Promises
Plus our upcoming café on moral intuitions, readings and resources, and more.
Introduction
By Adrian Ma
What is involved in a promise? David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, was famously puzzled by this question. In an oft-cited passage from A Treatise of Human Nature, he describes the mystery of promises thus:
I shall further observe, that since every new promise imposes a new obligation of morality on the person who promises, and since this new obligation arises from his will; ‘tis one of the most mysterious and incomprehensible operations that can possibly be imagin’d, and may even be compared to transubstantiation or holy orders, where a certain form of words, along with a certain intention, changes entirely the nature of an external object, and even of a human nature.
Last week we found ourselves puzzled by this question too. At our latest Curiosity Café, moderated by Sofia Panasiuk and yours truly, we explored the nature and boundaries of this “mysterious and incomprehensible,” perhaps even sacramental, phenomenon, under conditions that were arguably just as peculiar. But first:
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Curiosity Café Recap: Promises
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Upcoming Events
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Readings & Resources
Curiosity Café Recap: Promises
By Adrian Ma
We’re not entirely sure how to feel about this, but our latest café was an event of many firsts. It was our first café of 2025, our first in what felt like subzero temperatures, and our first in the unseen company of raccoons.
Our discussion kicked off with a simple overarching question: What is involved in a promise? In small groups, we began by examining our personal experiences with promises made, broken, kept, or dissolved, from which we proceeded to construct our own theories of promising. We then shared our findings and intuitions with the rest of the room, and tackled a series of interrelated follow-up questions:
What are promises intended to do? What do the words “I promise” add to a communication?
Under what circumstances are promises made?
Is it always wrong to break a promise? What makes it wrong? Under what conditions is it morally permissible to break a promise?
Here’s what some of you had to say:
Promises involve binding one’s future self to a certain set of behaviours and outcomes. There is, in fact, a sense in which all promises entail a promise to oneself—a promise that one will remain committed to the agreed-upon course of action or inaction.
Promises differ from some of their conceptual relatives, like contracts, in that breaking them results not in legal or physical consequences, but moral ones, like guilt or blame.
In making a promise, I produce an expectation or assurance in the promisee that a certain deed will be performed or not performed, and agree to be held morally accountable and suffer consequences such as moral debt or blame in the event that I fail to follow through.
There can be circumstances that make it permissible to break a promise, as when I am prevented from carrying out the promised action by external forces beyond my control. For example, if I have promised to pick my friend up from the airport, only for my car to break down on my way there, my failure to keep my promise does not make me liable to censure or blame.
However, even promises that are blocked or defused by such extenuating circumstances can sometimes trigger secondary obligations; one is not simply off the hook. In the event that my car breaks down on the way to the airport, I am still obligated to make compensatory arrangements for my friend, such as ordering them a taxi.
A promise is like an agreement that keeps social capital—like trust, credibility, and respect—flowing, much as a contract keeps financial capital flowing. Promises keep relationships afloat, as contracts do for businesses.
Promising conveys a seriousness and an intentionality that is seldom captured in other forms of communication. To say “I promise” is to say more than “I plan to do this thing”; it is also to say “I will do my very best” or “I will make this a priority.”
Conversely, promising—or at least the language of promising—is often used to project credibility where none has been established. Promising is needed only when the simple communication of an intention is insufficient, as in relationships with low levels of trust. If I have already shown myself to be reliable, promises serve little purpose.
Our attitudes toward promises might to some extent be a function of age; once you have experienced how complicated life can be, it is hard to maintain the perception of promises as sacred and inviolable, because you are no longer naive enough to treat their fulfillment as guaranteed. “I promise” comes to mean, at most, “I’ll try.”
The permissibility of breaking a promise depends in part on the content of the promise. It is easier to justify breaking a fairly trivial promise, such as showing up on time for a hangout at the bar, than a promise, say, to look after my cousin’s pet.
When I make a promise, I don’t just commit to performing or refraining from performing a certain action; I also commit to ensuring that I am in a position to perform that action when the time comes. If I have promised you I will show up at your birthday party, I am also obligated to free up my schedule so that I can actually make it to your party.
All promises have an interpersonal dimension, in that they are made by one person to another. This is true even of promises to myself: if I promise myself that I will lose fifty pounds by next year, this promise is in a sense addressed to my future self who is fifty pounds lighter.
After the break, we tested our ideas and intuitions with a choose-your-own-adventure style activity, in which we examined, in small groups, any or all the following case studies about promises:
Case Study #1:
In high school, you and a friend make a promise to get married if you’re both single by the age of 40. On your 40th birthday, your friend shows up at your house and announces that since both of you are single, and because of the promise you made 24 years ago, you must now be off to the wedding chapel.
Are you now obligated to get hitched? Would your friend have a right to be upset if you refused?
If your answer to either question in 1) is no, why not?
What would need to have happened for your answer to 1) to change? (For example, what if your friend had periodically raised the question for the past 24 years, and you just didn’t tell them “no”? What if your promise was insincere, or if you had wrongly assumed the arrangement to be a joke?)
Case Study #2:
You are currently taking part in a Curiosity Café. If you made it here on time, you heard Sophia announce our café rules, including, for example, “Use language that everyone can understand.” Does your participation imply a promise to abide by these rules? If we agree that breaking these rules is wrong, is it wrong because that would involve breaking a promise?
Would the same be true if you arrived late, and didn’t even hear the rules announced?
Imagine we now introduce a new rule, one that requires you to wear a nametag in order to participate. Would you be obligated to follow this rule, too?
Does your being here entail a promise to not only follow established rules, but also defer to our rule-making process?
Do your answers to the above depend on the content of the rule? What if we asked you to take off your left shoe upon entry, or to reveal the last six digits of your social security number when you raise your hand?
Case Study #3:
As a New Year’s resolution, you promise yourself that you will read at least one philosophy book per month.
Would you feel guilty for falling short of this goal? Why or why not?
Imagine you decide, on a whim, that you no longer want to follow this resolution. (You say, “Don’t worry about it”—but to yourself). Would you still be bound by your self-promise? Would it still be rational to feel guilty for falling short?
Are promises to yourself meaningfully different from promises to other people? Is it more, or less, acceptable to break a promise to yourself? Why?
We then reassembled on the freezing patio to answer the following set of questions in connection with the three case studies:
When is it okay to leave a promise unfulfilled?
Under what conditions are promises “non-binding”—that is, when do they fail to generate an obligation in the first place?
Under what conditions do promises expire or dissolve?
Did these case studies confirm or challenge the accounts of promising you developed in hour one?
Here are some of the ideas you shared in response:
It is morally permissible to leave a promise unfulfilled when keeping it would result in worse consequences overall, or when the apparent obligation to keep the promise is overridden by competing moral considerations. If following through on my promise to marry my high school friend would make us both extremely miserable, it would be better for me to break it!
Because we can’t inhabit the minds of other people, we can never be wholly certain of what they are thinking or intending; promising, however, allows us to gain some measure of assurance as to how another will behave or not behave, and is thus a means by which the chaotic uncertainty of the future can, to some extent, be shaped and controlled.
The circumstances under which a promise is made play a large part in determining how binding, or even real, the promise is. Promises made while drunk should be taken much less seriously than those made while sober.
In thinking about the feasibility of keeping promises that reach far into the future, we can take a page out of the relationship anarchy playbook. Relationship anarchists reject the idea that relationships should adhere to traditional expectations or externally imposed rules and norms; instead, the terms, structure, and standards of a relationship should be autonomously co-developed and negotiated by its parties in accordance with their own interests and values. A standard practice of relationship anarchists is the periodic renewal and renegotiation of these terms, which would help bring clarity to the question of whether a past promise continues to apply.
The continued application of a promise depends on the identities of the parties involved. If I am no longer who I was at the time I made a promise, I am no longer obligated to follow through.
But doesn’t this undermine one of the very things promises are supposed to do? Promises serve as a bulwark against change, as a way to increase the likelihood of our remaining committed to a certain course of action despite all the whims, temptations, and vicissitudes that might in the future stand in our way.
Certain kinds of promises seem to be much less sensitive than others to changes in identity. If in 2022 I promise my friend I will repay a loan of $100, and by 2025 I have become half the person I used to be, my debt isn’t thereby reduced to $50—I still owe my friend the full $100, perhaps with interest.
Whereas it may be appropriate to feel guilt or shame when we fail to keep a promise to another person, self-compassion may be a better response to our failures to keep our promises to ourselves.
My ability to keep my promises to myself is also a reflection of my reliability with interpersonal promises. How can I be trusted to do what others ask of me, if I can’t even do what I demand of myself?
The very act of making a promise to myself suggests a measure of unreliability or lack of self-trust. If I could already count on myself to do what I think I should do, why would a promise or resolution be necessary?
Thanks for reading. I hope you had a promising start to 2025—and that you show yourself a little compassion for the New Year’s resolutions you’ve already begun to break.
Community Survey
For those who’ve attended our Curiosity Cafés, please consider taking our brief community survey. We are conducting this survey to gather feedback on our events, and it should only take a few minutes to complete. Your responses are completely anonymous and will be invaluable in helping us improve our offerings. Thank you in advance!
Upcoming Events
Curiosity Café: Bi-weekly on Tuesdays, tickets below!
About: For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about: Every two weeks, we invite members of our community (that includes you, dear reader!) to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about. After our scheduled programming, we encourage attendees to stay and mingle over food and drinks.
We will host our next Curiosity Café on Tuesday, January 21st, from 6:00 - 8:30 pm at the Madison Avenue Pub (14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2S1). Come and hang out with us, grab food, and read through our handout from 6:00 - 6:30 pm. Our structured discussion will run from 6:30 - 8:30 pm with a 10-minute break in the middle!
Please get a ticket* using the button below the event description. They go on sale today (January 14th, 2025) at 6 pm!
The topic of our next café is: Moral Intuitions
What shapes our sense of morality? Moral intuitions—those instinctive judgments about what feels right or wrong—often guide our decisions (have you ever been told to “trust your gut”?), but are they always a reliable compass? Can they justify our actions and beliefs, or do they sometimes lead us astray?
In this Curiosity Café, we will delve into the fascinating terrain of moral intuitions from two angles. First, we’ll explore the foundations of these intuitions: What influences the principles we hold dear? Are they shaped by universal human tendencies, cultural norms, or individual traits and experiences? Why do certain situations evoke an immediate moral response, while others require deeper reflection?
In the second half, we’ll critically examine when these intuitions serve as valid justifications for moral judgment and when they might reflect biases or contradictions. How do we decide which instincts to trust and which to challenge? Can we develop better ways to engage with conflicting moral intuitions in ourselves and others?
Join co-moderators Yoel Inbar and Zachary Grey for a thought-provoking discussion that will inspire you to reflect on your values, question your assumptions, and explore the diverse ethical perspectives that shape our world.
*A note about ticketing:
We are implementing a change to our Curiosity Café ticketing system! All of our tickets are now Pay-What-You-Can, with an important exception** (see below). It is important to us to be transparent with all of you, so here’s our reasoning:
We want to promote $ accessibility by only asking our attendees to pay what they can, while also allowing us to grow our capacity as an organization. We have some exciting new initiatives planned for 2025, so think of your ticket as an investment in our community and future work ❤️
We want to encourage people who get tickets to actually attend so that as many people as can come get to attend.
This requires less back-end monitoring to adjust ticket category quantities on Eventbrite.
As before, our suggested donation amount is $10, but this amount is a very generic recommendation based only on our needs as an organization. We encourage you to adjust what you are paying according to this amount and your own financial circumstances.
**We will still have five free tickets available for our attendees. If paying anything at all is not financially feasible for you, or our ticketing system presents some other barrier for you, please contact our Director of Community Programs, Sophia, at sophia@beingnbecoming.org. These tickets will be first come, first served, no questions asked! You can expect to hear back from her within 72 hours.
If you have accessibility-related concerns, please visit our Eventbrite Page—in the event description, you will find some accessibility-related information about the venue and the event.
Toronto Events
Chris’s Toronto Event Calendar
If you want more opportunities to connect, inquire and mingle with like-minded people, check out Chris’s calendar on Notion. Chris curates this calendar with events happening in Toronto. Events include thought-provoking lectures, group discussions, and workshops.
makeworld’s Calendar of Toronto Events
makeworld’s curated list of recurrent events in Toronto, which include tech meetups, lectures, unconventional comedy shows, and discussion-based events (like ours!).
Readings & Resources
Adrian’s Recommendations:
“Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive” and “Unpredictability and the Power of Promise” from The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. I found The Human Condition to be quite a challenging and rewarding read on the whole, but these two chapters have always loomed large in my memory, in particular for the connections they draw between forgiving and promising and the sometimes tragic relationship of humanity to time. Whereas, Arendt argues, forgiveness serves as a partial remedy for the irreversibility of time, allowing us to be released from the consequences of actions we cannot undo and whose outcomes we did not and could not have foreseen, promising allows us to “set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men.” The faculties of forgiving and promising, Arendt argues, both “depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself”—directly engaging the question of whether self-promises can be genuinely binding. Cue the next reading…
“Promising Ourselves, Promising Others” by Jorah Dannenberg. Moral philosophers have tended to be rather skeptical of the notion of a promise to oneself, despite our making self-promises all the time. (Check out Marcus Singer’s paper “On Duties to Oneself” for a succinct and influential objection to this idea). Conversely, in this paper, Dannenberg argues eloquently (and movingly) that promises to oneself can indeed be binding, and that the aim of such promises is to shape and safeguard our values. As Dannenberg writes, “[w]e can … promise ourselves not with the alienated or mistrustful aim of requiring or compelling ourselves in the future to do something, but rather with the aim of establishing, maintaining, and protecting the place in our lives of the things that we want to matter to us.” Dannenberg proceeds to argue that even promises sincerely made to other people involve a similar activity of the will (a view some of you appeared to share on Tuesday), and that the “bindingness” of promises, contra much of contemporary moral philosophy, is not reducible to that of moral constraint.
“Promises, Offers, Requests, Agreements” by Brendan de Kenessey. (Shoutout to Alexandra for suggesting this one.) In this paper, de Kenessey examines three phenomena that appear to be intimately related to—but receive a great deal less philosophical attention than—promises, asking: “Why are the normative effects of accepted offers, accepted requests, and agreements so similar to those of promises?” (For example, if I offer to pay for dinner, and you accept, I become obligated to foot the bill in much the same way as I would be if I had promised to do so. The same would be true if I had accepted a request from you that I pay for dinner, or if we had agreed that I would pay for dinner and you would pay for dessert.) de Kenessey argues that the similarities between these four phenomena suggest the existence of a common explanation, which an adequate theory of promising ought to provide. After considering, and then challenging, a potential “quick and easy” theoretical solution to this problem, he offers an elegant alternative explanation, which he calls the joint decision view. de Kenessey writes with admirable clarity, and even readers unfamiliar with the landscape of contemporary moral philosophy should find this paper a pleasure to read. (And if you like this paper, be sure also to check out de Kenessey’s “Promises as Proposals in Joint Practical Deliberation.”)
Featured Quote
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
- Hannah Arendt
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