Promising Against the Evidence #1 - Ethics | PHILOSOPHY

[Music] hi I'm Betty some Irish and I go by berry I'm a philosophy professor at Brandeis University today I'm going to talk about a problem that most of us face at one point or another can we responsibly promise to do something when we have evidence that we might not follow through with our promise for example suppose you are promising to spend the rest of your life with someone you know that sticking to this promise may be difficult on some days that it may require persistence in the face of temptation you know to the significant number of people who are in many respects like you have failed to follow through with this sort of promise you may know the divorce rates for your demographic or you may even have a stain on your track record can you nonetheless make the promise responsibly a simple line of thought suggests that the answer must be no that is because if we believe as our evidence suggests that we might not follow through with our promise we seem to be insincere in making it after all if you believe that you might not in fact spend the rest of your life with the other person you can't sincerely promise that you will if we believe that we will follow through with our promise we seem to be irrational after all if we have evidence that we might fail to do something it seems that we can't rationally believe that we will do it we can only rationally believe that we will possibly or probably do it depending on what our evidence is if you believe in light of your evidence that you only have an 80% chance to keep your promise and 80% is a good number then it seems irrational to believe that you will in fact keep your promise so it seems that we must be insincere in promising against the evidence yet whether we are insincere or irrational we are liable to mislead the person we are making the promise to therefore it seems we cannot responsibly promise against the evidence yet we make such promises all the time indeed some of our most important promises are of this kind think of wedding vows resolutions to quit smoking and so on all of those promises made irresponsibly I call this the problem of promising against the evidence a number of possible solutions will come to mind let me sketch five of them the first response many people give is this we can't responsibly promise against the evidence we can only responsibly promise to try the second response maintains that sincerely promising to do something does not require believing that we will succeed it only requires intending to do it and we can intend without believing in success for example you can intend to spend the rest of your life with the other person without believing that you will the third response maintains that when we sincerely promise to do something we decide to do it and when we decide to do something we gain a distinct kind of knowledge that we will do it an agent's knowledge or to use Elizabeth Anscombe sprays practical knowledge for example when you decide to go out for lunch you get acknowledged that you will go out for lunch in virtue of deciding to do so thereby you don't need evidence and your knowledge is not based on evidence your knowledge is grounded in your decision similarly when you sincerely promise to spend the rest of your life with someone you know that you will do so and your knowledge is grounded in the decision that your sincere promise expresses but then if you know that you will do what you're promising to do you can rationally believe in success despite your evidence the fourth response maintains the hardline view that we cannot responsibly promise against the evidence it countenances an evidential is constrained on promising in order to responsibly promise to do something we must be able to predict that we will actually do it and when we have evidence that we might not follow through then we cannot make a promise responsibly this suggests that most waiting promises are in fact not made responsibly finally the fifth response takes inspiration from constic tum' that we act under the idea of freedom it suggests that our evidence doesn't determine what it is rational for us to believe about matters that are up to us when considering matters that are up to us we should look to our practical reasons not to our evidence alone to determine what we will do for example when considering whether to spend the rest of your life with someone you should consider your love for the other and the nature of your relationship rather than evidence about what is likely to happen in general when something is up to us we should decide what to do not seek to predict what we will do and it may be rational for us to decide to do something difficult that is why if something is up to us and it is important enough for us to do it we can be in a position to rationally believe that we will do it despite having evidence that we might fail to follow through and this explains why the initial line of thought was mistaken we can escape the dilemma of insincerity and irrationality when promising against the evidence we needn't be irresponsible when promising against the evidence because as agents we can sometimes rationally believe against the evidence if you really love someone you can rationally believe that you will spend the rest of your life with the other even if you are not in a position to predict it I think that each of these responses has some plausibility but I also think that ultimately only the last one is tenable in the next episode I will explain why the first four should be rejected you

Channel: Wireless Philosophy

Views: 32,373

Keywords: Khan Academy, Philosophy, Wireless Philosophy, Wiphi, video, lecture, course, Berislav Marusic, Evidence and Agency, Oxford University Press, Ethics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind, Promising, Evidence, Agency, Rationality, Responsibility, Brandeis University, Elizabeth Anscombe

Id: -V8t8beCnnY

Length: 6min 14sec (374 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 30 2018