Promises, Expectations, and Rights

Promises are unique and perplexing in that, by promising, we can voluntarily transform the moral status of an action. A promise can change an optional act into an obligatory one.1 By promising, it seems that we can create moral rights and obligations “from nothing.” Specifically, we can create the promisee’s right to have the action performed and the promisor’s self-imposed obligation to perform the promised action. Theorists have extensively discussed why we have a duty to keep our promises. Different answers have been provided, but two main approaches compete.2 According to the first, which we can call the “institutional approach,” the individual act of promising belongs to the social institution or convention of promising, and we have a duty to keep our promises because we have a duty to comply with that social institution, which is in some way valuable for society. Not complying with the institution (by not keeping our promises) directly or indirectly undermines the practice.3 The second approach, called the “expectational approach,” claims that the duty to keep our promises arises because when we promise something, we create an expectation in the promisee which we have the duty not to disappoint.4 The institutional approach has at least two major shortcomings. First, it cannot account for our strongly entrenched intuition that, when we fail to keep a promise, we are directly wronging the promisee. If I promise you that I will read your paper by next week, and I fail to do so, I am not doing wrong simply because I fail to comply with a social convention that bene-