Sheehan, HPG;
(2016)
The Making and Breaking of Promises.
Masters thesis , UCL (University College London).
Preview |
Text
Sheehan_Completed Thesis.pdf Download (619kB) | Preview |
Abstract
In this thesis I shall answer two different questions about promising: how do we make binding promises and what is the distinctive wrong that we commit by breaking promises. In the first chapter I shall answer the first of these questions by arguing that promising is a practice. This explains how a promise can bind us to act as we said we would because all practices restrict how we can permissibly act in some way. In the second chapter I shall defend a Rawlsian explanation of why we should be morally obliged to obey the rules of the practice of promising and why promises generate obligations rather than merely restricting our actions. This will only be a partial defence, however, since in the third chapter, I will show that conventionalist accounts such as Rawls’s cannot explain the distinctive wrong of breaking a promise. I shall argue that this is the case because they cannot explain how a broken promise wrongs the promisee in particular, because they cannot capture the directed nature of the wrong of breaking promises. In the fourth and final chapter I shall offer an explanation of the distinctive wrong of breaking a promise close to the expectationalist account presented by Tim Scanlon. I shall argue that in order to explain the wrong of breaking a promise there must be a practice of promising to allow the promisor to solicit the beliefs and expectations of the promisee which explain the distinctive wrong of promise breaking. Overall I will argue that these two separate questions require two different approaches, one conventionalist and the other non-conventionalist, that fit together to provide a coherent account of the phenomenon of promising.
| Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Making and Breaking of Promises |
| Event: | UCL (University College London) |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1474871 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
