Topics Ethics

Question How does one know when is it acceptable to break a promise? Is there something special about a vow, or is it just a social construct? I can envision various scenarios involving onerous mortgages and starving children, and my conclusion seems to be: "Well, you'll just know it when you see it". But that seems to suggest it's just based on my present whim.

Accepted:
July 20, 2015

Comments

To begin with two very minor

To begin with two very minor point (sorry if this seems "academic" in the negative sense!): Even if vows are social constructs, there might be something very special about vows. Second, you might well know when a vow should or should not be kept intuitively (a sort of knowledge from your gut feelings without knowing a precise principle), but this would not be a matter of whim. Someone might not have a definition of pornography, but it is not just a whim when they recognize porn on the internet.

I need to defend some modest use of a "I know it when one sees it" principle due to the last line in this response.

There is some reason to think that vows are special, explicit promises which makes them related to the implicit promise-making and breaking we do every day. So, when I say I will meet you for a coffee at 11:00, there is a sense in which I am making a promise to you and you have a right to find fault with me if I break the promise unless there are strong reasons to the contrary. Those reasons (that would excuse me from blame) might include some unforeseen accident, a medical condition, and any number of pressing ills that would override my duty to keep promises. With vows, I suggest, the stakes get higher than the everyday implicit or explicit promises we make with one another. There might be different reasons for this (e.g. a utilitarian might argue that the practice of making and keeping vows under various conditions maximizes happiness), but I suspect that an important reason why we take vows seriously is because they involve our very identity. To take your examples of the mortgage and starving children, when I vow to pay back money that I borrow (from you or from a bank), I am presenting myself as someone you can trust. I take it that means that if I am untrustworthy I have shown myself to be either hypocritical, a liar or charade or confused, etc. BUT I believe that those of us who take vows seriously are aware that each of us has many obligations. If you make a vow to repay money borrowed a bank and yet you are in a life-and-death situation to the effect that if you repay the money your children will die (and there is no other alternative), it seems that saving your children is the morally more stringent obligation.

Several areas where it has been largely held by ethicists that vows (or promises) are not binding include cases when the vows were made involuntarily or made on the basis of false information or they were made when the person or persons were not mentally in the proper state of mind or when the vows were made to do something that is evil. There have been famous cases of when it is not obvious that a person may be released from a vow. In many traditions, for example, a marriage vow is considered sundered (dissolved) if either party renounces the union, in other traditions, however, marriage vows may be considered indissolvable, so that a spouse may still be under the obligation not to marry another party even in a case when her or his spouse has renounced the marriage and has married another. On this latter view (which would fit traditional Roman Catholic ethics), the person who renounced the marriage and engaged a new marriage partner is in a state of continuous infidelity (the new "marriage" would be deemed organized adultery).

I share your sense that it may not be clear how to address various scenarios of when vows might be important to break or when they really provide serious moral weight. I'll end this overly long response with a proposal that marriage vows do, in my view, when made in a balanced state of mind and when not based on fraud etc, should be taken very seriously. I do not go as far as Roman Catholic teaching; I am inclined to think that if one of the marriage partners renounces her/his vow, the shared vow has ceased to be. But I think such a vow sets the bar pretty high in terms of fidelity. For a person to renounce such a vow the reasons would have be be serious. I may not have an exact formula of when emotional abuse gives one the right or option to walk away from a marriage vow but I believe most of us would know it when we see it.

I think that you are right

I think that you are right that there are no clear, definite rules about exactly when one may break a promise. But I don't think that this shows that whether or not it is acceptable is based on your whim.

Aristotle argued that there are only very rarely fixed rules in ethics, but there are nevertheless objective reasons for why (and when) actions are right and wrong. It just means that reasoning in ethics doesn't take the form of discovering rules. There aren't laws of ethics the way there are laws of nature. He argued that to know what is the right thing to do, at least in complex and unpredictable situations like this, you have to be good. So 'you'll just know it when you see it' is only true if you are a good person; if you aren't, you will probably think it is okay to break a promise when, really, it isn't (e.g. not being good, you might be swayed by selfishness to disregard the harm that breaking the promise would do to someone else).

Knowing when to break a promise is a matter of weighing up the reasons for and against breaking it that apply to the actual situation you are in (such as the importance of keeping your word v. the suffering of your starving children and the absence of any alternative). There aren't any algorithms for weighing up reasons, and in a different situation, there might be different reasons. So it is very difficult to base one situation on another. (We might at least think the fact that you'll break your promise is a reason not to do it, but what if you had made a promise to a morally bad person to do a morally bad thing? Then it seems it would be good to break your promise!)

The approach to ethics I've outlined here is known as 'particularism'. It rejects the idea that ethical reasoning is always about finding rules for behaviour. But we still have to reason in ethics - it isn't about our whims, and we can get the answers wrong.

A final point about your second sentence. Promises can be special and yet be a social construct (we don't have to choose). If there was no social agreement on promising, there could be no promises and nothing special about them. (If no one accepts your promise, you can't make it!) So promising is definitely a social construct in that sense. But being able to trust people to do what they say they will do is so important for us to live together that promising is special. It requires some very good reasons (again, not a mere whim) to justify breaking a promise.