The Immorality of Promising - Hardcover

Fox, Richard M.; Demarco, Joseph P.

9781573928649: The Immorality of Promising

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 157392864X ISBN 13: 9781573928649

Publisher: Humanity Books, 2001

Philosophers Richard Fox and Joseph DeMarco challenge both popular wisdom and traditional moral philosophy by arguing that all the standard received theories on promising are wrong. Against those who uphold promising as an exemplary moral practice, they attempt to prove that promising is immoral. Against those who believe that promising creates a moral obligation, they maintain that promises have no such power.
Some traditional philosophers have supported the view that the duty to keep promises is self-evident, while others have claimed that it is supported by reason, and still others that it is prescribed by social practice. Social contract theorists in fact have taken the extreme position that all moral rights and duties are founded on promises, as promises are thought to be the foundation of contracts. All these doctrines are mistaken, according to Fox and DeMarco, because promising cannot all by itself create any obligations and because promising is in the final analysis morally unjustified.
The Immorality of Promising elucidates paradoxes and dilemmas that go to the very foundations of ethics and morality, and will be of great interest to professional philosophers and students of ethics alike.

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About the Author:

Richard M. Fox and Joseph P. DeMarco (Cleveland, OH), professors of philosophy at Cleveland State University, are the authors of Moral Reasoning: A Philosophic Approach to Applied Ethics and the editors of New Directions in Ethics.

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