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Speaker: Seana Shiffrin, Professor of Philosophy, University of California Los Angeles
Summary by Amalia Amaya Navarro, Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellow in Ethics
How is it possible just through a statement to will into existence an obligation? The main problem about promising is a metaphysical puzzle. The idea that an agent can intentionally form an obligation only through the mere expression of her will alone has been thought to be puzzling. Conventionalism purports to offer a solution to this metaphysical puzzle. The conventionalist position involves two claims. First, the view that the moral bindingness of promises is not morally fundamental, but rather depends upon some other moral obligation. And second, the position that the other moral obligation that is at the foundation is activated only by contingency, by the happenstance that a social custom of promising has developed, the details of which are also socially contingent.
In this lecture, Prof. Shiffrin shed doubts about whether there is anything perplexing about the purported metaphysical puzzle, and called into question the conventionalist account of promising. Instead, she pursued an alternative relational account of promising according to which the bindingness of promises does not depend upon social conventions but it is something about the relationship between the promisor and the promisee that gives rise to the bindingness of promises. More specifically, her claim is that the ability to make binding promises derives from being an autonomous agent. In her view, this ability is an integral part of the ability to engage in special relationship under conditions of equal respect. Agents, she claimed, could not enjoy a meaningful form of autonomy, in relation to others, without the power to promise.
Prof. Shiffrin developed her argument in three steps. First, she discussed the subject of consent and its relationship to the metaphysical puzzle. Second, she articulated and defended some neglected desiderata for a moral account of promising. And last, she elaborated an argument about promising that parallels her argument about consent.
(i) Consent and the Metaphysical Puzzle
Those who have felt the magnetism of the metaphysical puzzle often represent promising as having a singular form. On this view, other obligations arises from events and state of affairs that have a moral significance independent of the agent's will to be so bound. By contrast, promises have been seen as peculiar entities because it is only through the mere expression of an individual's will to alter her moral status with respect to another that an obligation is intentionally created. However, Prof. Shiffrin argued, promising is not singular in this respect as those in the grip of the metaphysical puzzle have it. She considered the subject of consent and argued that, like with promises, consent also reconfigures the moral landscape of permissions and obligations through the mere transmission of the intention to do so and without altering the independently describable state of affairs. Yet, unlike the case of promises, this has seemed unexceptional to most commentators. Why has the ability to consent seemed so unexceptional?
Prof. Shiffrin submits that the power to consent has seemed unexceptional because it flows naturally from a plausible understanding of a meaningful right of autonomy. In her view, no plausible account of autonomy that recognized that autonomous agents must have the opportunity to interact with others could be without the power of consent. Similarly, she argues, a right of autonomy that reflects the recognition that autonomy must be exercised within a community of relationships must contain the power to make binding promises. Just as autonomy requires the ability to share or transfer through the power to consent owns sovereignty over one's body and personal spaces and property, it also requires the ability to make binding promises. Rights of autonomous control that were inalienable would render impossible real forms of meaningful human relationships, and thus they would be inconsistent with the conditions necessary to achieve full autonomy. Likewise, argued Prof. Shiffrin, the ability of engaging in meaningful, moral relationships that is necessary for full autonomy also requires that autonomous agents have the ability to make binding promises.
(ii) Desiderata
In the second part of her lecture, Prof. Shiffrin introduced and defended some desiderata for a plausible view of promising. The desiderata are as follows. First, in Prof. Shiffrin view, an account of binding promises should not depend upon what she called the promise's belief in performance, that is her belief that the promisor will actually do what is promised. Second, a binding promise need not forge or reinforce a relationship of shared ends. Thus, Prof. Shiffrin rejected the idea, which features on some accounts of promising, that promising involves the creation and pursuit of shared ends. And third, Prof. Shiffrin contended that a satisfactory account of promising should not take promises between intimates as unusual or strange. Most accounts of promising take promises between strangers to be the standard, prototypical cases around which an account of promising is built, and view promises between intimates as anomalous. In contrast, Prof. Shiffrin argued that an account of promises should treat promises between intimates as the central cases, rather than placing them at the periphery. With these desiderata in mind, Prof. Shiffrin proceeded to articulate and motivate an alternative relational account of promising.
(iii) Intimate Relationships and the Need for Promising
Prof. Shiffrin started the last part of her lecture by contrasting three different ways of opposing conventionalism. First, one may attack conventionalism directly, by attacking its central motivation, namely, the puzzle about the will and willing obligation. Prof. Shiffrin said that, while doubts may be raised -as she had mentioned before- about this puzzle, she preferred not to attack conventionalism directly in part because the purported mystery is opaque to her. A second strategy would demonstrate directly that promising could arise without recourse to convention, as Scalon does. Instead, Prof. Shiffrin proposed a third strategy, to wit, a reductio of the conventionalist story. According to the conventionalist story, promises are not among the fundamental moral elements, but rather they are conventional constructs. On this theory, promises are inventions which we could have failed to invent and still have a morally acceptable world. This is the conventionalist tenet that Prof. Shiffrin aimed at attacking. In her view, it is not plausible to imagine a morally acceptable world without promises and without the power to promise. Just as a picture of individual autonomy without consent is implausible, a conception of the social moral world without the power to promise is also unsustainable. Promises are indispensable, she argued, to special relationships, which are not thought to depend on social conventions for their existence or for their minimal moral health.
Prof. Shiffrin argued for this view on promising by way of an example. She invited the audience to consider a case – two people who are or who aim to be friends and who take each other to have equal moral standing, but who cannot (even implicitly) use the resources provided by promising. Through a lengthy and detailed analysis of this example, she aimed to demonstrate that an intimate relationship such as the one considered in the proposed case could not survive on healthy terms were the parties deprived of the power to make blinding promises. This example shows, she claimed, that we need promises. Promises – she contended – are necessary for engaging in healthy and meaningful relationships, for providing our relationships with the necessary moral background. Prof. Shiffrin concluded her lecture by considering whether her argument for the bindingness of promises undermines conventionalism. It could be argued, she said, that the most the argument shows is that we have the power to promise in order to have meaningful relations with each other, but that this is consistent with its being the case that promising is not morally elemental and that, rather, we have a duty to create a convention that creates the power to promise. At this point, she claimed, there is anything significant at stake in the dispute. For if it is conceded that there is a duty to establish a convention of promising, then much of what is distinctive of conventionalism has evaporated. Once conventionalism becomes a view about a set of practices that we are obliged to create and maintain, the urgency of determining whether conventionalism is true or false – she contended – wanes.