Promises, Oaths, and Vows

On the Psychology of Promising

Herbert J. Schlesinger

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780881634549
  9780881634549
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135469504
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Considering that getting along in civil society is based on the expectation that (most) people will do what they say they will do, i.e., essentially live up to their explicit or implicit promises, it is amazing that so little scientific attention has been given to the act of promising. A great deal of research has been done on the moral development of children, for example, but not on the child's ability to make and keep a promise, one of the highest moral achievements. What makes it possible developmentally, cognitively, and emotionally to make a promise in the first place? And on the other hand, what compels one to keep a promise (or vow or threat) when there seems to be no personal advantage in doing so, and even when harm can be predicted? How do we know when a promise is offered seriously to be taken at face value, and how do we understand that another is only a polite gesture, not to be taken seriously?

In Promises, Oaths, and Vows: On the Psychology of Promising, Herbert Schlesinger addresses these questions, drawing on the literature of moral development in children; the psychotherapy of a patient who regularly broke promises that were unnecessary in the first place; those who were regarded as "promising youngsters" who did not fulfill their "promise"; and those who feared making a promise, a commitment, or a threat out of fear that, once made, the utterance would take on a life of its own and could never be taken back. Furthermore, he illustrates his conclusions by examining the widespread use of promising in classical literature, such as Greek drama and the plays of Shakespeare, as well as the motivating and reifying power of the promise in Western religious traditions.

With a style honed over the penning of two previous books, Schlesinger once again produces a work grounded in a firm analytic sensibility, but which also retains the wit and candor of the seasoned analyst. His seminal investigation of this all but neglected topic in the clinical literature is as timely as it is scholarly, and – with the title firmly in mind – Promises, Oaths, and Vows is assured to be a worthy addition to any clinician's library and a provoking investigation into Nietzsche's notion of man as "the animal who makes promises."

1

PROMISING AND MORALITY

At some time, every one of us has been disappointed by the failure of another to behave as expected. We may take the unpleasant reminder philosophically; accepting that some among us do not act properly at times; whereas most of us behave appropriately most of the time. When does an encounter with someone behaving improperly raise considerations of a higher order? When do we consider such behavior not just wrong, but immoral?

Rather than approaching the issue from the negative side, let us consider what we mean by moral. Freud (1915) famously dismissed the question with an answer that might have been offered by any 19th-century gentleman who assumed that his personal code of behavior also defined morality, “What is moral is self-evident” (p. 267).¹ Far from being self-evident, the question has preoccupied philosophers, ethicists, and religionists from time beyond memory (e. g., Newman, 2004; see also Gilligan, 1976; Gert, 2005) and it still excites lively controversy among our contemporaries. Philosophers have been clear about the central importance of the act of promising for a theory of morality.² Kant (1785) applied his seminal concept of morality, “the categorical imperative,” to a number of examples. Perhaps the best known concerns unfaithful promises. Consider, for instance, a person who is short of money and asks for a loan. He promises to repay it, but he has no intention of repaying. By applying the idea of the categorical imperative to this behavior, Kant observed that it fails the necessary condition that one should behave as if one’s behavior would be adopted universally. About this example, he noted that the behavior is self-contradictory; if breaking promises were to become universal, no one would ever agree to accept a promise and promising would disappear, and with that so would morality.

We daily experience that, if kept at all, promises tend to be kept only more or less as offered, and yet morality is not shattered as Kant’s tight, deductive logic would predict. Still, it is hardly arguable that man’s ability to make a promise with the intention to keep it and then actually to carry it out is essential to the orderly functioning of society. The very question, Why should we keep promises? is so embedded in our social norms that asking it can be used to test a child’s intelligence (Wechsler, 2003). It has profound implications that touch on core issues of culture, the nature of the social contract, and the very substance of higher morality. I draw on personal experience to note that when I asked one bright child that question, he retorted tartly that some people do not always keep their promises. We might agree that, although the question implies an absolute value, as this child had already discovered, whether or not one fulfills a promise is highly conditioned by circumstance. The circumstances include at least the promiser’s perhaps conflicted or even insincere intention in making the promise, the nature of the perhaps changing relationship between the promiser and promisee, and who else might be listening.

While we may accept, cynically or philosophically, that occasionally we fall short of our best intentions in regard to keeping promises, we probably do not challenge Kant’s proposal that keeping promises is an absolute good, an aspect of “natural law” (Murphy, 2002). Yet we can imagine, as did Cicero (60 BCE, p. 197), that because in the mean time circumstances might have changed, it could be inadvisable, even harmful, to keep a particular promise, even if it had been made with the best intentions.

Recent history and current newspapers tell that the principles many of us hold as moral absolutes are widely ignored. The governmentally approved mass slaughters in Nazi Germany and more recently in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan tell us that following the rules of local society may not guarantee that one is moral. These questions—What is moral behavior? How do children become moral? How do we understand obvious departures from moral behavior?—continue to trouble those who think about such matters

I have put the issue of morality by assuming that floating somewhere above the regularities of the social order that define propriety there is a generally accepted moral code. Most of us, like Freud, might hold the code to be self-evident, and most of us, at least in casual usage, would include that every person has a will that is sufficiently free to choose to behave morally or not, properly or not.³ While the factuality of these assumptions is challengeable, they are nevertheless convenient. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine how an organized society, even a primitive one, could exist if its people did not subscribe and largely conform to a broad array of implicit expectations of how people are to behave in relation to each other, to the material world of things, and to the environment in general. The “soft” system of social controls embodied in “culture” complements the more formal sets of rules and sanctions that are codified in law and regulation. Anthropologists tell us that every culture develops such patterns of traditional customs and expectations, which differ from each other in particulars but cover the same areas of behavior and belief and always are supported by a set of overarching principles, often based in or supported by religion; and it is this set of higher principles that frames what is moral. Yet, if we follow this line of argument much further, we will be in danger of falling into the same error I warned about earlier—equating what is moral with what, locally, is socially accepted and even praised. The great exemplars that define morality for us, after all, include Socrates, Jesus, and Gandhi, each of whom took a principled stance based on what he took to be higher values, a stance that was against certain contemporary social norms. On a less lofty plane, each of us has observed on occasion, “It might be legal, but it ain’t right.”

The Scientific Study of Morality

As a question to be studied scientifically, morality preoccupied social and developmental psychologists even before these subdisciplines of psychology were firmly established, perhaps as soon as the discipline of psychology separated itself from its parent, philosophy. As Lickona (1975) noted, the question of morality is at an interdisciplinary crossroads and permeates many discussions and studies of child and adult development and behavior. His list of moral issues that have been studied more or less scientifically includes, among many other subjects, “violence, altruism, criminality, cooperation, honesty, child-rearing, self-control, situational variations in behavior, modeling, the influence of heredity versus experience, bystander response to emergencies, social and political attitudes, personality functioning and the impact of culture on socialization” (p. x). Although this list is hardly exhaustive, it is noteworthy that keeping a promise does not appear on it; neither does promise or promising appear in Lickona’s index. The omission of promising in relation to morality is representative of works in the field.

It is hardly arguable that the ability to make and keep a promise, and the general agreement that breaking a promise invokes moral condemnation, are essential to the orderly functioning of society. It is remarkable, then, that promise keeping, which I propose is one of the defining acts of maturity in moral behavior, has been almost totally ignored as a focus of systematic study by psychologists.⁴ Nevertheless, in chapter 4, I offer a sample of the research on the development of moral behavior in children for the tangential relevance of its findings to the morality of keeping promises.

Although I must situate my discussion of promising within the general context of morality and moral behavior, I do not deal here with morality in general or philosophical terms, but only in those special instances when unconscious forces seem to corrupt one’s moral sense as it takes over the fulfilling of a dire oath (see chapter 6).

The Everyday Meaning of Promising

I use the term promise in its ordinary, everyday sense as an explicit statement of one’s intention to perform some act at a future time with the proviso that someone relies on the fulfillment of the promise. One could, of course, promise to avoid performing some act, and the someone who counts on fulfillment could also be the one who makes the promise. We can and, at least as often as New Year’s Day, we do promise ourselves to do or not do something. Whether or not a promise must be explicit and verbalized, and whether it is made in the hearing of another party are subissues I consider later; I expand on this partial definition in chapter 2.

Although I have assumed the commonsensical position that we know when we have made a promise, scholars differ about this matter. As I will discuss further in chapter 2, theorists, including some linguists, for example Austin (1962), consider only the words spoken, regardless of context. Others, for example Grice (1975), think it important to consider the intention of the speaker as well. Clearly, linguistic theorists are preoccupied by different questions from those that concern everyday consumers of promises, such as; does the speaker mean what he says? Can we count on his delivering the goods when he said he would? That last concern, of course, is a separate issue from whether or not, when he spoke, the speaker did intend to deliver the goods. Moreover, it is a separate issue from how fixed his intention might remain, however “true” it might have been when uttered⁵. How quickly this seemingly simple matter has become complicated.

And, too, an ordinary promise is similar in semantic structure to other statements of intention—vows, oaths (both solemn, as in marriage, and testimonial, as in a court of law), threats, covenants or contracts, ⁶ and in contingent form, ultimatums. It is also obvious that the amount of moral (and legal) weight we give any particular promise varies with context and circumstance. For instance, the degree of willingness or obligation one feels to fulfill a promise may depend on the rational and emotional circumstances⁷ that existed at the time one made the promise, for example, when one was grateful or enraged, and that exist at the time set for fulfillment, when the circumstances might be other than one anticipated when making the promise. Another index of the moral and legal weight of a promise is the expected or actual reaction of others to keeping it or breaking it.

Earlier, I slipped in a phrase, as if by the way, to the list of circumstances that helps to determine if a promise will be fulfilled, that is, “on who else may be listening.” This innocuous-seeming insertion conceals a heavy addition to the complexity of the problem of promising, and it invokes a current and lively debate among psychoanalytic theorists; should we remain with what some call a “one-person” theory or accept that the “two-person” version of object relations theory gives a better account of the actuality of human experience (Aron, 1990)? This debate ignores that in one of Freud’s (1905a) least referred to, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” but hardly least important, works, he saw the necessity for a three-party relationship paradigm. Although his main interest at the time was in expanding the reach of the libido theory, he found it necessary to expand his conception of human relatedness to include a third person to understand how we appreciate a joke; he distinguished the one who tells the joke, the one about whom it is told, and the one to whom it is told (pp. 144-158). Freud spelled out the qualities that third party must have to appreciate the joke, including that he be in psychical accord with the teller of the joke (p.151). To ease the analogy between joking and promising, we may note, as Freud did not, that the person telling the joke may also be the butt of it (e.g., the joke is on me), one can laugh at oneself.

In the social arrangements in which the act of promising is embedded, the nature and degree of affinity between the listening, witnessing third party and the promiser and promisee will prove to be particularly important. The third party may be the being—living, dead, or immortal—whose name is invoked to guarantee fulfillment of a vow or oath, ⁸ as when in the courtroom, with hand on the Bible, one utters the fateful phrase, “So help me God.” Or he may be the oath maker himself, as in “On my sacred honor.” Or he may be represented by the legal system in the promises that are embedded in contracts; or he may be embodied namelessly, so to speak, in one’s conscience. In chapter 6, I return to detail the importance of the third party, embodied or not, when I consider the destructive over-fulfillment of a promise or oath, fulfillment when the oath maker no longer consciously wishes to fulfill it.

Categories of Promises

In daily life, a complicated web of factors and circumstances promotes the keeping of actual promises and may even excuse the breaking of promises. Statements in the semantic form of a promise, that is, utterances that sound like promises, are so loosely offered in everyday usage that the meaning the promiser intends and the meaning the receiver infers are far from certain. Moreover, the fate of a statement that sounds like a promise depends on much more than the half-hearted intention of the promiser; unlike a contract, which is a set of mutual promises that ends a period of negotiation, the more-or-less promise may be offered only to open negotiation. The opening statement that sounded like a promise may evolve into a firmer and more considered commitment, or it may lose even the little force it once seemed to have as the promiser’s intentions and their possible consequences become clarified. Considering the complexities, it is remarkable that the promises we expect to be kept are indeed kept. It is equally remarkable that we are not surprised, and may not even notice, that certain statements made to us in the syntax of promising are not kept, for neither party expected them to be kept; and, even if we remember that the statements were made, we do not remember them as actual promises. Here is a brief catalogue of statements that are cast as some form of promising and that arouse varying expectations:

Serious Promises: Promises Made with the Full Intention to Keep Them

Marriage vows—While they may be made in all sincerity, often enough they are not kept, at least not in all particulars, and yet the marriage may endure. Even if the vow is later broken, or bent, one cannot say it was insincere when made. Although religious sanctions may enforce the keeping of marriage vows “until death do us part,” society provides the mechanism of divorce to relieve each party of the obligations of the vows. Serious promises, of course, are offered on less momentous occasions and generally are uttered in such a way as to convince listeners of the promiser’s sincerity. The promisee will wonder if she actually knows the true intentions of the person who says, “I promise;”⁹ Can she rely on it? As promises are offered only in the context of possibly mixed intentions, we must challenge the usage “true intentions.” Although we should know better, we often speak in this reductionistic way, ignoring that we harbor conflicting intentions, all of them true. Which of these intentions is salient at the time set for fulfilling the promise is of the essence, and if several sincere and conflicting intentions are operative, the outcome may be especially uncertain and especially interesting.

Solemn oaths—For example, oaths of office, like marriage and religious vows, may be kept scrupulously or only more or less. Generally, unlike marriage vows and religious vows, they are time limited.

Testimonial oaths—The requirement to tell the truth when under oath is expected to be observed scrupulously. The court will impose severe punishment for failure to do so while “on the stand”—for committing perjury. These oaths are in force only until one is excused from being “sworn” by the court.

Contracts—These promises are expected to be fulfilled as written. Contracts usually state precisely the way and time when they are to be fulfilled, and detail the consequences of a breach and the procedures for adjudicating one. The obligations end when the contract is fulfilled or terminated. A contract may be unwritten or oral, and yet will be binding if another party relied on its fulfillment. The parties may later agree to nullify the contract or change its provisions.

Promises That Are Not Serious

Casual promises—One may use the promising form “lightly,” or casually, or to show interest in another; but without the full intention of keeping it and without any expectation that one will be called on to keep it, unless the other person confirms the offer. For example, one offers a ride to another when several drivers are available and have made offers; only one ride is needed.

A promise one makes with “fingers crossed”—Such a promise is made with the hope that one will not be called on to keep it; it is even made, perhaps with the expectation that the offer will be refused. The promiser may use extravagant terms to preclude being understood literally; such as, “promise the moon.” The promiser may not remember making a promise if it is not “picked up” by a listener and included in that person’s plans. A promise may be extorted in some sense; for instance, one may pledge a contribution one ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Promising and Morality
• Chapter 2. Why Do We Make Promises? Promise Keeping as One of the Defining Acts of Morality: Philosophical, Historical, and Legal Background
• Chapter 3. Promising and the Theory of Mind in Development
• Chapter 4. Empirical Studies of Moral Development
• Chapter 5. Developmental and Regressive Aspects of Making and Breaking Promises
• Chapter 6. Mature and Regressive Determinants of the Keeping of Promises
• Chapter 7. Implicit Promising and the Implicit Promise
• Chapter 8. Promising in the Clinic
• Chapter 9. Promising as an Element of Form and Content in Greek Drama
• Chapter 10. Promising in Shakespearean Drama
• Chapter 11. Forms of Promising in Religious Practices
• Epilogue
• References
• Footnotes
• Index