Abstract
I present a novel way to think about promising: Promising as Doxastic Entrustment. The main idea is that promising is inviting another to entrust her belief to you, and that taking a promiser’s word is freely choosing to accept this invitation. I explicate this through considering the special kind of reason for belief issued by a promiser: a reason whose rational status depends both on the will of the promiser to provide it, and on the will of the promisee to accept it. Though this may seem to raise worries about believing at will, I show how such concerns can be navigated. I then argue that the view provides a rich, attractive understanding of the interpersonal bond forged through promising. According to the Doxastic Entrustment view, that bond results from freely given trust, in exchange for freely assumed responsibility for what is entrusted: namely, a bit of the promisee’s own mind.
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Notes
In this paper, the Doxastic Entrustment View is offered solely as an account of promising, construed narrowly (as most philosophers tend to construe it) to include only giving one’s word about one’s own action in the future. As will soon be evident, however, my discussion makes contact with, and draws heavily upon, recent discussion of other word-givings, including especially telling and/or asserting. While much that I say about promises could be extended in a straightforward way to these and other members of the genus, nailing down the details would require more attention than I can provide here, so I leave the extension largely to the imagination of the reader. For illuminating discussion of promising’s relationship to other types of word-givings see (Watson 2004) and Migotti (2003).
Moran, for instance, explains the Assurance View in terms of a speaker’s “assuming responsibility for the truth of P” (2005: 7) and later talks of assuming responsibility “for those words’ having any particular epistemic status.” (2005: 12). On the other hand, he does sometimes articulate the view in a way that may suggest a speaker assumes a more basic responsibility for her audience’s resulting attitude, for instance when he writes, “When someone gives me his assurance that it’s cold out he explicitly assumes a certain responsibility for what I believe.” (2005: 6, my emphasis).
McMyler (2011) in particular emphasizes the entitlement to defer justificatory challenges.
See especially (Scanlon 1998). I will discuss Scanlon’s view further in the next section.
As in Rawls (1971) who appeals to the principle of fair play.
Scanlon (1998). I focus on Scanlon’s articulation of the position since it is likely to be the most familiar, but similar views have been ably defended by others: for instance, as Scanlon himself notes, by MacCormack (1972), and Thomson (1990). More recently, (Friedrich and Southwood 2011) defend a similar position, grounding promissory obligation in terms of promisee trust; but in the end they appear to endorse a “non-cognitivist” view of trust, characterizing the promisee’s attitude in terms of optimism or faith in the promiser, rather than any truth directed attitude.
Of course, there may be peculiar promises made with no aim to assure, but such promises are not typical. I shall return to related issues in Sect. 4.
Hence, Scanlon labels this the “can’t get started” problem.
The canonical example is (Prichard 2002: 257), who begins “In promising, agreeing, or undertaking to do some action we seem to be creating or bringing into existence the obligation to do it, so much so that promising seems just to be binding ourselves, i.e. making ourselves bound.”.
On the standard “conventionalist” view, for instance, acting so as to engage the convention, thereby triggering the promisee’s obligation to follow that convention’s constitutive rules. Belief might then have a rational basis, if the promiser is believed to be morally conscientious. See (Prichard 2002: 259).
Abe Roth has recently suggested a novel third way, arguing that accepting a promise involves intending the promisor’s action (Roth 2016). When the claim is coupled with cognitivism about intention, a promisee comes to believe in a way that circumvents the problem of evidence because, as with intending one’s own actions, this form of belief is warranted non-evidentially. As Roth himself notes in at least one place (p. 98), however, this promisee intention must be somehow authorized by the promisor, and Roth does not attempt to explain how that authorization goes. My own discussion of the special sort of reason for belief a word-giver issues might, when viewed through the lens of Roth’s other commitments in the philosophy of action, help to fill in that gap: Roth could perhaps re-describe what the promiser does as issuing an authorization to intend.
In their very clarifying discussion of the circularity problem (Kolodny and Jay Wallace 2003) are explicit: “it is not under B’s voluntary control to form the belief that A will do X. She needs to have evidence for it.” (my emphasis).
Nor does it alter the model if the reason I put before you directs your attention to what is morally required of me. I may even intend that this should add a new source of obligation. This is essentially the strategy for supplementing Scanlon’s expectation theory with a separate, practice-dependent obligation, proposed in (Kolodny and Jay Wallace 2003).
I defend this claim in (Dannenberg 2017).
If promissory obligation were independent of belief, one could interpret the sense of insult as a response to not being trusted to do what I am (morally) obligated to do. At this point in the argument, my opponent is the expectation theorist, to whom this move is not available. I discuss this in (Dannenberg 2017).
The point is that the promisor’s intention to be taken at her word is necessarily frustrated should her audience consider her word evidence to be weighed against other, competing, evidence in the usual way. This is distinct from (though related to) the question of so-called “perversity” i.e. the observation made by Moran (2005: 6) and discussed by Faulkner (2007), that this (or any similar such) intention appears to somehow enhance, rather than detract from, the epistemic justification acquired by the word-taker. For skepticism about that observation, see Keren (2012).
The important point is not about the use of the word ‘evidence’ as a technical term. Some, for instance, may want to stipulate that anything that constitutes valid grounds for belief is evidence. The point would remain: there are two fundamentally different kinds of evidence, one necessarily beyond the reach of the will, the other not.
This should be uncontroversial. After all, for you to interpret me as promising (as opposed to, say, reporting my defeasible intentions, speaking in my sleep, or rehearsing a play), you must understand me as endeavoring to offer you an assurance of some kind.
It is not merely that, as Moran (2005) observes, otherwise we will be in “disharmony.” As with any giving, I fail to give what you refuse to accept. Importantly, from the fact that I only succeed if you accept we should not infer that I merely mean to offer my word. Consider: I can intend to give you my bicycle (not merely to offer it), knowing that I will succeed only if you prove willing to take it.
Some may object this implies formal performance of a speech-act of acceptance, while in actual practice we rarely make our acceptance so explicit. But it is consistent with what I have argued that accepting a speaker’s word requires little or no explicit verbal communication. Acceptance might even be (tacitly) communicated by mere non-rejection.
This paragraph reconstructs the famous argument from Williams (1973: 148).
Note that here is a place where extending the view of promises defended here to other species of word-giving would require some care, since many require different (though perhaps overlapping) packages of virtues. If I am to believe you when you vouch for somebody else, for instance, I must not only take you for honest, but also a decent judge of character.
Moran (2005: 16) makes a similar point.
The discussion of accepting a promise in Marusic (2015: 175–209) bears special mention here. Marusic also draws heavily on so-called “assurance” accounts of testimony, and emphasizes the way a promisee’s belief is not based in her evidence. According to Marusic, for you to accept another’s promise is for you to let that person “settle the question” for you of what she will do, for a special kind of reason: a reason of trust. Marusic is clear that this involves forming a bona fide belief that she will act as promised (as opposed to some less truth-governed attitude), and his account draws heavily on the discussion in (Holton 1994), according to which we can choose, from within the Strawsonian “participant stance,” to trust a word-giver for thoroughly practical reasons, with the result that we “come to believe” what the speaker gives her word about. This can happen, moreover, even when the speaker’s word goes directly against our available evidence, as in the sort of case that Holton adapts from Judith Baker (1986); it is indeed the rationality of promisee belief against the available evidence that Marusic is especially interested in vindicating. I have elsewhere (Dannenberg 2019) argued that Holton’s solution to the problem posed by Baker’s ingenious example of taking another at her word in the teeth of one’s evidence will not work; indeed, following in Baker’s own footsteps, I argue that the upshot of these cases is that we should be skeptical about the very distinction between practical and theoretical reason, in terms of which we tend to think about these issues. Some of these criticisms may apply to Marusic’s treatment too, depending on how the special reasons of trust are understood. Also notable is that Marusic is especially interested in vindicating the rationality of believing in promises that involve the sort of partiality discussed in Stroud (2006). (His central example of a promise made by a spouse to be faithful after an infidelity). My discussion in this section and the next, by contrast, aims to provide a more general treatment of how any promisee might rationally choose to believe in a promise.
A stranded motorist says he has left his wallet at home and asks to borrow twenty dollars for gas, taking down your address and promising to send you a check. At least in some contexts, you may choose to accept this sort of promise i.e. you can choose to take the motorist at his word. What, in such a case, is your evidence supposed to be, that he is indeed a trustworthy person? And why think you need to consider any in particular, in order for your belief to be a rationally legitimate one?
The analogy is frequently noted. Often, however, the emphasis is on the way each is a way of generating obligations via an act of will, expressed through speech. See, for instance Owens (2012: 5) and McMyler (2011: 146–147). I mean to focus on an aspect of the analogy that receives comparatively less attention: the relation a person stands in to the action or belief of another, when and because her authority is recognized.
Moran (2005: 24).
Indeed, her audience may even be her “victim,” and not just the “occasion” of her fall (Thompson 2004), if attempting to issue promiscuous promises violates a standing interpersonal duty of due care.
Scanlon evidently thinks so. His extensive discussion of the “Profligate Pal” case indicates he sees this as a vulnerability of the view. Others are not satisfied with his attempt to handle the case. See especially the discussion in Shiffrin (2008).
This point, which appears in different guises in Kant, Sartre, and Strawson (along with the many others of us who follow in their footsteps), is also emphasized by Marusic (2015) in his discussion of how a promiser might rationally promise to do something she has evidence she will not do. My suggestion, here, is that the special relation of an agent to her own actions also has implications for what it means to assume responsibility for another’s belief about one’s actions, and thus what a promiser is bound to do for her promisee in keeping her word.
Such uncertainty may reflect a reasonable reaction to her circumstances. Or, the difficulty may be an expression of less-than-fully rational feelings of anxiety or vulnerability that accompany the trust she is to show me. Nor should we expect the line between factors that can make it “hard to believe” someone who gives her word will be sharp.
This, of course, can be taken to excess- and certain forms of checking up, as well as measures like making a back-up plan, may go too far. What seems important is that she wants to trust me, but finds it challenging. For more discussion, see (Dannenberg 2017).
I once heard a philosopher cook up the following example of “keeping” a promise. Having given my word to pay you a sum by midnight, I make a show of going to the casino and wagering with what I let you believe is all of my cash, in order to make you doubt that I will come through. Unbeknownst to you, I have the sum I owe you set aside in my pocket. As the hour approaches, your anxiety about whether you will be paid increases; but at the stroke of midnight I dramatically pull out your money to your surprise, paying you just as I promised I would. The philosopher who proposed the example thought it obvious that my behavior was, so far as the obligation stemming from my promise was concerned, perfectly permissible. Yet how could anyone think this was an acceptable way for a person who made a promise to behave? Understanding that I have assumed responsibility for your belief allows us to say, in a principled way, why this is wrong, and in a manner that flows directly from the undertaking of the promise itself.
Scanlon (1998: 316).
For a systematic treatment see Owens (2012). The view of the role of promises advanced in Shiffrin (2008) also emphasizes the interest in transferring authority. However, in order to succeed in remedying the problematic imbalances in relationships that, as Shiffrin convincingly argues, make promising necessary, more than the right to blame a promise-breaker must be at stake. Indeed, to perform that role it would seem that people who make each other promises must typically be able to take one another at their word, particularly in the contexts of intimacy that Shiffrin emphasizes. The Doxastic Entrustment View may thus help us understand how promises succeed in performing this important job within intimate relationships.
Nietzsche (1967: 58).
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Dannenberg, J. Promising as Doxastic Entrustment. J Ethics 23, 425–447 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-019-09304-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-019-09304-3