Shaping The Normative Landscape PDF Download

Our most important interpersonal relationships are often the sites of our most meaningful promises, from the promises we extract from our parents as children in order to receive assurance from a position of little power to the promises we make to our partners in romantic relationship to negotiate the commitments we hold. Academic philosophy as a whole has generally paid too little attention to the social and moral significance of these promises, and the ways in which they shape our relationships. Promises allow us to, among other things, make lifelong commitments to other people and establish norms for the ways we treat each other in relationships. A promise to pick up ones partner at the airport after a flight gets in can result, on the most basic level, in a person getting picked up (or not picked up) at a terminal at an agreed-upon time. But such a promise can also set norms for how two people in a relationship demonstrate love and respect for each other, how they position themselves as committed and reliable, or, on the other hand, how they fail to do any of these things. Therefore, in this thesis, my aim is to explore the practice of promising within interpersonal relationships and begin to present an account of promising that appropriately privileges the function of promises as relationship norm-setting tools. In the first chapter, I will examine Mark Lance and Quill R Kuklas account of calls as it relates to promising in order to demonstrate the complexity of the ways in which we promise and respond to promises within our important relationships, and will examine a number of hypothetical cases of promising within relationships under Lance and Kuklas account. In the second chapter, I will consider the features of an account of promising that explains the importance of promising in relationships, and will come up with three desired criteria for an account of promising. These criteria relate to 1) the uptake given by the promisee, 2) the time over which the promise is made and accepted, and 3) the subject matter and content of promises in relationships (particularly in romantic relationships). In the third and final chapter, I will evaluate three accounts of promising – T.M. Scanlons expectational account, Seana Shiffrins rights-transfer account, and J.L. Austins speech act account – on the basis of my three desired criteria for an account of promising, and will conclude that Austins account, with some modifications, best explains (or is least likely to preclude the existence of) the relationship-related goods and ills that I see as an effect of promising.