Is Promising a Practice and Nothing More, Normatively Speaking?
Stan Husi
Promising is a norm-guided affair. I make a promise and suddenly I am subjected to
standards telling me what to do next. I promise I’ll pick you up and now my watching TV at
home counts as a normative failure. Transforming practical episodes from normatively innocent
into normatively guilty is no minor feat that standards pull off. Yet wherein rests the authority of
those standards? One answer is that the authority of those standards entirely rests in promissory
practices. Let’s call this answer the exhaustive practice position or EPP for short. EPP claims
that promising is a practice and nothing more, normatively speaking, and denies that the relevant
standards embodied by promissory practices have any practice-external authority. No
justification flows to promissory norms from some practice-independent order, or so claims EPP.
What would EPP mean for our promissory commitments? Would its truth make it harder
for us to remain loyal to those commitments? Some have thought so. They have argued that
unless we can safely consider promissory standards to be sanctioned by a practice-external
authority, we shall be unable to sustain those commitments. In this essay I seek to dislodge this
concern. I will argue that EPP offers a self-affirmative rather than a self-defeating interpretation
of promissory practices. Acceptance of EPP need not prompt practically engaged agents to think
any lower of their own promissory commitments. We can first-personally and self-reflectively
stand by our promissory commitments even if, normatively speaking, we came to see them as
part of practices and nothing more.
1
I
What is it, then, for promising to be a practice and nothing more, normatively speaking?
EPP contains two components. (1) Promising consists in a system of norms or standards that (2)
have no practice-external authority or justification. (1) acknowledges that the practice of
promising bears a constitutive relationship to a complex system of norms and policies that is
observed by enough participants. To understand what some practice involves, we must
understand what the legitimate moves are within that practice. Most importantly, we must
understand what the missteps are. Practices clearly contain possibilities for failure, ways for
things to go wrong. Norms deliver such formal possibilities. They supply models for what should
be, for what makes sense or what is permitted, favored or required within some practice. Every
promissory activity, then, bears this formal relationship to the norms underlying the practice of
promising: the activity complies or does not comply.
(2) denies that the relevant practice-constitutive norms have any practice-external
justification. While (1) postulates practice constitutive norms, (2) confines the normative
significance of promising to those practice-norms. EPP assumes promissory reasons and
obligations to be nothing but the dictates of a practice. They have force only from within a
practice-internal vantage-point. Whether or not to keep a promise, thus understood, is essentially
and exclusively a question about how promissory norms come down in a particular case: whether
the promise concerns matters of importance to the promisee; whether the expectations created
and the requisite execution are reasonable; whether we encounter excusing or exempting
circumstances, and so forth. In answering these questions, we bring to bear promissory norms to
2
a particular case and draw the conclusion. The promise-internal answer will then be complete,
and nothing remains to be said but “you promised!”1
The second component together with its normative confinement is where the action is.
What EPP denies is that promissory norms have the following meta-normative property: being
justified by something external to promissory practices. It is important, however, not to misread
EPP as leveling any substantive criticism against promissory norms in virtue of its rejection of
external justification. It is, in fact, the chief point of this essay to argue that promissory norms do
just fine without such justification. EPP’s denial of practice-external sanction requires one
important qualification, though. EPP is not intended to rule out that promissory practices might
be embedded in further and more general social practices. If so, promissory norms may very well
receive support from those more general practices. This option, however, would simply push
back the question EPP is meant to address. What we would have to ask now is what metanormative status those more general practices have. Are they justified by something external to
them? And if not, as EPP would have to say at some point in the progression to ever more
general practices, what would that mean for our commitments to those “ultimate” practices? The
core feature of EPP is its restriction to practice-norms, and the question of this essay is what this
means for our commitments. Since the recourse to more general practices only pushes back our
question, I suggest we limit the focus on promissory practices in the first place and simply
assume, perhaps somewhat artificially, that any further and more general practices promising is
embedded in are part of the overall promissory package. What EPP denies is that promissory
practices, inclusively understood, are and need to be justified by something that is not itself just
another social practice.
1
This resembles the position Rawls set out in his early essay Two Concepts of Rules, Philosophical Review, 1955.
3
EPP advances a meta-normative position and mostly stays silent on what conditions must
obtain for something to be a promise and on what content in particular promissory standards
have. In specifying and reconstructing the contents of promissory norms advocates of EPP are
free to use what many of their opponents have said about promissory obligations, including
Scanlon and his principle F. With the restriction, of course, that principle F only figures as a
practice-internal rule in EPP. Similarly, promissory practice-norms may specify who has
authority to do what under what conditions. EPP is not hostile to authority talk per se. It only
construes such talk as a practice-internal way of handing out licenses for who may do what. To
use an example of Stephen Darwall’s, school internal norms allow teachers to give their students
quizzes but not vice versa.2 In similar vein, promissory standards may restrict who can make
what kind of promise to whom, or who has claims for what. There is no reason why principles
such as Scanlon’s and authority-licensing rules could not be part of the relevant practiceconstitutive norms. Also, EPP is only directed at the normative significance of promising as
such. The position does not deny that we usually have all sorts of reasons to keep our promises,
many of which have nothing to do with promising at all: I better share my toys with my little
sister as promised, because if not, Granny won’t give me that delicious candy. But that reason,
however substantial, is not of the relevant kind. The essay focuses entirely on promissory
obligations and reasons as they genuinely pertain to promising.
EPP’s rendition of promissory reasons and obligations in practice-internal terms places
promising in large company. Practice-internal reasons are ubiquitous. Soccer players have
soccer-internal reasons to pass the ball low so as to make it harder for the opposing team to get it.
2
Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, Harvard 2006, p.51.
4
Members of a choir have choir-internal reasons to breathe in at different times. Wedding guests
have wedding-internal reasons to rise when the bride enters. Chess-players have chess-internal
reasons to get out the queen early. How promising, in contrast, could have genuine practiceindependent authority remains a task not fully carried out yet, to say the least. So why not try
without such authority? To many, this seems not an option. There is the profound worry that
practices alone just won’t cut it. Unassisted practices supposedly cannot be entrusted to sustain
our promissory commitments completely on their own.
The worry is this. Norms are easy to come by; their authority, their status as legitimate
guidelines, however, must appear an altogether more consequential matter. Philippa Foot’s
famous examples of norms of etiquette still serve to illustrate the distinction between norm’s
formal dictates and their authority best. The rule that one must answer in the third person to third
person invitations clearly states a demand, but what is its normative force?3 We find norms
governing virtually all corners of life. For every norm we can wonder why to take seriously what
it demands. The fundamental question, then, must concern the normative status, and not the mere
existence of norms. This is most firmly held when it comes to moral norms. Most would think
James Griffin left out something crucial when he wrote: “To say that something ‘ought to be’ is
to say that it is what conforms to some standard, norm, or regularity. … ‘Moral oughts’ are no
different. They claim merely that there is a norm in the background to which a certain action
would conform.”4 Norms in the background, however, are quite easily secured. We can thus
understand why many would want to insist that in addition to having norms in the background,
they better be authoritative independently of our acceptance of practices that embody them. It is
3
4
Phillipa Foot, Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives, Philosophical Review 81, 1972, p. 308.
James Griffin, Value Judgment, Oxford 1996, p.81.
5
understandable why many take issue with a view that denies such independent authority to
promising.
II
Let me contrast EPP with two competitors that seek to push beyond practices when it
comes to the normative significance of promising: Morality and social or individual benefit.
Consider first the proposal that promissory norms are morally justified, in robustly practiceindependent ways. It is clear that many authors are driven in that direction precisely by the kind
of worry this essay addresses. Stephen Darwall’s, in his discussion of Reid’s criticism of Hume
on promising, first carves out a position very much like EPP: “Again, it doesn’t matter if we
reserve ‘promise’ … for distinctive conventionally defined methods of voluntarily undertaken
second-personal obligations.” He then continues with approval. “Reid’s point is that such
conventional obligations will be possible only if we can presuppose an authority to make claims
of one another and undertake voluntary obligations at all that does not itself depend upon
antecedent conventions.”5 Many philosophers concur. Scanlon writes that breaking promises is
“wrong [i.e. contrary to obligation]: not just forbidden by some social practice but morally
wrong.”6 For him, promising is a special case to be subsumed under the broader obligation of
fidelity that is firmly grounded in principles that no one can reasonably reject. For Ross, we have
prima facie moral duties to keep our promises. For Rawls we have promissory obligations
through our general obligation to support just institutions.7 For consequentialists, of whatever
5
Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, Harvard 2006, p.198.
Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, Harvard 1998, p. 306.
7
Rawls, Theory …
6
6
stripe, we must keep our promises when, and because, doing so brings about the most good, or
accords with rules the general observation of which would bring about the most good.
Now EPP has two cards to play against moralists. First, it is unclear whether just any
moral account of promising can stay true to the normative significance of promising. This
especially applies to accounts that rely on general moral principles. For sure, moral principles
would explain why we must keep our promises. By bolstering promissory obligations, one may
think moralists must be well disposed towards promising. But this impression may be deceptive.
Relying on general moral principles potentially contains difficulties for establishing the
normative significance of promising in the right way – in the promising way, as it were. If
promise-breaking is a wrong to be explained in exactly the same manner as other wrongs, it is
hard to detect much distinctive contribution promising makes to that wrong. Consider soccer
again. It would be wrong to intentionally kick the ball right into the goal keepers’ face out of a
short distance, but this fact owes little to soccer. By doing so one would cause gratuitous harm to
another player, something morality forbids. This wrong, however, does not constitute a particular
soccer-way for things to go wrong. Norms for soccer are not legitimized by serving more general
moral duties. The same may be true for promising.
Whether promises must always be kept, morally speaking, is in fact questionable –
bringing us to the second card. Immoral promises do not automatically cease to be promises. The
mobster who promised in good faith to murder the witness is not at liberty to carry out that
promise, morally speaking, not even a little bit. And yet, his promissory obligation does not just
evaporate in the face of morality’s decisive precedence. Some have argued that immoral
7
promises are void ab initio.8 But this is not generally plausible. Immoral promises are certainly
morally void, but that’s rather trivial. The question is whether they automatically are
“promissorily” void, and that one may doubt. If there are any paradigmatic promises considered
with the kind of seriousness philosophers commonly associate with the enterprise, those made to
and by the Godfather qualify. If promises within “the family” don’t count, I’m not sure which
do. It is natural, then, to interpret the mobster’s situation as falling under two conflicting
obligations: an unambiguous promissory duty to carry out the promise and an unambiguous
moral duty to defect.
In general, promissory obligations can facilitate virtue, vice, or neither. Recall how
regrettably seriously many German army officers took their oath to Hitler. It surely would have
been morally better if they had joined Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt despite their
promissory obligations. It is a tricky question whether in such cases promissory reasons might
not retain some moral force that is only outweighed or defeated by decisive countervailing moral
reasons. I can find little to morally recommend serving Hitler solely in virtue of a promise, but
I’m not in a position here to rule out that this is not due to tininess of reason as opposed to
nonexistence. If my initial suspicion is correct, however, then promissory and moral duties
potentially do not match up. If so, one could hardly supply the normative foundation for the
other.
Let me now turn to the second kind of competitor, this one drawing on prudential and
social benefits rather than on morality. What I have in mind here are versions of practice
positions along David Hume’s lines.9 Though close cousins, EPP and broadly Humean
8
9
Cf. Hart, 1955.
David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Oxford 2000.
8
approaches are nonetheless distinct. The view I defend is not that the normative significance of
promising rests in the benefits promissory practices afford. If promissory practices were justified
in the service of some social good, this would qualify as a sort of practice-external justification
in my sense. Now global versions of this view are less plausible than more individual ones,
which I can only discuss in a longer version of this essay. Global versions place too much of
emphasis on general social aspects and thereby fail to adequately engage the crucial perspective
of the deliberating agent; why to keep his promise here and now. For that end I doubt the general
usefulness of a practice can make much contribution. Only few practices that it would be useful
to have automatically usher individual commitments in us. We don’t feel called upon, for
instance, to collect litter from the sideways Sunday mornings despite the obvious benefits this
would confer. What’s good for society often does not translate into reasons for individuals.
Agents can thus reasonably wonder whether they should comply with practices they
acknowledge are socially beneficial. It would certainly serve the collective, they may think, but
now here am I and not the collective making the choice; and I am certainly no mere servant of
the collective. In addition, it takes little imagination to construct cases where the execution of
some promissory obligation would weaken the practice of promising as such. Suppose I make a
promise the execution of which would be so shocking to watch that most would become
completely discouraged to ever make promises again. Still, this destabilizing effect need not
exempt me from my promissory obligations.
9
III
Let me return to the worry with EPP. Notice first the objection leveled against EPP on
grounds of its supposed inability to sustain promissory commitments is highly indirect. It would
not strictly speaking refute the claim that promising has no practice external authority even if the
worry was warranted. Promising could very well be a practice and nothing more, even if our
allegiance to it was based on the mistaken belief that it was more than that. EPP first and
foremost advances a position on what promising is, normatively speaking, and not necessarily a
proposal on how to make it thrive. Many believe that a full understanding of religious practices
would place a heavy burden on their rational continuation, without thinking that this would
falsify their account. Moreover, even if fully grasping what the practice of promising involves
would make it harder for us to stand by our promissory obligations, this only need to give rise to
pragmatic concerns if acquiring that grasp is a likely scenario. And it might not. The illusion
could be stable, possibly even be sanctified by other considerations. The practice could carry on
despite its rest on illusionary roots. This situation may resemble the ways in which some
reinforce their daily workout habits by considering themselves under a duty to do so. They may
be fully aware that such a self-imposed duty lacks any real authority at their more reflective
moments, and yet at their less reflective moments continue to think so, effectively employing the
help useful fictions provide on occasion.
Nonetheless, this indirectness does not make the objection less serious. For starters, a
non-debunking view of promising would certainly be preferable all things considered. If EPP
was short of an affirmative interpretation for promissory practices that could survive reflection, it
would be inferior to competitors in this respect. Accounts that enabled us to reflectively stand by
our promissory commitments without fooling ourselves would be better motivated. But more
10
importantly, EPP, as I introduced the view, has greater ambitions than to merely take a stand on
normative metaphysics. It also aspires to offer a self-embracing interpretation of promissory
practices. Advocates of practice-views generally like practices. The concern that EPP may not be
able to sustain promissory practices has force even for EPP’s own advocates. The preservation of
the relevant commitments that carry promissory practices must be something they care about.
Because the objection can be pressed from EPP’s own grounds without relying on anything
extra, it makes it particularly worthy of a good response.
What’s the response, then? How could we stand by our promissory commitments if we
came to see them as part of a practice and nothing more? What I have to say, in essence, targets
more at establishing the absence of a negative than the presence of a positive. My goal is to
dispel the impression that this is a philosophically hard question. To begin with, the objection
rests on a rather sterile picture of our involvement in practices. We are not usually drawn to
certain practices on rational grounds so much as we are acculturated to them. We usually remain
loyal thereafter unless we find our commitments to be in conflict with other fundamental
commitments. If we can’t see anything wrong with them, we retain them. And what’s wrong
with our habit of taking promises seriously, especially given that we take on our promissory
obligations completely voluntarily? What other commitments do we have that would challenge
our allegiance to promissory practices? There certainly are important questions about the status
of norms. But in practical life we take them seriously only if our allegiance has already
encountered substantive problems. Otherwise these questions retain an artificial aura of
sophistry. The need for justification arises only against a presumptive background of suspicion.
Our loyalty to practice-norms does not even require any beliefs about their external
legitimacy. Most people who play soccer aspire to play it well, not because of something else,
11
but simply because they want to play soccer well. They are responsive to soccer-internal
guidelines without regarding those guidelines as authoritatively grounded in anything other than
soccer. Granted, they may not maintain these aspirations unless they can find a home for them
within their larger projects and identities. But the fact that our allegiance to certain norms
negatively depends upon finding a home for them within our larger identities does not mean that
we need to regard those norms as externally sanctioned. It is simply not true that everyone who
aspires to play soccer well does so for reasons not related to soccer, even if it was true that he
would abandon that aspiration in the absence of those other reasons. What’s fair for soccer seems
fair for promising as well.
Norms frequently maintain their particularly important standings within agents’
deliberative spheres simply by reflecting what those agents care about. Here’s one case. We
don’t like wasting our time. In our estimation of what counts as wasting our time we’re guided
by norms that reflect what activities are important to us. Those norms structure how we organize
our time where some ways count as better than others. Yet we do not need to believe that these
practices and the concerns they reflect have any external authority. To me, for instance, watching
sports is a waste of time. But that’s just me. I certainly do not believe that my attitude towards
sports reflects any external normative pressure on myself. I am simply guided by norms I do not
consider externally sanctioned.
So far this response is rather individualistic. Is this a problem given the fact that
promising is a social and not just individualist practice? Promising certainly involves not one but
many agents. Focusing on the individual is well-motivated, however. The final call on whether to
stay faithful to promissory practices is to be made by individual deliberating agents. There are
also independent reasons that push into an individualistic direction, however. Promising is more
12
individualized than often acknowledged. Promising is not enforced by any central agency. Nor is
it usually enforced by third parties. Most don’t care that much, if they are taking notice of other
people’s broken promises at all. Promise-breaking often is considered inconsequential. Think of
deadlines. All this tends to have fragmentizing and individualizing effects on the practice of
promising. What we end up with are many and not just a single practice of promising. There
possibly is one promising-schema the details of which are to be filled in by the participants of
more individualized practices. Different promissory practices emerge in different contexts.
Promising in the context of family involves other standards than promising in the context of
business. Promising in an honor-society is a different practice than in laissez-faire academia. It is
my sense that promising is mostly a personal affair, and loses its grip once personal ties fade.
Often it is simply between you and me. I find it hard to recover much point in promise-exchange
between complete strangers, for instance. What confidence to take in someone returning a spear
if I was to return his boomerang is beyond me.
Let me turn now to a second point. EPP does not deny that people usually have all sorts
of extra reasons to observe promissory norms. Many are purely prudential. I may want that
candy. EPP doesn’t take issue with having lots of non-promissory reasons in play in addition to
promissory reasons. Case by case, different coalitions of reasons may prompt us to keep our
word. If enough people manage to do so enough of the time, the practice will carry on. EPP only
contests that these additional reasons are a necessary component of the normative significance of
promising as such. Soccer, once more, makes the point. One should pass the ball low, I said, so
as to make it harder for the opposing team to get it. In addition, one may also have reasons to
pass the ball low because this limits the risk that the ball will be kicked out of the gated premises.
The second reason is certainly legitimate. One may now feel even stronger about passing the ball
13
low. But what this does is merely to bring in a consideration that has nothing to do with soccer to
bear on a particular case that happens to be soccer. The same happens in promising.
The most prominent case it this. We often keep our promise not primarily because we
promised, but because the promised activity is of such high importance. Suppose a colleague of
mine promised to pick up a good friend from the airport. Now as I see him heading off to the bar,
I realize he must have forgotten. As he quickly becomes incapacitated to carry out the task, I
have no choice but to take over. So I pick up my friend. What is important is that my friend is
picked up, not primarily that a promise is kept. This is what my friend and I care about. We may
not even take much offense in the absentmindedness of our colleague. What I will later say to my
colleague is that he really should have kept his promise, not primarily because he promised, but
because it was important to do what he said he would be doing. That in many cases there are
strong non-promissory reasons in play does not show that promissory reasons themselves are
somewhat deficient or lacking.
At the heart of the worry lays our reflective ability to stay indifferent towards the dictates
of social norms, and to ask what reasons we have to do what they say. Many think this is a
problem that requires a robustly meta-normative solution that transcends social practices: the
solution of finding an objective authority that provides normative backup for social norms. I
believe it does not require a solution of that kind. The solution could be purely practical. We may
question whether social norms have any practice-external authority and then conform to them
anyway. If norms make sense to us, why should their possession of any additional metanormative backup be of any concern to us? We do stay loyal to many practices in a purely
practical manner without holding meta-normative beliefs them. Soccer, weddings, choirs, chess
illustrated the point. What is important for practices to carry on is that people stay loyal; not that
14
they have certain beliefs. In any case, even if people had those beliefs, even if they took utmost
confidence in the practice-external authority of promising, this may still not answer the practical
problem. As Foot’s puts it “the question remains as to why we should do what we are required to
do.”10 Practice-external authority would not automatically settle the practical question. We still
have to decide whether to go along with norms we take to be authoritative in that robust metanormative sense. If we shall be able to shrug this off as easily as we supposedly can with
practice-norms, as I think we can, then how much progress have we really made on the practical
front by inventing practice-external authority?
(4.424 words, footnotes excluded)
10
Phillipa Foot, Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives, Philosophical Review 81, 1972, p.310.
15