On the Fine Structure of Promising

The human practice of promising has fascinated or disturbed a wide range of philosophers. For Hume (1739, III.ii), promising was one of the crucial test cases for his theory of artificial virtues; Nietzsche (1886) went so far as to characterise man as the animal capable of promising. Explaining the moral force of promises has been and remained an important and difficult problem for moral philosophy, as can be seen by the vast literature on the subject.1 The practice of promising has also been of central importance for discussions about the nature of rules (Rawls 1955) and in the development of speech act theory (Searle 1969). Promising is thus an important topic of philosophy, but it differs from many other important topics in terms of its phenomenological accessibility. For many philosophically central notions such as knowledge, truth, and the morally good, any approach to these topics will first have to address the difficult questions of how to discern instances, and even whether there are any. Understanding promising is easier in this respect, since we surely know a promise when we see one. Promising is a common, everyday phenomenon, not some abstract notion or theoretical concept. Thus, the main philosophical questions about promising are, firstly, questions concerning the detailed phenomenology of that practice and, secondly, the question of how it works. What is the nature, and what are the internal workings, of a practice through which we can freely bind ourselves? The aim of this paper is to show how a broadly action-theoretic view on the practice of promising, combined with an analytically oriented interest in its structural aspects, can help discern the fine structure of promising