Promise keeping: Commitments, Contracts and Belief
What seven-letter word names a commitment that can be kept or broken by doing, or failing to do, what was agreed? A promise is the answer, and promise keeping turns a declaration about future conduct into an obligation between people.
A promise communicates an intention to act, or refrain from acting, in a particular way at some future time. The person making that commitment is the promisor; the person receiving it is the promisee. Ordinarily, a promise involves communication to another party, although philosophers debate promises to oneself and commitments to absent or deceased recipients. Such commitments range from everyday declarations to solemn vows and military oaths. An oath and an affirmation can each take the form of a promise, while a vow is a special kind of commitment. Election pledges extend that relationship into public life, where future action depends on political cooperation.
In contract law, promise keeping can become legally enforceable through an exchange of commitments. An offer indicates that one party intends to be bound by particular terms when the other accepts them. Once acceptance takes place, a contract that also meets requirements such as consideration, capacity, and legality imposes obligations that the parties have voluntarily assumed. Failure to perform can amount to a breach, bringing a duty to compensate the other party. The usual monetary aim is to put the injured party into the position that performance would have created.
A car sale illustrates that financial consequence. A seller agrees to deliver a car for $10,000, and the buyer agrees to pay that price. Before delivery, the seller fails to perform and the cost of a similar car rises by 10%. The buyer now needs an additional $1,000 to obtain the equivalent purchase, so that amount represents compensation for the increase. If a $5,000 deposit has already been paid, its return accompanies the additional compensation. The sale involves mutual undertakings, making it bilateral. Another arrangement can involve only one undertaking: payment promised to someone who finds a particular car, without obliging that person to search.
Religious traditions attach their own obligations to promise keeping. In Christian ethics, an oath invokes God as witness, while a vow solemnly commits a person to a moral good over time. Some Christian communities, including the Religious Society of Friends and Anabaptist churches such as the Mennonites, object to oaths on the basis of the Sermon on the Mount. Their religious scruples helped create legal provisions allowing an affirmation instead of an oath, accommodating believers who took the biblical prohibition on swearing literally.
In Islam, Surah Al-Ma’idah distinguishes thoughtless oaths from deliberate ones, holding people accountable for the commitments they intentionally make. The prescribed atonement concerns deliberate oaths and offers several ways to make reparation, with fasting required when the other specified options are unaffordable. A broken oath also brings requirements for forgiveness and reparation. These include feeding or clothing ten poor people or freeing a slave; someone unable to fulfill those forms of reparation must fast for three days. The obligations connect a person's spoken commitment with subsequent conduct and acts of atonement.
Philosophers have debated whether competing benefits can outweigh promise keeping. Immanuel Kant held that promises should always be kept, while some consequentialists allow a promise to be broken when doing so produces greater benefits. Act utilitarians assess whether keeping or breaking a particular promise produces the greatest net benefit, including the effects of disappointed expectations on the people receiving it. Rule utilitarians instead defend the practice of promise keeping because a generally observed rule can support trust and produce better consequences overall. These approaches differ over whether the obligation rests on the results of an individual act or the value of an established practice.
Psychological research places promises alongside threats because each can influence another person's behavior through an anticipated outcome. A promise generally offers a positive result, while a threat holds out punishment. Both can be expressed conditionally, linking something the listener does with a consequence that the speaker will bring about. Conditional promises and threats can involve similar assumptions about obligations, even when people interpret their logical conditions differently. Research on such statements examines what listeners think speakers are obliged or permitted to do after making these conditional commitments. The commitment concerns something guaranteed for the future whose fulfillment cannot yet be verified at the moment it is spoken.
References
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Promises — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/promises/
Cornell Law School: Contract — https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/contract
Cambridge University Press: Great Christian Jurists in American History — Introduction — https://assets.cambridge.org/97811084/75358/excerpt/9781108475358_excerpt.pdf
Ibn Kathir: Tafsir of Al-Ma’idah 89 — https://quran.com/al-maidah/89/tafsirs/en-tafisr-ibn-kathir
Sztencel and Clarke: Deontic commitments in conditional promises and threats — https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-and-cognition/article/deontic-commitments-in-conditional-promises-and-threats-towards-an-exemplar-semantics-for-conditionals/CC99FC5C3815A432141A3EDDA96F8C56
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Promises — plato.stanford.edu