INTRODUCTION
Most of us believe that people are obligated to keep their promises. There are many views of why this is. Most contemporary accounts agree that it is because promises somehow establish a normatively significant relation between two people: the person who gives the promise (the promisor) and the person who receives it (the promisee). But they differ in how they construe this relation. Some explain the wrongness of breaking promises in terms of the promisee’s expectations (Scanlon 1998, Chap 7), others in terms of her trust (Friedrich and Southwood 2011), and yet others in terms of her normative authority with respect to the promisor (Owens 2006). My aim in this paper is to defend a novel account which appeals to a different relation, namely reliance. Promissory exchanges, I will argue, establish relations of reliance between promisee and promisor which are well‐suited to explain the normativity of promissory obligations …
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Alexander Heape, Promises, obligation, and reliance, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, https://doi-org.ucc.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/phpr.12752. First published: 13 December 2020.
First posted 2020-12-14 06:28:46
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