The Shortcomings of Legalistic Moral Philosophy Part Four - Promising and Commitment
In the third part I discussed gratitude and forgiveness as aspects of the moral practice that pose a challenge to legalistic accounts of morality. I tried to show that they can be understood as genuinely moral phenomena in the sense that being a morally good persons involves knowing when to be grateful and forgiving. At the same time I argued that it would be a Procrustean endeavor to fit them into the framework of claim/obligation relations. (If you still are not convinced, I suggest you take a look at this interview with the wonderful Danya Ruttenberg who makes this case far more elaborately.) I also argued that expanding the deontic triad by sorting gratitude and forgiveness under the category of supererogation does not provide a way out because it does not adequately capture the role such aspects play in the moral practice. As I said, a plausible response would be that these aspects are fringe cases and arguments such as mine do not get at the heart of morality as legalism conceives it.
In order to explore the validity of this response, I will now take a closer look at the practice of promising. As I have shown in the second part, legalism establishes promising as the paradigm case of creating a moral relation and presents this relation as a model for every other moral relation. So, how does promising work?
Imagine a friend tells you “I’m moving to another place in a couple of weeks and I could use some help loading and unloading my stuff. Will you be there?” Since you are friends, you do not hesitate to assure them that you will be there to help. Shortly before the move takes place, you learn that the new season of your favorite show which you have been waiting for eagerly will be released on the same day. You are highly tempted to call off your help to stay at home and finally watch the continuation of your beloved story.
I am going out on a limb here and assume that even though you might regret that you have to wait until next day to watch the show you would stick to your promise. Or, if you do not, you would know that helping your friend would have been the right thing to do. Now let us alter the situation slightly. Instead of a new season of your favorite show being released, the reason for you to not stick to your promise is the fact that you are invited to a promising job interview. In that case it is less obvious that you still have to show up and help your friend.
Imagine you call your friend to tell them you will not be there because you are going to attend the job interview. The thing most likely to happen is that your friend will tell you that it is alright. They have a couple of other people to help and even though they would have appreciated your being there the job interview is more important. The legalistic phrasing would be that the opportunity which opened up for you changed the situation in such a way that your friend owes it to you to release you from your commitment previously undertaken so that you do not longer owe them your help. But is this really what is going on here? Imagine calling your friend and telling them that you will not be there because of the job interview. Imagine they reply that you have to because, after all, you made a promise and they will not release you. You go at length to explain how important the job interview is for you but they still insist that you come because they have a respective claim against you due to your promise. As a last resort, you tell them that because of the unforeseen change of the situation it is in fact you who has a claim against them.
In that case you will probably begin to question the nature of your relationship. Has this person ever been your friend? Do they not understand the situation? This just is not how a friend talks to a friend. Of course it could be said that the customs around friendship work that way. The moral situation is that of a claim/obligation-relation but it would impolite to explicitly say so as a moral agent in the situation. Again, this does not strike me as convincing because it obscures a more deeply lying issue. The talk of rules, the deontic triad, claims, and obligations is tied to the notion of some kind of force or coercion - hence the label “legalism”. The terms carry with them a kind of normative force. But such a force is only called for when no other reasons to act obtain. This is precisely the point of the law in the contract scenario I sketched in part two. Both parties could refrain from fulfilling their obligations, so the law puts a normative force in place that makes them do their part.
This is clearly different in the case of friendship. There is no need for such a force because helping one another is just the sort of thing friends do. There is no difference between what you have to do and what you would be doing anyway as a friend. And this is precisely why duties of friendship can never be owed nor claimed. The problem with legalism here is, I think, a kind of ahistoricism. By that I mean a disregard for the past events that have brought a moral agent in a situation in which they make a moral commitment. The friendship the two of you have is shaped by a common past that creates a situation in which agreeing to help is the “natural” thing to do. The two parties in the contract scenario are completely free to commit themselves to their respective obligations or not. In situations that are shaped by the history of the moral agents involved, this is not necessarily the case. If your friend asks you to help you can of course refuse to but I imagine you would give them some explanation. You would not simply say “I will not help because I do not have to and that is all the reason I need’. In a way, your agreeing to help is not so much the creation of a commitment but rather the expression of one. You do not really enter into a moral situation by agreeing to help but rather acknowledge the fact that you have been in one all the time just in virtue of your friendship.
When your friend asks you to help, the situation is not morally neutral in the way the situation is normatively neutral when A offers B to buy their book for ten Euros. Your friend’s request is a manifestation of a previously existing moral relationship between the two of you. I think this is the normal case of promising. People usually do not make promises to strangers on the bus but rather to persons with whom they are already close. These promises are a special case of the more general fact that they have a relationship from which certain moral consequences arise. Of course, the moral relation you have to the person sitting next to you in the bus can be described in terms of claim/obligation-relations. They have an obligation not to punch you in the stomach randomly and you have a claim against them to refrain from doing so. But the point is that this relation obtains because there is nothing else that unites the two of you in such a way that it would be wrong for them to punch you. The normative force that is carried by notions such as obligation and claim is only required in such cases. There is no place for these notions in friendship and other interpersonal relationships that create circumstances in which making certain commitments is the right thing to do - in fact, there should not be. So, promising in its regular case is precisely not the kind of moral phenomenon that creates a claim/obligation-relation and can therefore not serve as a paradigm case of the kind of moral status that is created by such a relation. Once one adopts a viewpoint that considers the historicity of interpersonal relationships, it becomes apparent that those relationships transcend the deontic triad.