on the Commentaries,1-1-6), Sidgwick (The Methods of Ethics, 1874 [1962:3–6]), Narveson (1967, 1971), Singer (1972), and Árdal(1968, 1976).

In support of this picture utilitarians argue that promises are thesorts of things which are generally made because the promisee wantsthe thing promised, and so wants to be assured of getting it. Since apromise is designed to secure his trust, and that trust is then likelyto be the source of much pain if it’s disappointed, it’sreasonable to assume that in most cases keeping one’s promisewill be productive of better consequences than breaking them, giventhe expectations of the promisee. And there are other potentialnegative consequences of breaking a promise (e.g., the loss of trustby one’s familiars, the general erosion of trust in the practiceof promises) that utilitarians can add to the negative side of theledger. For an astute philosophical survey of Act Utilitarianapproaches to promising see Atiyah (1981: 30–79), also Robins(1984: 140–143) and Vitek (1993: 61–70).

As mentioned above, the standard critique of the act utilitariantheory of promissory obligations is that it doesn’t accord withour intuitive judgment that at least some promises that don’tproduce the maximum utility still ought to be kept. In claiming thatutilitarianism has unacceptably counter-intuitive results in certaincases, this argument it is of a piece with most arguments against theview. One sort of counter-intuitive case that has received someattention is the so-called “Desert Island” case, where apromise is made in isolation (on a desert island) to someone who thendies. The question is whether there is any obligation to keep thepromise, given that the promisee can’t have any expectations ofits fulfillment (being dead) and that no-one else can know of thepromise (see Nowell-Smith 1956; Narveson 1963: 210; Cargile 1964;Narveson 1967: 196–7). See the section onProblematic Promisees and the Uptake Condition (§5.1] above for more information.

A more sophisticated problem outlined by Hodgson (1967: 38) and othersis that a promising convention is broadly speaking incompatible withan act utilitarian society. This is so because such a conventioncouldn’t get established (or couldn’t be sustained) ifpeople were aware that everyone was a consistent utility maximizer ofthe act utilitarian sort. If this were the case people would put nostock in promises, knowing that when the time came to keep thepromise, the promisor would simply apply the utilitarian calculus,without regard to the fact that he had previously“promised”, as this is what being an act utilitarianmeans.

Note that the utilitarian cannot reply that we have failed to takeinto account the expectations of the promisee in our case, because theclaim is that the promisee has no reason to generate any specialexpectations that the promisor will do what she promises, preciselybecause he knows the promisor to be an act utilitarian, andconsequently knows that she will do what the utility calculus tellsher is best, without thought of her promise. Of course, the promiseeis free to generate some expectations that the promisor will keep herpromise on the assumption that her promise is indicative of her atleast having the (present) intention to perform the promised act. But,as Raz (1972), Kolodny and Wallace (2003) and others point out, theadvising of the promisee of one’s mere intention to do thepromised act is insufficient ground for the sorts of expectations thatare meant to attend promises.

More recently there have been some efforts to rehabilitate actutilitarianism with regards to promissory obligations. Some theorists,like Michael Smith (1994, 2011), propose that sophisticating thetheory with the addition of other values might allow it to accommodate“agent-relative” values like promise keeping (M. Smith2011: 208–215).

Others, like Alastair Norcross, offer a negative defense, arguing thatthe sorts of counter-examples generally adduced to demonstrate theproblem don’t survive scrutiny (Norcross 2011). Norcross alsoproposes an indirect form of consequentialism, one where the decisionprocedure consciously adopted by agents isn’t the same as theoryitself. This sort of approach is outlined by Peter Railton (1984).

6.3.2 Rule Utilitarianism

The sorts of difficulties that promises pose for act utilitariantheories discussed above are at least in part the motivation for ruleutilitarianism (see Rawls 1955 and Brandt 1979: 286–305). Ruleutilitarians change the context of moral evaluation from individualacts to rules governing actions. The principle of utility is appliedto rules and practices, rather than individual acts, and the best ruleor practice is that produces the best over-all consequences. Somenotable rule utilitarians are Urmson (1953), Brandt (1959, 1979), andHooker (2000, 2011).

Of special note here is Rawls’ 1955 paper we discussed above inthe context of conventionalism, “Two Concepts of Rules”,which advanced a rule-utilitarian defense of promissory obligationsand helped to focus the debate on promising By changing the focus fromact to rule, rule utilitarians are better able to explain our moralintuitions regarding individual cases of promise-keeping. But inparticular, rule utilitarians claim that their theory can make senseof the origin and maintenance of the practice of promising itself.Unlike an act utilitarian society, promising and trusting in promisesmakes sense in a rule utilitarian society, because promisees can restassured that promisors won’t do the local utility calculation todetermine whether or not to keep their promises, but rather will obeythe rule of promising.

One problem for the rule utilitarian theory of promissory obligationsis that it seems that utilitarian society couldn’t establish apractice of promising, because prior to the establishment of the rule,people could have no expectations that promises would be kept. Assuch, those receiving the first promises would not be able to form theexpectations necessary to make the rule actually productive of thebest consequences. This is so because the consequential value of therule of promise keeping depends on the expectations of promisees. Suchexpectations are the grounds of trust, and trust is how promisinggenerates its benefits (see Robins 1984: 142–3). In response,Brandt argues for what he callsideal rule utilitarianism,which makes the frame of reference for rule consideration not theactual rules available, but the ideal rule, i.e., the rule that wouldbe optimific (productive of the best possible consequences), were itemployed. There is substantial criticism of this move (see Diggs1970). Again, an excellent (although now dated) survey of therule-utilitarian approach to promising is found in Atiyah (1981:79–86).

Since the turn of the century Brad Hooker has offered newer versionsof Brandt-style rule-utilitarianism (he calls itrule-consequentialism) (2000, 2011) with an eye towards solving thesesorts of problems. This work has in turn spawned another chapter inthis literature (see Eggleston 2007; Arneson 2005; Wall 2009; Cureton2015).

And work continues on these issues, see Sinnott-Armstrong (2009), Gill(2012), Melenovsky (2017). For an excellent contemporary survey ofthis issue, see Alida Liberman’s “Consequentialism andPromises” in theOxford Handbook of Consequentialism(2020).

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