PROMISE, in ordinary cases, is a declaration of some intention to be put in execution; but in morals is a solemn affirmation by which one pledges his veracity that he shall perform, or cause to be performed, the thing which he mentions.
As such a declaration excites expectations in the minds of those to whom it is made; and as to frustrate
these expectations might rouse indignation, and be followed by consequences injurious to the person, the character, or interest, of him who made it—it becomes a matter of prudence in the promiser to keep his word. And farther, as a certain degree of confidence is found necessary to the very existence of civil society, and as others may have acted on the faith of his promise, it is now not a matter of prudence only to keep his word—it is a duty which he owes to all who have spent their time, their money, or their labour, in consequence of those expectations which he has warranted them to entertain.
It, then, being consonant to sound reason, necessary to the existence of civil society, and in general the interest of both the promiser and promisee, that the words of the promise should be fulfilled, it has become a maxim in morals that a man is obliged to perform his promise.
In many instances, the great difficulty concerning a promise is, how to explain it; for although the grounds of its obligation be those expectations which it has raised, a question will occur, Is the promiser bound to answer fully all the expectations to which the different constructions of his words may have given birth? Should I, for instance, desire a man to run with a letter to such a place, and engage to satisfy him upon his return; and if on his return I gave him double of the usual hire in like cases; but if he be not satisfied with less than the triple of such a sum, am I obliged to grant his demands? This will lead us to consider the rules by which a promise should be interpreted.
If a promise were always to be deemed obligatory in the sense in which the promisee receives it, a man would not know what he had promised; the promisee, from a difference of views, associations, and interests, might conceive a sense of which the promiser had never dreamed; might suppose engagements which were never intended, which could not be foreseen, and, although foreseen, could not be performed. For these reasons it is natural to think that the sense of the promiser should rather direct the interpretation. He knows precisely what it is he has undertaken, and is unquestionably the best judge of what meaning he affixed to his words. His explanation should therefore be admitted, if information alone could give him a title to decide in the affair.
But something more than mere information, or a knowledge of the cause, is expected from a judge, as integrity is equally essential to his character. Doubts may arise when the words will admit of various meanings, whether the promiser will be so candid as impartially to own the precise meaning which he had actually annexed to his expressions: At any rate, if he wishes to deceive, he might purposely use an ambiguous phraseology, and perform the promise in a sense of his own without satisfying the reasonable hopes of the promisee.
When the daughter of Tarpeius bargained with Taurus to betray the citadel for what he and his Sabines wore on their left hands, meaning their rings and their golden bracelets, Taurus probably performed his promise in the way which he intended, when he caused her to be buried under their shields, which they carried also on their left hands. But who will say that here were not treachery and a dishonourable abuse of that confidence which had been reposed in him?
It.
It must therefore be obvious, that the import of a promise, where its meaning is disputed, is not to be determined by the sense of the promiser nor by the expectations of the promisee; and if it was said that the obligation of a promise arose from those expectations which had been raised by it, the assertion now must be limited to those expectations which were intentionally raised by the promiser, or those which to his knowledge the promisee was induced to entertain in consequence of that declaration which had been made to him. Should there still be a doubt about what expectations were intentionally raised, and what should have been reasonably entertained, recourse must be had to the judgement of those who are allowed to be persons of candour, and who are acquainted with the characters of the men, and with those circumstances in which the promise was made.
The following are some of the cases in which a promise is not binding. As the obligation to perform the promise arises from those expectations which are intentionally raised by the promiser; it is plain that no promise can be binding before acceptance, before the promise has been communicated to the promisee, and before he has entertained hopes of its performance. The case is similar where a promise is released, that is, where the performance is dispensed with by the promisee, and where he entertains no expectations on account of any thing than the promiser has said to him. Should a third person entertain hopes on account of the promise, he is to cherish these hopes at his own hazard, having no encouragement from the promiser to do so: yet if this person has been warranted to hope by the promisee, the promisee has renounced his privilege of releasing the promise, and along with the promiser becomes bound for its performance.
A promise is not binding where the performance is unlawful; and the performance is unlawful where it is contrary to former promises, or to any moral and religious precept, which from the beginning to the end of time is of perpetual and unalterable obligation. Thus no man is bound by his promise to give to me what he has already promised to another; and no man is bound by his promise to blaspheme God, to commit murder, or to criminate the innocent. Such promises are unlawfully made, and cannot be otherwise than unlawfully performed.
Some have even carried their scruples so far as to doubt, whether any promise unlawfully made, can be lawfully performed. Should a man, during the lifetime of his wife, happen to promise marriage to another, such a man (they say) by the Christian religion has already committed adultery in his heart; and should he afterwards become a widower, he is not bound, and he even ought not, to fulfil his engagements, as this would be putting his criminal intention into execution. This species of reasoning, we must confess, is to us unintelligible.—As the wife is dead, what now should prevent the man from marrying the object of his affections? Why, say the casuists, he already is under a promise to marry her, and his promise was made at a time when it should not have been made. It is true, the performance, considered by itself, is opposed by no law human or divine; but then it originated in what was wrong; and however much the Supreme Being and the bulk of the creation may be out of the secret, we have discovered by the ingenious logic of casuistry, that evil can never spring
out of good, nor good out of evil; but that the means and the end, the motive and the action, are always of the same complexion in morals.
When a promise is made, the particular circumstances in which it is to be deemed obligatory are sometimes mentioned. "I promise (for instance) to lend my friend 200 pounds within three days, provided a certain creditor which I name do not make a demand on me before that time. In other cases no circumstance is foreseen by the promiser to prevent the fulfilling of his engagement; and hence we have erroneous promises, which proceed on the supposition that things are true, possible, and lawful, which are not so. An erroneous promise, which proceeds on the false representation of the promisee, is not binding.
A London gentleman lately purchased an estate in the south of England at a public sale, believing the description which he saw in the newspapers, and which likewise was given by the auctioneer, to be true; but finding afterwards that the estate nowise corresponded to the description, the law freed him from his engagement, because the seller had evidently been guilty of a breach of promise in not satisfying those expectations which he had intentionally and even studiously excited in the buyers.
An erroneous promise, whose performance is impossible, is not binding. Before the conclusion of the late war a planter of Tobago promised to send to his friend in England 12 hogheads of sugar from the next year's produce of his estate; but before that time Tobago fell into the hands of the French, and the West Indian found it impossible to answer the expectations of his friend in England.
An erroneous promise, whose performance is unlawful, or, to speak more precisely, whose performance is contrary to a prior promise, or to any moral or religious obligation, is not binding. A father, believing the accounts from abroad of his son's death, soon after bequeaths his fortune to his nephew: but the son, the report of whose death had been false, returns home, and the father is released from the promise to his nephew, because it was contrary to a prior promise, which he had tacitly come under to his son. This prior promise was implied in the whole of the father's conduct, and was expressed in signs as emphatic and as unequivocal as those of language. It had all the effect too of the most solemn promise on the son, who, to his father's knowledge, was induced in consequence of this promise to entertain the most sanguine hopes of succeeding to his father, if he survived. The world likewise could bear testimony that these expectations were not rashly cherished. He was brought into existence by means of his father, who was thereby understood to love him affectionately; he was ushered into society as the representative of his family, and was therefore supposed to be the heir of its wealth. Religion itself supported his pretensions, pronouncing the father worse than an infidel who neglects to show that attention to his children which the world naturally expects from a parent.—That the father's promise was not released from the mere circumstance that the mistake was known to his nephew the promisee, will appear plain from the following circumstance. Suppose the father a landed proprietor, that the lease of one of his farms has expired, and that he has long been expecting
Promise. to let it at 200l.; suppose that this sum is refused, and that he agrees with the present tenant to grant a new lease at 150l.—the obligation here to perform his promise is not dissolved by an after offer of 200l., though the tenant knew that 200l. had been expected, and that only from despairing of that sum his landlord had granted the new lease at 150l.: the promise is binding, because the performance is every way lawful, contrary to no prior engagement, and opposed to no principle in morals. The law of the land, were the proprietor reluctant, would enforce the obligation, and exact obedience in the tone of authority; because breaches of faith, were they permitted in such cases, would destroy all confidence, and annihilate the bonds of social union:
Men live and prosper but in mutual trust;
A confidence of one another's truth. Ozonoko.
13 Utility no criterion whereby to judge of the validity of promises. The great difficulty which many have to encounter in determining when erroneous promises ought or ought not to be kept, arises from their proceeding on a principle of whole consequences they do not seem to be always aware. There is seldom, they perceive, a virtuous action that is not attended with some happy effects; and it will, perhaps, be generally allowed, that the comparative merit of similar virtues may safely be estimated by their utility: But to make utility, as some do, the criterion of virtue, and pronounce an action vicious or virtuous merely on account of those consequences which they see may flow from it, is a dangerous maxim. Evil has often sprung out of good, and good out of evil; and good and evil have frequently sprung from the same action. In Mandeville's Hire,
That root of evil Avarice,
That damn'd ill-natur'd baneful vice,
Was slave to Prodigality,
That noble sin; whilst Luxury
Employ'd a million of the poor,
And odious Pride a million more.
Envy itself and Vanity
Were ministers of Industry:
That darling folly, Fickleness,
In diet, furniture, and dress,
That strange ridiculous vice, was made
The very wheel that turn'd the trade.
The description here is not altogether false; and these indeed may be some of the consequences that flow from avarice, luxury, pride, vanity, and envy: but these are not all.—To see at once all the consequences that spring from an action, the good and the bad, the particular and general, the immediate and remote, would require sometimes the foresight of Omniscience, and at all times a knowledge superior to what is human. In the Fable of the Bees, the author's object was to show that private vices are public benefits; and he therefore was naturally led by his argument to consider only such consequences of vice as favoured his hypothesis. He wanted candour. And that artifice which runs through his Fable happens to remind us, that while the remote and the general effects of an action may not be seen, the particular and immediate, which fall within our notice, are apt to be viewed through the medium of pas-
sion, interest, or opinion. For these reasons, it appears surprising how any person should ever imagine that the obligation to perform a promise should depend entirely upon the ideas which the promiser apprehended of its utility.
The best refutation of such an opinion are the singular conclusions to which it leads.
A late writer on political justice, who appears to have embraced it, gets into reasoning not very common. In a part of his system he looks on morals as an article of trade: virtue and vice, in his Chapter of Promises, are but antiquated terms for profit and loss; and right and wrong are used to express what is beneficial and what is hurtful, in his apprehension, to himself and the community.—With respect to veracity, those "rational and intelligent beings," by whom he wishes the affairs of the world to be carried on, may, while they act as rational and intelligent, break or perform their promises at pleasure. He thinks it "essential to various circumstances of human intercourse, that we should be known to bestow a steady attention upon the quantities of convenience or inconvenience, of good or evil, that might arise to others from our conduct." After this attention, the disappointment of the promisee is not to be minded, though the expectations excited by these "rational and intelligent beings" may have "altered the nature of his situation, and engaged him in undertakings from which he would otherwise have abstained." What the promiser takes to be the general utility and the fitness of things is to be his guide. And a breach of promise will be attended with the following advantages: "The promisee, and all other men, will be taught to depend more upon their own exertions, and less upon the assistance of others, which caprice may refuse or justice withhold. He and all others will be taught to acquire such merit, and to engage in such pursuits, as shall oblige any honest man to come to their succour if they should stand in need of assistance." This breach of promise, with a view to the general utility, will, so far from being criminal, form a part of that resolute execution of justice which would in a thousand ways increase the independence, the energies, and the virtue of mankind."
Such are the views which determined this author to consider "the validity of promises" as "inconsistent with justice," and as "foreign to general good." From one, however, who relies with so much confidence on the promiser, it would certainly be desirable to know, whether the person, who violates his faith for the public utility, is always to be candid. Where breach of a private faith promotes his own interest, ought he alone to decide on the validity of his promise? or where promises are broken for the general good, is he to be guided by his own visionary schemes of utility? Is he to act as of utility on, trustee for the public without any delegated power? and shall the community submit to his decisions without so much as putting the question, Who hath made thee a ruler over us? When a writer thus deviates so far from the path of reason, it is natural to ask, what was the ignis fatuus that misled him? In the present case it is pretty obvious. Being something of opinion with the celebrated Turgot, that romances are the only books in which moral principles are treated in an impartial manner, this gentleman, in his Chapter of Promises, seems to have borrowed a part of his morality from
Promise. from the doggerels of Butler; and having adopted, though from different motives, the political principles of Sir Hudibras's squire, that obedience to civil government is not due because it is promised, he has come to exactly the same conclusion with respect to the obligation of keeping one's word. But Ralph has reasoned with more ingenuity; and has shown not only that the public good, but the glory of the Lord, may be sometimes promoted by a breach of faith.
The saints, * whom oaths and vows oblige,
Know little of their privilege;
Farther, I mean, than carrying on
Some self-advantage of their own:
For if the dev'l, to serve his turn,
Can tell truth, why the saints should scorn,
When it serves theirs, to swear and lie,
I think there's little reason why:
Else h' has a greater pow'r than they,
Which 'twere impiety to say:
W' are not commanded to forbear,
Indefinitely, at all to swear;
But to swear idly, and in vain,
Without self-interest and gain;
For breaking of an oath and lying
Is but a kind of self-denying,
A saint-like virtue; and from hence
Some have broke oaths by Providence:
Some, to the glory of the Lord,
Perjur'd themselves and broke their word:—
For saints may do the same thing by
The spirit, in sincerity,
Which other men are tempted to,
And at the devil's instance do.