Mind Association

Threats and Promises: A Reply to Vera PeetzAuthor(s): Pall S. ArdalSource: Mind, New Series, Vol. 88, No. 352 (Oct., 1979), pp. 586-587Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2253457 .

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Threats and Promises: A Reply to Vera Peetz

PALL S. ARDAL

In the October I977 issue of this journal, Mrs. Vera Peetz makes the following claims. (i) In my article 'And That's a Promise' (Philosophical Quarterly, July I968), I echo Professor Colin Grant's suggestion that 'a threat may be defined as an unwelcome promise', and that a threat is distinguished from a promise in that it is unwelcome to the threatened person; (2) that I maintain that every promise involves the same relation between the promiser and the promisee and that promises without a promisee are impossible; (3) that I maintain that a promise never in- volves any obligation on the part of the promisee; (4) that it is a misuse of language to use 'I promise...' to guarantee that something will be the case, because promises are always promises to perform a future act; (5) that it is a misuse of language to use 'I promise...' or 'that's a promise' to make threats. All these claims are incorrect. (i), (2) and (3) are misinterpretations of my view, whereas (4) and (5) are philosophically unacceptable.

(i) Promises cannot be made without the use of language or some symbolic act (e.g. a nod in answer to 'Is that a promise?'). Since threats need not be linguistic or symbolic acts, one can after all threaten someone with an axe, threats cannot be defined as special kinds of promises. Even verbal threats need not be emphatic enough to constitute 'promises'. All I claimed was that 'I promise . . .' and 'and that's a promise' could be used both to make an emphatic threat and a promise. Although promises are usually welcome to the promisee and threats are not, I point out that there are exceptions to this. I take the example of a person promising to take my wife out while I am on a whaling expedition. Although I am jealous, I may not reject the unwelcome promise because I don't want to hurt my friend's feelings (Ph. Q. I968, p. 232). Mrs. Peetz makes virtually the same point by an example involving unwanted damson jam (Mind, 1977, p. 579). I do indeed think that when harm is intended when 'I promise . . .' is used, it is natural to refer to the utterance as a threat and, also, that what may be meant as a promise may be taken as a threat and vice versa. To explain the conditions under which one or other or both of these characterizations of the act seem to be proper is the most important task for the philosophical analyst. It may be unreason able to insist that a threat can never be a promise and a promise a threat.

(2) Although I confined my attention to what I called 'ordinary' promises, I certainly did not maintain that the relation between promiser and promisee is always the same. Indeed, one of the main points I wanted to draw attention to was that there are promises and promises. Thus some are more contract-like than others (Ph. Q. I968, p. 235). There is nothing at issue between Mrs. Peetz and me on this point. I must have expressed myself extremely obscurely to have given rise to this mis- understanding.

(3) That the promisee has, at least in very many cases, an obligation

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THREATS AND PROMISES: A REPLY TO VERA PEETZ 587 as well as the promiser can hardly be disputed. I have elsewhere ('Pro- mises and Reliance', Dialogue, 1976) drawn attention to the fact that not to do what is tacitly understood may be immoral for exactly the same reason as breaking a promise. If I ask a friend to promise to meet me for lunch in a certain place, he surely has every reason to expect me to be there and to hold me responsible if I am not. Has anyone explicitly or implicitly denied this obvious fact?

(4) 1 still maintain that what I called 'salesman's promises' involve no misuse of language. 'I promise you that my firm will supply spare parts for this car for the next ten years' is perfectly good English as far as I can see. It is certainly false to claim that one can only promise to 'perform some future act' (Mind, 1977, p. 578). Can one not promise never to smoke again?

(5) Mrs. Peetz takes as an example of a promise without a promisee the following statement she quotes from a television play: 'If you tell, I'll kill you. That's not a threat; it's a promise.' It is, she claims, because I and others have failed to appreciate the existence of promises without a promisee that we quite wrongly think that statements of this nature can constitute threats. I think she completely misreads the function of 'it's a promise' in this expression. What the speaker wants to rule out is the notion that 'I'll kill you' is here merely a vain threat. By saying 'it's a promise', the threat is made more emphatic and it was precisely this function that I attributed to 'I promise. . .' and 'that's a promise'. I called these expressions emphasizing expressions rather than explicit performatives because they can be used both to make emphatic promises and emphatic threats. Since Mrs. Peetz thinks that promises always involve the undertaking of an obligation, she is committed to the view I tried to explode in 'And That's a Promise', that a man who seriously uses expressions like the one under discussion has some obligation to kill the person because he has promised he would. If there is no independent justification for killing the person, saying 'I promise to kill you' certainly does not entail that you have a conflict of duties if you think you ought not to kill the person because killing people is wrong. If the statement is construed as a promise, then there certainly are promises that we do not have a prima facie obligation to keep. But it is not so clear that it has been shown that there are promises without a promisee. What is the function of 'you' in 'I'll kill you'? And just imagine counsel for the defence in a murder trial arguing as follows: 'I do indeed admit that the accused did say "If you tell, I'll kill you. That's not a threat; it's a promise." And he meant what he said seriously. But this in no way shows that he threatened the person he is accused of murdering, for he only made a promise without a promisee.' Since the example was taken from a play, I asked a professional actress how, she would understand a statement such as the one under discussion. The immediate unqualified answer was 'as a threat'.

There are certain acts that can be thought of as promises without a promisee, such as oaths and vows. I did not discuss these in my article because they seem to me to need special treatment.

QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY

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