QUESTION TEXT: A person's failure to keep a promise…
QUESTION TYPE: Principle
PRINCIPLE: It’s wrong to not keep a promise
only if (necessary conditions):
- You hurt the one you made the promise to.
- Other people will lose confidence in your ability to keep promises.
ANALYSIS: We can only conclude breaking a promise is “not wrong”. Why?
Because we have necessary conditions for saying it’s wrong to break a promise. To call something wrong, we need a sufficient condition. If either necessary conditions are missing, we can say it wasn’t wrong to break a promise.
So we can say, breaking a promise is not wrong if:
- The person wasn’t hurt, OR
- Nobody who finds out will lose confidence in you.
___________
- We don’t know anything about when it’s wrong to keep a promise. We only have evidence about breaking a promise.
- We can never conclude that breaking a promise is wrong. That’s especially true here, since the corporation wasn’t harmed, which is the first necessary condition for breaking a promise to be wrong.
- This situation has one of the necessary condition for saying it was wrong to break a promise. But we’re missing the other necessary condition. Even then we wouldn’t know if was wrong of course: there might be other necessary conditions.
- CORRECT. This fails both necessary conditions. Miriam wasn’t hurt, and no one lost confidence, so we can say Carlos was not wrong to break his promise.
- I’ll say it again: we only have necessary conditions. We can never say that breaking a promise was wrong. We need sufficient conditions to do that. And we’re even missing a necessary condition: we have no evidence anyone was hurt.
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