Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 13.07.1981, Side 231
Promises and Games
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affairs will obtain, or that certain propositions will be true, e.g. that
Tide washes whiter than white. The promiser can be held responsible
for the evil brought into the world by his failure to satisfy favourable
expectations that his own act has aroused, in most cases deliberately.
However, it must not be forgotten that it may sometimes be unreason-
able to hold a man to a promise that he undoubtedly made, and that it
is wrong to fulfill a promise to do an immoral act. ‘You are under no
obligation to do x although you promised to do x’ is certainly not a
contradiction. Although one is never under an obligation to keep a
promise that it would be immoral to keep, it need not have been im-
moral to make the promise. The failure to appreciate the immorality
may for example have been due to ignorance that was not blameworthy.
In such cases one may have an obligation to explain to the promisee
why one does not do what one promised to do. He too may, through no
fault of his own, not appreciate the immorality of the promised act.
When you have decided that the act you promised to do is immoral, you
have no prima facie obligation to perform that act, although you may
have an obligation to explain to the promisee why you consider yourself
not to be bound by the promise. If this happens after the promise was to
have been kept, the promisee may of course disagree with you, but no
blame attaches to you, if, when the promise was given, you had no
reason to believe that it was immoral, and you could not have sought to
be released from the promise prior to its performance. The mere fact
that the promise was made furnishes in such a case no reason at all for
doing the promised deed.
I argued that when the point of a promise is lost, the obligation ceases
and this is why I denied that there is a prima facie obligation to keep
Promises. For a prima facie obligation is normally taken to really oblige
a person, unless the prima facie obligation in question is overridden by
a more stringent one. But I claimed that when everyone, including the
Person to whom a promise is made, ceases to care whether it is kept or
n°t, the performance of the promise has become pointless, although a
fanatically honest promiser may prefer to stick to the rule of keeping
his promises for the sake of his own character. He may of course be
quite mistaken in his belief that following such a rule is good for his
uharacter.
In rejecting my view Michael H. Robins argues that threats are un-