UTILITARIAN GENERALIZATION Sometimes an act is criticized just because the results of everyone's acting similarly would be bad. The generalization test ...

In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

T.M. Scanlon (1998) proposes that promise breaking is wrong because it shows manipulative disregard for the expectations for future behavior created by promising. I argue that this account of promissory obligation is mistaken in it own right, as well as being at odds with Scanlon's contractualism. I begin by placing Scanlon's account of promising within a tradition that treats the creation of expectations in promise recipients as central to promissory obligation. However, a counterexample to Scanlon's account, his case of the (...) "Profligate Pal," will show that this view of promissory obligation, which I call the Expectations View, is incorrect. In its place, I propose an account of promissory obligation I call Promising as Accountability, according to which promising is a way of making oneself accountable to others for a future act. Not only is Promising as Accountability a more defensible approach to promissory obligation, it also better fits with certain general features of Scanlon's contractualism. (shrink)

An important test of any moral theory is whether it can give a satisfactory account of moral prohibitions such as those against promise breaking and lying. Act-utilitarianism (hereafter utilitarianism) implies that any act can be justified if it results in the best consequences. Utilitarianism implies that it is sometimes morally right to break promises and tell lies. Few people find this result to be counterintuitive and very few are persuaded by Kant’s arguments that attempt to show that lying is always (...) wrong, even if it is necessary to save someone’s life. One thing that makes Kant’s view about lying so implausible is that he is committed to the view that the duty not to lie is always more important than any conflicting duties. Even if we agree with utilitarianism that lying and promise breaking are sometimes morally permissible, we may still be inclined to think that utilitarianism is too permissive about lying and promise breaking. Ross gives the definitive statement of this criticism. He holds that there is a strong, but overrridable, moral presumption against telling lies and breaking promises that is independent of utilitarian considerations. Almost all utilitarians claim that there is a strong moral presumption against telling lies and breaking promises on account of the direct and indirect bad consequences of those actions. However, utilitarians cannot say that there is any moral presumption against lying and promise breaking that is independent of their bad consequences. Many philosophers think that Ross’s theory constitutes a kind of reasonable middle ground in ethics between Kant’s absolutism and utilitarianism. Ross’s theory is arguably the major ethical theory that is closest to most people’s commonsense moral beliefs. It is noteworthy that the two most important defenders of rule-utilitarianism/rule-consequentialism. (shrink)

Richard Brandt is one of the most eminent and influential of contemporary moral philosophers. His work has been concerned with how to justify what is good or right not by reliance on intuitions or theories about what moral words mean but by the explanation of moral psychology and the description of what it is to value something, or to think it immoral. His approach thus stands in marked contrast to the influential theories of John Rawls. The essays reprinted in this (...) collection span a period of almost 30 years and include many classic pieces in metaethical and normative ethical theory. The collection is aimed at both those moral philosophers familiar with Brandt's work and at those philosophers who may be largely unfamiliar with his work. The latter group will be struck by the lucid unpretentious style and the cumulative weight of Brandt's contributions to topics that remain at the forefront of moral philosophy. (shrink)

Chapter Promising in Law and Morals Promissory and contractual obligations raise many issues of common interest to philosophers and lawyers. ...

One of the most influential of the Victorian philosophers, Henry Sidgwick also made important contributions to fields such as economics, political theory, and classics. An active promoter of higher education for women, he founded Cambridge's Newnham College in 1871. He attended Rugby School and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained his whole career. In 1859 he took up a lectureship in classics, and held this post for ten years. In 1869, he moved to a lectureship in moral philosophy, the (...) subject where he left arguably his greatest mark when he produced this work, regarded as his masterpiece. Published in 1874, the book argues the utilitarian approach to ethics, and a systematic and historically sensitive approach to ethical research that influenced utilitarian philosophers well into the twentieth century. It remains a valuable introduction to the philosophy, practice and history of ethics. This reissue includes the 1877 supplement. (shrink)

An idea that has attracted a lot of attention lately is the thought that consequentialism is a theory characterized basically by its agent neutrality.1 The idea, however, has also met with skepticism. In particular, it has been argued that agent neutrality cannot be what separates consequentialism from other types of theories of reasons for action, since there can be agent-neutral non-consequentialist theories as well as agent-relative consequentialist theories. I will argue in this paper that this last claim is false. The (...) paper is divided into four sections. Section one specifies two senses in which consequentialism is agent-neutral. Section two and three examine and reject, respectively, the claim that there are agent-relative consequentialist views as well as agent-neutral non-consequentialist views. I end the paper with some remarks on the plausibility, or better, the implausibility of characterizing consequentialism in terms other than agent neutrality. (shrink)

Breaking a promise is generally taken to involve committing a certain kind of moral wrong, but what (if anything) explains this wrong? According to one influential theory that has been championed most recently by T.M. Scanlon, the wrong involved in breaking a promise is a matter of violating an obligation that one incurs to a promisee in virtue of giving her assurance that one will perform or refrain from performing certain acts. In this paper, we argue that the “Assurance View”, (...) as we call it, is susceptible to two kinds of counterexamples. The first show that giving assurance is not sufficient for incurring the kind of obligation of fulfillment that one violates in breaking a promise. The second show that giving assurance is not necessary. Having shown that the Assurance View fails in these ways, we then very briefly sketch the outline of what we take to be a better view—a view that we claim is not only attractive in its own right and that avoids the earlier counterexamples, but that also affords us a deeper explanation of why the Assurance View seems initially plausible, yet nonetheless turns out to be ultimately inadequate. (shrink)

In his "consequences of utilitarianism", D. H. Hodgson argues that to act on the principle of act-Utilitarianism would have disastrous consequences, And that this principle must therefore be rejected. I attempt to refute his argument. The debate centers on whether there can be an act-Utilitarian justification for telling the truth and keeping promises.

The rule ‘Keep your promises’ is often presented as a challenge to consequentialism, because the ground of your moral obligation not to break a promise seems to lie in the past fact that you made the promise, which is not a consequence of the act. A different picture emerges, however, when we move beyond the question of whether you have any moral obligation at all to the related question of how strong that obligation is.If I promise to meet you and (...) some other mutual friends for a casual lunch, then my moral obligation to meet you is not as strong as when I promise to drive you to the airport to catch an important flight. Why not? The natural answer is that, if I break the lunch promise, not much bad will happen. You will still have a pleasant lunch with our other friends, and you and I can still have lunch some other time. I have some moral obligation to meet you, but not a very strong one. In contrast, if I break my driving promise, then my failure will cause much more harm, assuming that you will not find another way to get to the airport in time for your flight. These harmful consequences to you seem to be what give strength to my moral obligation to keep this promise.The relevant kind of strength is measured by how much is needed to override the obligation. I would need much stronger reasons to justify breaking my promise to drive you to the airport than to justify breaking my promise to meet you for lunch. The fact that my teenage child is sick at home might be enough to justify missing the lunch, even if the teenager would be safe at …. (shrink)

The power to promise is morally fundamental and does not, at its foundation, derive from moral principles that govern our use of conventions. Of course, many features of promising have conventional components—including which words, gestures, or conditions of silence create commitments. What is really at issue between conventionalists and nonconventionalists is whether the basic moral relation of promissory commitment derives from the moral principles that govern our use of social conventions. Other nonconventionalist accounts make problematic concessions to the conventionalist's core (...) instincts, including embracing: the view that binding promises must involve the promisee's belief that performance will occur; the view that through the promise, the promisee and promisor create a shared end; and the tendency to take promises between strangers, rather than intimates, as the prototypes to which a satisfactory account must answer. I argue against these positions and then pursue an account that finds its motivation in their rejection. My main claim is: the power to make promises, and other related forms of commitment, is an integral part of the ability to engage in special relationships in a morally good way. The argument proceeds by examining what would be missing, morally, from intimate relationships if we lacked this power. (shrink)

In a Recent paper to The Joint Session of the AristotelianSociety and Mind Association Professor Neil MacCormick makes some interesting observations about the nature of promises and the source of the obligation to keep them. He rejects the view that an act can count as a promise only because a certain practice exists in a society. One may on the contrary well understand what promises are and know how to make them without there being any special convention making possible the (...) speech act of promising which amounts to no more than …“an utterance of the speaker's about his own future conduct which is essentially characterized by the speaker's intending his addressee to take it as being intended to induce the addressee to rely upon the speaker's taking the action in question.” One needs no special rule to explain why promise-breaking is wrong for …“the fact of the addressee's reliance on the promisor is sufficient ground for asserting that the promisor has an obligation to keep his word.” To bring home the point, MacCormick contrasts promising with divorcing by the simple utterance of 'I divorce thee, I divorce thee.' This is intelligible as an act of divorcing only by presupposing a convention that allows a divorce to be effected in this way. In performing the act by the appropriate formula the person is invoking the conventional rules that must obtain in the society if the act is to be successful. Searle, we are told, fails to see that promises are quite different in that they …“are explicable in terms of an intention to bring about a specific perlocutionary effect, and an intention that that intention be recognized” It is neither here nor there to point out, as Searle does, that ‘I predict’ and ‘I intend’ like ‘I promise’ tend to create expectations for the effect a promise is intended to achieve is reliance and not simply an expectation. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall be concerned to explore the utilitarian account of promising, which for some time has had, in many circles, the status of a dead horse. My aim is not to flog it, however, but to show that perhaps it yet lives. At least, I hope to show that some prominent and apparently powerful objections to this account do not find their mark. In the course of this, several subjects of wider interest will come in for review (...) as well, and it is hoped that some further light on the utilitarian position in general, as well as the concepts of expectation and obligation, may glimmer forth.At the outset, some clarification of the question at issue about promising is essential. Briefly, the question is: why ought we to keep our promises? Less question-beggingly put: why, if at all, should we keep promises, and to what extent?; where by talk of ‘extent’ it is meant that the question of whether we sometimes should not keep them, of its being a matter of attaching a “degree of stringency” to the obligation, is to be kept open. (shrink)

Shaping the Normative Landscape is an investigation of the value of obligations and of rights, of forgiveness, of consent and refusal, of promise and request. David Owens shows that these are all instruments by which we exercise control over our normative environment.

A theory is agent neutral if it gives every agent the same set of aims and agent relative otherwise. Most philosophers take act-consequentialism to be agent-neutral, but I argue that at the heart of consequentialism is the idea that all acts are morally permissible in virtue of their propensity to promote value and that, given this, it is possible to have a theory that is both agent-relative and act-consequentialist. Furthermore, I demonstrate that agent-relative act-consequentialism can avoid the counterintuitive implications associated (...) with utilitarianism while maintaining the compelling idea that it is never wrong to bring about the best outcome. (shrink)

The duty to keep promises has many aspects associated with deontological moral theories. The duty to keep promises is non-welfarist, in that the obligation to keep a promise need not be conditional on there being a net benefit from keeping the promise—indeed need not be conditional on there being at least someone who would benefit from its being kept. The duty to keep promises is more closely connected to autonomy than directly to welfare: agents have moral powers to give themselves (...) certain obligations to others. And these moral powers, which enable promisors to create agent- relative obligations to promisees, correlate with rights the promisees acquire in the process, such as rights to waive the duty or insist on its performance. As a result of promises, promisees acquire (not only rights but also) a special status: the promisees are the ones wronged when promises to them that they have not waived are not kept. One more aspect of the duty to keep promises that is associated with deontological moral theories is that what actions the duty requires is at least partly backward-looking: what actions the duty requires depends on facts about the past, namely facts about what promises were made and then waived or not. This paper surveys these aspects of the duty to keep promises and then explores whether rule-consequentialism can be reconciled with them. (shrink)

In normative ethics there has been a long-standing debate between consequentialists and deontologists. To settle this dispute moral theorists have often used a selective approach. They have focused on particular aspects of our moral practice and have teased out what consequentialists and deontologists have to say about it. One of the focal points of this debate has been the morality of promising. In this paper I review arguments on both sides and examine whether consequentialists or deontologists offer us a more (...) plausible account of promissory obligation. My conclusion is negative. Given the arguments on the table, I argue, we should conclude that the debate is in a stalemate. It is, therefore, hard to see how the issue of promissory obligation could help us choose between consequentialism and deontology. (shrink)

Utilitarians are supposed to have difficulty accounting for our obligation to keep promises. But utilitarians also face difficulties concerning our obligation to make promises. Consider any situation in which the options available to me are acts A, B, C… n, and A is utility maximizing. Call A+ the course of action consisting of A plus my promising to perform A. Since there appear to be a wide range of instances in which A+ has greater net utility then A, utilitarianism obligates (...) us to make far more promises than even the most expansive views concerning our obligations to make promises would acknowledge. (shrink)