Does Promise Keeping Provide a Clear Refutation of Utilitarianism?
It is sometimes argued that a comprehensive analysis of promise keeping provides a clear and convincing argument against utilitarianism's claim to be a sound and complete moral theory, as, it is argued, applying the doctrine of utilitarianism to promise keeping yields a clearly intuitively wrong result. Your task here is to elaborate and analyze this argument against utilitarianism,elaborate and analyze a utilitarian defense agains this argument, figure out whether the attacking argument succeeds or fails, and, after you've done all this, write a paper stating your conclusion and clearly and completely laying out all the reasoning that led to your conclusion.
The promise-keeping argument against utilitarianism goes like this. Suppose you need a certain amount of money to pay your rent on time. You know you won't be evicted if you're late, but there will be a late charge, and your landlord will be mad at you. Now suppose that your utilitarian friend Heesoh Feckless has promised to lend you this money so you can pay your rent on time. However, rent day comes and goes without Sammy showing up with the money. You cash your paycheck and pay your rent, plus the late fee, and a day later Heesoh shows up to explain. Heesoh Feckless says that he was on his way to give you the promised money, but he met another renter in the exact same position as you, except that her landlord was a bit nastier, and so if Heesoh lent her the money instead, the overall amount of pain in the world would be lessened by a greater amount than it would have been if Heesoh Feckless had kept his promise, so he lent her the money instead of you. The promise-keeping argument against utilitarianism holds that, given that Heesoh Feckless is a utilitarian, the fact that lending the money to this stranger results in a slightly larger reduction in oveall pain than it would if he lent you the money means that utilitarianaism implies that he should have broken his promise to you, and, since this violates most people's deep-seated intuition that promises should be kept in most, if not all circumstances, this proves that utilitarianism is not the correct moral theory.
The utilitarian defense against the promise-keeping argument goes like this. Human expectations and relationships are real, and can be the source of great pleasure and great pain. The fact that Heesoh Feckless let you down will hurt you much, much more than if he did the same thing without having previously promised anything. Furthermore, he fact that Heesoh Feckless helped a stranger instead of you is in itself hurtful, irrespective of any promises. Finally, utilitarianism holds that making and keeping of promises is a practice that contributes greatly to generating pleasure and reducing pain in human society. When promise making and keeping is reliable and commonplace, a great deal of pleasure is generated, and a great deal of pain is avoided, compared to the same world without promise-keeping. Thus, if promise keeping is lost, a great deal of pleasure is avoided, and a great deal of pain is generated. This has rightfully resulted in promise keeping being highly valued in society, and so that any utilitarian who hears of promises being lightly broken will, from a utilitarian perspective conclude that, unless there is a very, very large gain in utility from breaking the promise, it was wrong to break that promise. Furthermore, utilitarians might argue that, whethever a utilitarian concludes that a promise was rightly broken, the circumstances will be such that a majority of reasonable non-utilitarians will also conclude that the promise was rightly broken, which means that utilitarianism does not conflict with our moral intuitions here after all.
Your task is to understand and evaluate both arguments, and write a paper explaining both arguments and what you ultimately think of them.
