Symposium: Promises, Commitments, and the Foundations of Contract Law Introduction

Most of the essays gathered in this Symposium were submitted to the Special Workshop on Economics, Ethics, and Law at the 22nd IVR World Congress in Granada, Spain.1 The papers selected address promises and commitments, their rational or moral grounding, and their relationship to various kinds of contracts and agreements. While the duty to fulfill promises is uncontroversial, the nature of promises has given rise to two conflicting views, respectively associated with Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. Thus, Hobbes’s third “law of nature” says, “That men performe their Covenants made: without which, Covenants are in vain, and but Empty words . . . .”2 Though Hobbes did not treat natural laws as moral laws, but rather as “dictates of reason,” he nonetheless assumed that the capacity to make a commitment has a natural, nonconventional foundation. David Hume rejected the proposition that keeping promises is a natural virtue. For Hume promises are conventional, and the obligation to keep them is an artificial virtue, originated from self-interest. It is worth quoting one of his statements: “But as there is naturally no inclination to observe promises, distinct from a sense of their obligation; it follows, that fidelity is no natural virtue, and that promises have no force, antecedent to human conventions.”3 How does Hume explain the fact that the obligation to keep promises is usually regarded as a moral obligation, not just a conventional one? Hume resorts to his well-known view that “[m]ankind is an inventive species.”4 Man invents conventions and artificial virtues, and while promising is among the former, the virtue of keeping promises is among the latter.