Abstract
Conventionalism about promising is the view that the power to make binding promises depends essentially on the existence of a social practice or convention of promising. This paper explores an objection to conventionalism that says that—(allegedly) contra conventionalism—there is no morally acceptable world in which we lack the power of promise. Instead, normative powers theorists claim that our power of promise is morally basic or necessary. I argue that the conventionalist need not deny this claim. There are several ways to develop a noncontingent conventionalism: a version of the view that can accommodate the insight that the power of promise is indispensable to morally acceptable lives. Then, I argue that the conventionalist is indeed on the hook for accommodating this insight. I wrap up by considering the state of play in the debate over conventionalism about promising. Once we note the theoretical possibility of noncontingent conventionalism, it looks like the theatre of battle shifts to the difficult question of whether “natural” morality always provides “moral necessities.”
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Notes
Hume (2007: 331–7) [Treatise 3.2.5].
Rawls (1999: 303–4).
Rawls (1999: 303–6).
Scanlon (1998: 295).
It is perhaps worth noting that no one (so far as I know) is denying that the moral obligation identified by the conventionalist is a genuine one. The worry is just that it does not exhaust the normative force of the promissory circumstance, and indeed fails to get at the most central or basic normative aspect of the promisor’s predicament.
The example is borrowed directly from Melenovsky (2017: 110). One might object that I still have an obligation to you in the second case, and not merely to your sister. That might be true, but doesn’t undermine the point that clearly the cases should be analyzed differently. It’s also not at all clear that the obligation would be a promissory one.
Though see Gilbert (2004) for some doubts.
Scanlon is aware of the problem and attempts to wriggle out of the worry by suggesting that expectations in performance can be incited through confidence in another moral principle prohibiting willful deception (1998: 306–9). While there is no doubt the move is clever, it strikes me as an open question whether it is convincing (see Kolodny and Wallace [2003: 139–44]).
Kolodny and Wallace (2003).
See Melenovsky (2017: 117–18) for a brief discussion of this point.
Raz (1977: 214).
Raz (1977: 214).
Thomson (1990: 303).
Thomson (1990: 304).
Scanlon (1998: 296–7).
Shiffrin (2008: 498) also expresses skepticism about the decisiveness of this strategy.
Shiffrin (2008: 498).
Hereafter, I will often drop the qualifier “binding” when referring to binding promises. That is, I will assume that to promise is to successfully make a promise by (roughly) deliberately performing an action that results in one’s being under a directed obligation, owed to the promisee, to perform the promised action. I will also use the phrase “the power of promise” to refer to the ability to promise in this sense. Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging clarification on this issue.
Lewis (2002)
See Lewis (2002: 76) for his analysis.
Melenovsky (2017: 106n; 2020: 6n).
Marmor (1996: 351; 2009:9).
I’m grateful to an anonymous referee for helping me fully appreciate the significance of this point.
This may be how Tognazzini thinks about things: the word “convention” never appears in his article; he speaks only of a social practice.
See de Kenessey (2020: 223) for a related discussion of the notion of assertion as a move in a socially necessary practice.
Shiffrin (2008: 482).
Shiffrin (2008: 482–83).
For a nice discussion of this issue which has significantly improved my own thoughts on the matter, see de Kenessey (2020: 223–24). De Kenessey characterizes his own view as a nonconventionalist practice theory of promising. For him, the relevant practice is the practice of joint practical deliberation (2020: 222). Promising is a specific move within this practice: the proposal of a certain joint plan of action that governs the actions of only one party (the promisor). It’s important to note, however, that in eschewing the label of “conventionalism,” de Kenessey is working with a Lewisian sense of convention, according to which a practice is convention only if it’s “one of multiple different equally good solutions to a coordination problem.”
It is worth mentioning more briefly a sort of intermediate option. Some theorists of convention deny that conventions must be arbitrary in a sense that entails viable alternative conventions. Margaret Gilbert (1992: 340–41), for example, argues that we should reject Lewis’s assumption that “it is redundant to speak of an arbitrary convention” (Lewis [2002: 70]). And Seamus Miller (2001: 112–15) argues that there are plenty of examples of conventions that do not have any conventional alternatives. I admit I am not sure whether either of these particular views will help the conventionalist about promising. I mention them only to highlight that there may be at least some room to question the idea that the claim that calling the promising practice a convention entails that there are viable alternatives to it.
Melenovsky (2020: 6n) expresses affinity for this view in a footnote, though it’s not clear how deeply or lightly held this view is since he offers no explicit discussion of the matter anywhere else. As far as I can tell, no aspect of his argument or position depends on rejecting the first option canvassed in the main text.
Naturally, in holding this position, one will be beholden to reasonable analyses of the notion of convention, since presumably it is not kosher to arbitrarily toggle the notion of arbitrariness that defines conventions.
Scanlon (1998: 316–17).
Shiffrin (2008: 486–93, 502–10).
Friedrich and Southwood (2011)
Marmor (2009: 138). Marmor, in fact, is skeptical of that the practice of promising is arbitrary even in his preferred, weaker sense of the term.
Liberto (2016)
The remarks that follow share the spirit of arguments offered by Shiffrin (2008: §II), although I develop the relevant points in a different way.
Shiffrin (2008: 502).
Here I invoke the notion of privileges in the strict, Hohfeldian sense of actions that another does not have a claim against us performing. On this interpretation of a privilege, I have a privilege to φ, held against you, even when I’m morally required to φ, so long as I do not owe it to you to φ. See Sreenivasan (2010: 478–80) for a discussion of this point.
An anonymous reviewer proposes an oath-making system as an alternative. I am skeptical that such a system offers us the important relational control robust autonomy requires, since oaths, as Kyle Fruh (2019: 860–4) argues, do not invoke a “counterparty” or, relatedly, assign claims and control to any particular counterparty. But the power to assign someone a claim and control of one’s obligations strikes me essential to the sort of morally acceptable relational control I’ve been discussing. Of course, we can imagine our oath-keeping system involves a well-known practice of indirectly generating claims and control by deliberately inciting expectations in specific counterparties. This may indeed be a morally acceptable arrangement, but strikes me as very difficult to distinguish in any principled way from a promising practice. The same reviewer also proposes a contract-like system, which only enforces breaches that involve harm to counterparties, and treats compensated breaches as no breaches at all. But this system seems to seriously circumscribe the changes we are able to make to our relationships: the choice to bind myself to performance rather than merely performance-or-compensation has considerable importance in our relationships. That the world in which we possess only the latter option is morally unacceptable is perhaps clearest when we consider the point of view of the would-be counterparties, who are denied the possibility of the more valuable claim. But it’s also clear when we consider the fact that our relational option set is objectionably constrained without the inability to bind ourselves in a way that expresses deeper respect and concern for the will of the other party.
Hume (1983: 20–34) [Enquiry §III].
Rawls (1999: 109–12).
Hume (1983: 31).
I use the term “natural” here to indicate the affinity of normative powers views with natural law views. Thus the relevant contrast with “natural” here is “conventional” or “artificial.” I do not mean to suggest anything about whether the views in question are metaethically naturalistic.
Shiffrin (2008: 499).
The possession of this status is meant to be valuable in itself, not merely for any downstream effects it might produce. As Nagel puts it, in a memorable phrase: “To be tortured would be terrible; but to be tortured and also to be someone it was not wrong to torture would be even worse” (1995: 93).
Preston-Roedder (2014)
We can construct a similar triad to structure a debate over fully appreciative conventionalism: (i) conventionalism; (ii) special moral value of promissory powers; (iii) Strong or Very Strong Rationalist Premise.
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Acknowledgment
I’m grateful to Anna Bella Sicilia for several conversations that helped me get clear on some of the issues here, and to Tom Christiano, for feedback on an early draft. Many thanks as well to two anonymous reviewers at Philosophical Studies, whose insightful comments helped make the paper much better than it otherwise would have been.
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Lichter, A. Conventionalism and contingency in promissory powers. Philos Stud 180, 1769–1792 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01948-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01948-0