Colloquium: Eliot Michaelson (King’s College London)

Knotty Promises, or How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Theories of promising standardly assume that binding promises require an intention to communicate what one is promising to the listener. And similarly for consent. The present paper illustrates how we can promise and consent—or at least do something that looks very much like promising and consenting, and which has very similar normative effects—without so intending. Any way of trying to adequately explain these cases, I argue, is going to require substantially rethinking our earlier theories of moral address. I aim to provide a new account of moral address, and of address more broadly, that can smoothly account for both these and other problem cases.