Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 13.07.1981, Síða 240

230
Páll S. Árdal
with regard to promises is old hat to anyone who has read Hume’s ac-
count of artificial virtues in the Treatise, and in particular, what he says
about the nature of promises and our obligation to keep them.7 Hume’s
distinction between natural and artificial virtues is based upon the
insight John Searle rightly wants to stress, that statements such as “X
is a promise” and “X is mine” are intelligible only if we presuppose
certain general conventions, certain human institutions, in a very broad
sense of that term.
Let us now imagine a situation in which a man is wondering whether
he ought to keep a particular promise. We are told by Rawls that we
decide the issue by reference to the constitutive rules of the practice.
But the constitutive rules of games lay down only what is and what is
not permitted, and do not as such help one to decide what one ought
to do, unless only one permitted move is possible. It may be said that
this in no way invalidates the analogy with promises. The problem is
‘Ought I or ought I not to keep this promise?’ The answer would always
be either ‘You ought to keep it’ or ‘it is not the case that you ought to
keep it’. Only one course of action is thus ever permitted by the rules.
One must of course be alive to the difference between “it is not the case
that you ought to do x” and “you ought not to do x”.
But, what are the constitutive rules of promises by reference to which
one is supposed to decide what one ought to do, where the question
arises whether or not one ought to do what one undoubtedly promised
to do? There are of course certain fairly clear cases: one ought, for
example, not to do what is clearly immoral, although one has promised
to do so. But this is unilluminating, and it is precisely the making up
your mind in the normal cases that is on occasion difficult, and I submit
that it is far fetched and misleading to suggest that one appeals to pre-
existing rules in resolving such a difficulty. It is awareness of this prob-
lem that leads Rawls to write that “. . . a particular case cannot be an
exception to a rule of a practice. An exception is rather a qualification
or a further specification of the rule.” This suggests that the analogy is
closest with children’s games, when you to a certain extent make up the
rules as you go along. In the ordinary competitive games we have
mentioned the rules are laid down in advance, and the question is one
7 For my account of the artificial virtue of being a responsible language user
see my Convention and Value published in Hume: Bicentenary Papers, Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh 1976.