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.Favor and injuryare thus second-personal concepts.They concern our standing to haveexpectations and make demands of one another and are connected tosecond-personal responses that presuppose this authority.As Strawsonpoints out for negative reactive attitudes like resentment, the making ofthe demand is the proneness to such attitudes, and, we might add, viceversa (1968: 92 93).23Reid also anticipates Strawson s Point.To see something as an injury,Reid observes, it is necessary to have the conception of justice, andperceive its obligation distinct from its utility (1969: 406).Regardingsomething as required by justice carries inseparably along with it, a per-ception of its moral obligation (413).It is inconceivable, therefore, thatthe distinctive sentiments of justice could arise simply through a mutuallyadvantageous convention.Reid s Critique of Hume on PromisesAmong the most interesting of Reid s criticisms for our purposes are thosehe makes of Hume on the obligation to keep promises.Hume s accountof promising is notoriously byzantine,24 and it would take us too far afieldmentioned and specifically lodged against Bernard Williams in Chapter 5 (footnote 4).LikeWilliams, Hume wants to accommodate the category of justice (or rights, for Williams),but without the second-personal moral psychology necessary for us to be able to accept reasons of the right kind for challenging injustice.It is one thing, again, to think that itwould be desirable, whether from anyone s individual point of view or from some commonstandpoint, to hold someone accountable for doing something, or even to think that ahabit of doing so is desirable or even worthy or esteem, but quite another to think thatthe action is of a kind that warrants resentment along with the authority to demandforbearance.Like Williams, Hume only admits reasons for challenging injustice that areoutside any we accept within the second-person standpoint when we hold another ac-countable.I am indebted here to discussion with Simon Blackburn.23.Note also the following passage from Reid: He perceives that injury is done tohimself, and that he has a right to redress.The natural principle of resentment is rousedby the view of its proper object, and excites him to defend his right.Even the injuriousperson is conscious of his doing injury; he dreads a just retaliation; and if it be in thepower of the injured person, he expects it as due and deserved (1969: 416 417).24.Or, as Hume might have put it, Romish, since he says that promising is one ofCopyright © 2009 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Interlude 195to attempt to master all its intricacies.Suffice it to say that althoughHume sensibly understands promising to involve the voluntary under-taking of an obligation ( the willing of that obligation, which arises fromthe promise ), his moral psychology and virtue ethics require that theobligation be understood via the moral sentiment s role in an individual spsychic economy (1978: 517).Against this, Reid points out that the ideasof promise and its resulting obligation are essentially social, they are toothers, and, therefore, involve social operations of the human mind ; inour terms, second-personal psychic mechanisms, must be involved.Nei-ther, Reid argues, can the obligation to keep promises depend on theusefulness of a conventional social practice of promising, as Hume sup-poses is true of the moral obligation to justice generally, since childrenare capable of understanding, and naturally accept, the basic fairness andreciprocity involved in keeping faith long before they have any conceptionof its social utility (1969: 444).Reid stresses throughout the necessity of a pre-conventional, second-personal form of reciprocal obligation that individuals must already im-plicitly recognize in order for them to come to have genuine conventionalobligations at all.For this point, it doesn t much matter whether or notwe reserve the words promise and contract for undertakings that re-quire specific conventional contexts.If we do, then the point will stillremain that we could not come to have the conventionally establishedobligations of promise and contract unless we were capable of the pre-conventional second-personal obligations that make conventional obli-gations generally possible in the first place.Suppose we reserve promisefor a conventionally defined obligation that is undertaken with tokens of promise and its synonyms, and we reserve contract, for those that re-quire as context the law of contract.So defined, promise and contractwill be essentially conventional, and whatever distinctive obligations theycarry will depend in some way on their respective conventional contexts.They will depend, as Hume puts it, on a certain form of words andtherefore on employing symbols and signs instituted by the conven-tions of men (1979: 522).However, if Reid is right, these will nonethelessthe most mysterious and incomprehensible operations that can possibly be imagin d, andmay even be compar d to transubstantiation, or holy orders, where a certain form of words,along with a certain intention, changes entirely the nature of an external object, and evenof a human creature (Hume 1978: 524).Copyright © 2009 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 196 Interludealso depend on the possibility of voluntarily undertaking second-personalobligations that are not conventional.To anticipate, it must be possiblefor individuals to create binding conventions by a kind of agreement thatis itself neither conventional (in the usual sense) nor simply a coordi-nation of self-interested conditional intentions, as in Hume s boat-rowingexample or in iterated Prisoner s Dilemma.Reid faults Hume for failing to grasp promising s social or second-personal character.Commanding, testifying, requesting, bargaining, andpromising are all irreducibly social : they cannot exist without beingexpressed by words or signs, and known to the other party. It is im-possible, moreover, to resolve social operations into any modificationor composition of the solitary (1969: 438).(This, we should note inpassing, is a consequence of the circle of irreducibly second-personal con-cepts that we described in Chapter 1.25) It is consequently impossible tounderstand promising in terms of such solitary Humean mental actsas willing an obligation (understanding obligation as Hume does) oras the expression of a resolution of performing the promised act (Hume1978: 518, 517).Additionally, even if the distinctive forms that contract and promisetake in established practices depend on human invention, these none-theless presuppose a second-personal sociality that makes conventionalpractices possible in the first place.Reid makes a similar claim aboutlanguage.No doubt much of language is conventional also, but withouta background of natural, nonconventional dispositions to respondsecond-personally, conventional linguistic discourse would be impossible: This intercourse, in its beginning at least, must be carried on by naturalsigns, whose meaning is understood by both parties, previous to all com-pact and agreement.The power which man has of holding social in-tercourse with his kind, by asking and refusing, threatening and suppli-25.As Searle famously argued in How to Derive an Ought from an Is (1964),giving rise to an obligation to the promisee is part of the very idea of a promise.As wenoted in Chapter 3, however, we can t really get an ought from an is , Searle to thecontrary notwithstanding
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