Requests and obligations

By requesting something from someone, we create a reason for them to fulfill the request. On an individualistic view of human beings, this is a rather awesome power—somehow I reach into your space of reasons and create a new one.

It is tempting to downplay the force of reasons created by a request. After all, it seems that a mere request can always be legitimately turned down.

But that’s not right. There are times when a request creates an obligation. For it may be that apart form the request one’s reasons for an action were nearly conclusive, and with the request they become conclusive.

And besides that, a successfully transmitted request always creates a moral obligation to consider the request. Sometimes, the request may be quickly rejectable on the basis of a background policy. But a quick rejection still requires a consideration.

Questions, of course, are a type of request: they are a request for an answer. Thus, they too always create a moral obligation.

Do we have normative powers?

A normative power is supposed to be a power to directly change normative reality. We can, of course, indirectly change normative reality by affecting the antecedents of conditional norms: By unfairly insulting you, I get myself to have a duty to apologize, but that is simply due to a pre-existing duty to apologize for all unfair insults.

It would be attractive to deny our possession of normative powers. Typical examples of normative powers are promises, commands, permissions, and requests. But all of these can seemingly be reduced to conditional norms, such as:

• Do whatever you promise

• Do whatever you are validly commanded

• Refrain from ϕing unless permitted

• Treat what you are requested as a reason for doing it.

One might think that one can still count as having a normative power even if it is reducible to prior conditional norms. Here is a reason to deny this. I could promise to send you a dollar on any day on which your dog barks. Then your dog has the power to obligate me to send you a dollar, a power reducible to the norm arising from my promise. But dogs do not have normative powers. Hence an ability to change normative reality by affecting the antecedents of a prior conditional norm is not a normative power.

If this argument succeeds, if a power to affect normative reality is reducible to a non-normative power (such as the power to bark) and a prior norm, it is not a normative power. Are there any normative powers, then, powers not reducible in this way?

I am not sure. But here is a non-conclusive reason to think so. It seems we can invent new useful ways of affecting normative reality, within certain bounds. For instance, normally a request comes along with a permission—a request creates a reason for the other party to do the requested action and while removing any reasons of non-consent against the performance. But there are rare contexts where it is useful to create a reason without removing reasons of non-consent. An example is “If you are going to kill me, kill me quickly.” One can see this as creating a reason for the murderer to kill one quickly, without removing reasons of non-consent against killing (or even killing quickly). Or, for another example, normally a general’s command in an important matter generates a serious obligation. But there could be cases where the general doesn’t want a subordinate to feel very guilty for failing to fulfill the command, and it would be useful for the general to make a new commanding practice, a “slight command” which generates an obligation, but one that it is only slightly wrong to disobey.

There are approximable and non-approximable promises. When I promise to bake you seven cookies, and I am short on flour, normally I have reason to bake you four. But there are cases where there is no reason to bake you four—perhaps you are going to have seven guests, and you want to serve them the same sweet, so four are useless to you (maybe you hate cookies). Normally we leave such decisions to common sense and don’t make them explicit. However, we could also imagine making them explicit, and we could imagine promises with express approximability rules (perhaps when you can’t do cookies, cupcakes will be a second best; perhaps they won’t be). We can even imagine complex rules of preferability between different approximations to the promise: if it’s sunny, seven cupcakes is a better approximation than five cookies, while if it’s cloudy, five cookies is a better approximation. These rules might also specify the degree of moral failure that each approximation represents. It is, plausibly, within our normative authority over ourselves to issue promises with all sorts of approximability rules, and we can imagine a society inventing such.

Intuitively, normally, if one is capable of a greater change of normative reality, one is capable of a lesser one. Thus, if a general has the authority to create a serious obligation, they have the authority to create a slight one. And if you are capable of both creating a reason and providing a permission, you should be able to do one in isolation from the other. If you have the authority to command, you have the standing to create non-binding reasons by requesting.

We could imagine a society which starts with two normative powers, promising and commanding, and then invents the “weaker” powers of requesting and permitting, and an endless variety of normative subtlety.

It seems plausible to think that we are capable of inventing new, useful normative practices. These, of course, cannot be a normative power grab: there are limits. The epistemic rule of thumb for determining these limits is that the powers do not exceed ones that we clearly have.

It seems a little simpler to think that we can create new normative powers within predetermined limits than that all our norms are preset, and we simply instance their antecedents. But while this is a plausible argument for normative powers, it is not conclusive.

Divine desire ethical theories are false

On divine desire variants of divine command ethics, necessarily an action is right just in case it accords with God’s what God wants.

But it seems:

1. Necessarily, if God commands an action, the action is right.

2. Possibly, God commands an action but does not want one to do it.

Given (1) and (2), divine desire ethics is false.

I think everyone (and not just divine command theorists) should agree about (1): it is a part of the concept of God that he is authorative in such a way that whatever he commands is right.

What about (2)? Well, consider a felix culpa case where a great good would come from obedience to God and an even greater one would come from disobedience, and in the absence of a command one would have only a tiny good. Given such a situation, God could command the action. However, it seems that a perfectly good being’s desires are perfectly proportioned to the goods involved. Thus, in such a situation, God would desire that one disobey.

This is related to the important conceptual point about commands, requests and consentings that these actions can go against the characteristic desires that go with them. In the case of a human being, when there is a conflict between what a human wants and what the human commands, requests or consents to, typically it is right to go with what is said, but sometimes there is room for paternalistically going with the underlying desire (and sometimes we rightly go against both word and desire). But paternalism to God is never right.

Consent and inner acts

Some people think that a constituent (whole or partial) of consent is some sort of inner mental act of agreement with the thing one consents to. Here is an argument against this:

1. A request or command does not require an inner mental act of agreement.

2. Someone who requests or commands something necessarily consents to its performance.

3. So, consent does not require an inner mental act of agreement.

(One can also qualify the requests, commands and consents as valid in all the premises, and the argument remains sound, I think.)

That said, consent does require some inner component, as does request or command. Consent requires a relevant communicative act to be performed intentionally. Similarly, to request or command something is not just to utter some sounds (or make some gestures, etc.), but to do so intending to be taken as requesting or commanding.

Requests and naturalism

If someone asks me to ϕ, typically that informs me that they want me to ϕ. But the normative effect of the request cannot be reduced to the normative effect of learning about the requester’s desires.

First, when you request that I ϕ, you also consent to my ϕ, and hence the request has the normative effects of consent. But one can want something done without consenting to it. For instance, if I have a lot of things on my plate, I might desire that a student give me their major paper late so that I don’t have to start grading yet, but that desire is very different in normative consequences from my agreeing to the lateness of the paper, much less my requesting that it be late.

Second, considerate people often have desires that they do not wish to impose on others. A request creates a special kind of moral reason, and hence imposes in a way that merely learning of a desire does not.

Moreover, we cannot understand requests apart from these moral normative effects. A request seems to be in part or whole defined as the kind of speech act that typically has such normative effects: the creating of a permission and of a reason. Moreover, that reason is a sui generis one: it is a reason-of-request, rather than a reason-of-desire, a reason-of-need, etc.

There is something rather impressive in this creation of reasons. A complete stranger has the power to come up to me and make me have a new moral reason just by asking a question, since a question is in part a request for an answer (and in part the creation of a context for the speech acts that would be constitute the answer). Typically, this reason is not conclusive, but it is still a real moral reason that imposes on me.

Consider the first time anybody ever requested anything. In requesting, they exercised their power to create a moral reason for their interlocutor. This was a power they already had, and the meaningfulness of the speech act of requesting must have already been in place. How? How could that speech act have already been defined, already understandable? The speech act was largely defined by the kinds of reasons it gives rise to. But the kinds of reasons it gave rise to were ones that had never previously existed! For before the first request there were no reasons-of-request. So the speech act had a meaningfulness without anybody ever having encountered the kinds of reasons that came from it.

This is deeply mysterious. It suggests an innate power of the human nature, a power to request and thereby create reasons. This power seems hard to reconcile with naturalism, though I do not have any knock-down argument here.

Fulfilling requests

One of the most moving stories in Rosenbaum’s deeply moving Holocaust and the Halakhah tells of how one can be a great moral hero even when acting out of mistaken conscience. A man in a concentration camp comes to his rabbi with a problem. His son has been scheduled to be executed. But it is possible to bribe the kapo to get him off the death list. However, the kapo have a quota to fill, and if they let off his son, they will kill another child. Is it permissible to bribe the kapo knowing that this will result in the death of another child? The rabbi answers that, of course, it is permissible. The man goes away, but he is not convinced. He does not bribe the kapo. Instead, he concludes that God has called him to the great sacrifice of not shifting his son’s death onto another. The father finds a joy in the sacrifice amidst his mourning.

The rabbi was certainly right. The father’s conscience presumably was mistaken (unless God specifically spoke to him and required the sacrifice). Yet the father is a moral hero in acting from this mistaken conscience. (Here are two relevant features of this case. First, while he was mistaken, he was not mistaken in a way that shows moral callousness—on the contrary, he is obviously a man of moral sensitivity. Second, while he was mistaken in thinking the sacrifice was morally required, nonetheless the sacrifice was—I think—at least permissible.)

The analytic philosopher will see this as a variant of a trolley case (with some complications, such as that the deaths were mediated by the free agency of the kapo). It is permissible to redirect the trolley away from one’s child and towards a stranger’s child. This is another way in which the proportionality condition in the Principle of Double Effect is not a utilitarian calculation: the agent has a proportional reason to save their own child even when it is foreseen (but not intended) to cost another’s their life.

But at the same time it would not be permissible to redirect the trolley away from one stranger’s child towards another stranger’s child. Such redirection would be a grotesque toying with lives. It would be a needless and callous making of oneself into a cause of another’s death, even if unintentionally.

Here, however, is a case that puzzles me. Suppose Alice’s child is on the track the trolley is speeding towards, and a stranger’s child is on another track. Alice is physically incapable of redirecting the trolley but Bob is capable of it. Alice and both children are strangers to Bob. Would it be permissible for Alice to ask Bob to redirect the trolley?

Here is an argument to the contrary. It is impermissible for Bob to redirect the trolley from one stranger to another: that is just playing with lives. But it is impermissible to request someone to perform an impermissible action. Hence, it is impermissible to ask Bob to redirect the trolley.

That seems mistaken. The case of asking Bob to redirect the trolley need not be that different from begging the kapo to take one’s child off the death list, depending on the details of the latter story. So what is going on?

I think there are at least two ways to justify Bob’s acquiescence to the request and hence Alice’s making of the request:

1. Once Alice asks Bob to redirect the trolley, Alice is no longer a stranger to Bob. There is a way in which Bob in receiving her request can become an agent of Alice’s, and hence those that Alice cares for become ones that he has a special reason to care for.

2. On receipt of the request, Bob has two options coming with distinctive incommensurable reasons. The first is not to redirected, with the reason being promote equality, in this case equality between children who don’t have a parent in place to speak up for them and ones who do. The second is to fulfill the request of an anguished parent to save their child. Both reasons are grave, and it is permissible for him (other things being equal) to act on either reason. Requests really do add weight to reasons.

There is another complicating factor. I do have the intuition that if Bob is an employee in charge of the trolley, he should do nothing. The reason is this. Insofar as he is in charge of the trolley, Bob has a role duty of mitigating damage done by the trolley. It is generally good policy that such a role come along with a significant independence from outside influences, such as bribes or even requests. So, in that case, Bob should act as if he did not receive the request. But if he did not receive any request, he shouldn’t do anything, for it is better not to become the cause of the child’s death—as one would if one redirected.

Here is a variant case. There are three tracks. The trolley is on track A with five people. The other two tracks, B and C, have one person each, and Alice is asking Bob not to redirect to track B, as her child is there. Bob has to redirect to either track B or C, but everything other than Alice’s request is equal between these tracks. Here it seems to me that Bob should flip a coin (if there is time; if not, just act as randomly as he can) if he is an employee. And if he is not an employee, then he has a choice to accede to Alice’s request or flip a coin.

Assertions and other illocutionary acts

I used to think one could get by without assertions in a society, using only promises. Here's the trick I had in mind. Instead of asserting "The sky is blue", one first promises to utter a truth, and then one utters (without asserting!) "The sky is blue." This has sufficiently similar normative effects to actually asserting "The sky is blue" that a practice like this could work. This observation could then lead to further speculation that promises are more fundamental than assertions.

But that speculation would, I now think, be quite mistaken. The reason is that we do two things with a promise. First, we create a moral reason for ourselves. Second, we communicate the creation of that moral reason to our interlocutors. Both parts are central to the practice of promises: the first is important for rationally constraining the speaker's activity and the second is important for making it rational for the listener to depend on the speaker. But communicating that we created a moral reason is very much like asserting a proposition--viz., the proposition that we created a moral reason of such and such a type. Consequently, promises depend on something that, while not quite assertion, is sufficiently akin to assertion that we should not take promises as more fundamental than assertions.

A similar phenomenon is present in commands, requests and permissions. With commands, requests and permissions we attempt to create or remove reasons in the listener, but we additionally--and crucially--communicate the creation or removal to the listener. Assertions, promises, permissions, commands and requests seem to be the pragmatically central speech acts. And they all involve communicating a proposition. Assertion involves little if anything beyond this communication. In the case of the other four, the proposition is normative, and the speech act when successful also makes that proposition be true. For instance, to promise to do A involves communicating that one has just created a moral reason for oneself to do A, while at the same time making this communicated proposition be true.

So something assertion-like is involved in all these pragmatically important speech acts, but they are not reducible to assertion. However if we were able to create and destroy the relevant reasons directly at will, we wouldn't need promises, commands, requests or permissions. We could just create or destroy the reasons, and then simply assert that we had done so. But our ability to create and destroy reasons is limited. I can create a reason for you by requesting that you do something, but I can't create a reason for you by simply willing the reason into existence. (Compare: I can make a cake by baking, but not by simply willing the cake into existence.) However I can create and destroy reasons through speech acts that simultaneously communicate that creation and destruction, and that's how promises, commands, requests and permissions work.

Would telepaths need language?

One might think that language is a crutch for non-telepaths. If you could sense what I believe, I wouldn't need to assert anything. If you could sense what I want, I wouldn't need to request anything. If you could sense what I intend, I wouldn't need to promise anything.

But that's just not right. Maybe it's true that if you could sense what I believe, there would be no need to make assertions. But the claims about requests and promises are just completely wrong. To request something is very different from wanting it. When I request something I create a reason for you to provide it to me, a reason that goes over and beyond the reasons given by my desires. We can sincerely request things that we don't want, for instance because it is our duty to request them, and even more frequently with hold back from requesting things that we want precisely not to impose on our interlocutor with the reasons that come from requesting. Sometimes we even hold back from asking because we want to get thing without asking for it. And of course that I intend to do something does not create the kind of reason that a promise does.

A society of telepaths would still very much benefit from acts that have the reason-creating forces of requests and promises, and the reason-canceling force of permissions. Such telepaths would either need to have sui generis mental states of mentally-requesting, mentally-promising and mentally-permitting, or would need symbolic conventions to indicate when they are offering a request, a promise or a permission (maybe when I am imagining a blue patch while entertaining a proposition, I am requesting that you make the proposition true, while if I am imagining a green patch I am merely permitting you to make it true). In either case, I think, these mental requests, promises and permissions would be basically a language.

So maybe asserting is a crutch for non-telepaths. But while requests, promises and permissions could no doubt be offered more efficiently by telepaths, this would still involve something that is essentially a language.

Weak promises

Commanding is meant to create an obligating reason for another, while requesting is meant to create a non-obligating one. Promising is meant to create an obligating reason for self. There is a natural spot in illocutionary space, then, for a speech act meant to create a non-obligating reason for self, a speech act type that stands to promising as requesting does to commanding.

We would expect that when I have a normative power, I also have the corresponding weaker powers. If a legislature can bind under pain of ten years' imprisonment, they can bind under pain of a week's imprisonment. If I can create an obligating reason for myself, I can create a non-obligating reason for myself. That's another reason to think that we would have the "weak promise" speech act that creates non-obligating reasons.

I am not sure we have good phrases to express weak promises. We can approximate the force of a weak promise by weaselly promissory wordage like "I'll try to do this" or "I'll take your needs into account".

Commands and requests

One way to help out a sceptic about something is by arguing that what she is sceptical about is way more widespread than she thinks. Of course, that's a risky strategy, since instead of her scepticism disappearing, she might just widen its scope. Here's one example of this risky strategy.

Authority sceptics are sceptical that another person's commands can generate obligations for us, except in certain unproblematic ways (a command from someone trustworthy might provide epistemic reason to think that the commanded action is independently obligatory; when one has reason to believe that others will follow the command, there might be reasons to coordinate one's activity with theirs; etc.). There is something seemingly magical about generating obligations for another just by commanding.

But isn't it equally magical that we can generate non-obligating reasons for another just by requesting, or obligating reasons for self just by promising? Yet it seems quite absurd to be a request or promise sceptic.

A tentative prolegomenon to a theory of requests, commands and promises

The standard formal analysis of requests is that a person y requests a person x to bring it about that p (or, simply, to A—I will stick with the bringing about language for some formal reasons, but I think there are also reasons why one might prefer to talk of actions instead). In other words, a request is a relation that holds between two persons and a (centered?) proposition.

But this is insufficient to capture the full range of phenomena. I hand you a list of tasks and ask you to do them all. I don't actually know what is on the list. Perhaps I had a longer list of tasks and had a computer divide up the longer list between a number of people, and so I am handing you a printout of your portion.

On the standard analysis, we should either take this as a case of my issuing n requests, one for each item on the list, or as a case of my issuing a single request that you bring it about that all the items are done by you. Neither option is satisfactory. The suggestion that I issued n requests seems unsatisfactory on the grounds that I don't know what is on the list, and may not even know what the number n is. (Moreover, the list need not yet be printed out. I could ask you to do all the items that will show up on the screen when you log in.)

The suggestion that I issue a single request that you do all the items fails. For suppose you decline to do the nth item, but do do all the rest. This can be a perfectly reasonable response. But for what reason, given that you declined to do the nth item, did you do all the rest? The obvious answer is: "Because I asked you to." But I didn't, at least not on this reading. I asked you to bring it about that you did all the items. You didn't bring this about. So what was the point of doing what you did? It is worth noting that we do have room for a conjunctive request which gives no reason to do only some of the conjuncts. "Find me a hammer and a nail"—there need be no point to finding only one of the two. So we need a way of distinguishing the kind of request which distributively gives you a reason to do each task—and that is the kind of case I had in mind—and the kind of request which gives you only a reason to do them all. The latter is nicely modeled in the "y requests that x bring it about that p" way. The former is not.

To make it even clearer that not all requests have the "y requests that x bring it about that p" logical form, suppose I hand you the list but add that my request has a greater emphasis on the items higher up on the list. First of all, the mention of emphasis shows that everyone should grant that requesting's logical form is at least quaternary: "y requests with strength s that x bring it about that p". But in this case, there is simply no way of offering a single request with this quaternary logical form that does the job. If I request that you bring it about that all the tasks are done by you, the logical form above does not allow the strength to vary between the tasks on the list. But surely it can.

Here is my tentative suggestion. There is a function r from quadruples (y,x,p,t) where y is a person (requester), x is a person (requestee), p is a proposition and t is a time[note 1], to strengths (these might be represented as numbers sometimes), including a null strength in cases where no request has been made. Thus, r(y,x,p,t) is the strength with which y counts at t as having requested x to bring it about that p. Moreover, x at t has a reason proportional in strength to r(y,x,p,t) to bring it about that p for each y such that r(y,x,p,t) is non-null. Furthermore, each mature person x keeps track, as best she can, of the non-null values of r(y,x,p,now), and uses them in deliberation. I will call r the "request function".

There is a class of speech acts which are "request strength modifiers." Request-strength modifiers affect the time evolution of r(y,x,p,t). The simplest is the simple request of strength s that x bring it about that p. If t₁ is the time before the simple request was issued and t₂ is the time after it was issued, then (assuming nothing else relevant happened) r(y,x,p,t₂)=r(y,x,p,t₁)+s—in other words, the simple request increases the strength of request at a single proposition (in the paradigmatic case, r(y,x,p,t₁) is null, and r(y,x,p,t₂)=s). But there is a dizzying variety of other request strength modifiers. I could, for instance, reinforce all requests that I made on Tuesdays while canceling all requests that I made on Wednesday.

The individual y has in principle a great amount of control over the dynamic evolution of r(y,x,p,t). She can issue any, or almost any [note 2], kind of modification to r(y,x,p,t) that she is capable of describing to x.

The example I gave earlier of handing someone a list and prioritizing the items in the order given modifies r(y,x,p,t) for those values of p expressed in the list, and modifies them in degree dependent on where they are found on the list. The request function gives us an enormous amount of authority over reasons available to our fellows, an authority to be used carefully.

Because of the complexity of possible changes in the request function, we have developed complex performative language. If I say: "I'd like you to do all the items on the list, though I'd the odd numbered ones more than I want the even numbered ones", I am not describing my preferences. I am engaging in request strength modification by performatively describing a part of the structure of r(y,x,p,t), where y is me, x is you and t is now or shortly after now. The description is performative in that it makes r(y,x,p,t) have the values it is described as having (with whatever vagueness we want to include, e.g., on the side of strengths). The use of preference language is not to be taken literally—what is being described is not an inner state, but the function r(y,x,p,t). The lack of literalness is important. I can request something of you that I do not actually desire, and I can desire something I do not request. (This is important in constituting consent, for instance.) It is also important not to take r(y,x,p,t) to describe y's mental state at t, because y may have forgotten some of her requests to x, but unless they are canceled or mooted, they continue to be a part of r(y,x,p,t).

This way of thinking about requests gives a neat solution to the problem of characterizing conditional requests. Suppose I ask you to go kayaking with me tomorrow if it's not raining. One might try to model this with a material conditional. I am asking you to bring it about that if it's not raining, then we go kayaking. But on a material conditional reading, I am asking that you bring it about that it rains or we go kayaking. Surely, however, there is an asymmetry in my request that would make it odd for you to try make it rain.

The request function approach gives a better story. Because y has almost complete control over r(y,x,p,t) for future t, the requester y can make r(y,x,p,t) change its value conditionally on some factors that y does not actually know. (The case of the list of tasks was already like that.) I can, thus, make r(I,you,<we go kayaking at t₂>,t) be non-zero if and only if it doesn't rain at t₂.

Complex standing requests can be handled similarly ("Let's go kayaking every Wednesday on which it isn't raining and on which you aren't working on a paper on indicative conditionals"). We can even model some subtleties, such as whether the reason comes to be operative now (which gives me a present request-based reason to prepare for the kayaking if need be) or only comes to be operative tomorrow, since the changes in r(y,x,p,t) can be stipulated to only apply when t>t₁, say. Moreover, requests can have expiration dates—when t hits such a date, r(y,x,p,t) goes down (not necessarily to null, because there might have been two requests for p, and only one expired).

Commands are like requests. There is a command function c(R,x,p,t) whose values (strengths of command) give reasons to x. It is different in that the first argument place is filled not by an individual but by an individual authority role. I am Canadian. The commands of Her Majesty Elizabeth II do not go into a slot of "commands of Ms. Elizabeth Windsor", but into a slot of "commands of the monarch in right of Canada". (I am inclined to count legislation signed by her representative as a command of hers.) Thus, when Elizabeth goes to her reward, the commands of her successor in right of Canada will go into the same slot as hers did. Moreover, the same individual can have more than one individual authority role: Elizabeth had the authority of a mother and of a moarch over her son when he was younger, and now she only has the latter authority, and it is with the role that we keep track of the commands. A mature individual x will keep track, as best she reasonably can, of the non-null values of c(R,x,p,now).

Likewise, there are command strength modification speech acts. A difference between these and request strength modification speech acts is that the ability of R to modify c(R,x,p,t) tends to be strictly limited in all sorts of ways. Commands to act immorally are invalid (this might be true for requests), as are commands that exceed R's authority over x (there will be none such is when R is God). Such commands leave c(R,x,p,t) unchanged. Complex command strength modification speech acts will also often involve performative descriptions of c(R,x,p,t), and may sometimes use the same kind of apparently autobiographical language of preferences (though "need" and "want" are more likely than "I'd like"), with the commands being distinguished by context or tone or explicit markers ("This is not a request").

Finally, there is a function v(x,y,p,t) that encodes of the strengths of x's promises to y (I will use the term also for very weak committive states like "I'll do A if I can"). Promises like requests and commands have a strength. The rules on the evolution of the function are more complex, however. In the case of requests and commands, one and the same party was able to increase and decrease the strength of a request. But only the promiser can can create a promise or increase the strength of an existing one, while it is the promisee or, in some cases, an appropriate authority (parents can cancel the promises of their children, and the Church can commute or cancel vows to God) who gets to cancel a promise ("I am not holding you to that") or decrease its strength ("Don't do it if it's a lot of trouble").

The strengths of promises are definitely not numerical. There may be low level not-quite-commitments that create reasons—"I'll do it if I can"—which we don't normally count as promises. And the difference between these and full-blown promises is qualitative. Perhaps the strength of a promise (and maybe the same goes for a request or command) should be seen as a list of strengths. For instance, I might make a wimpy not-quite-commitment to come to your party, in which case v(x,y,p,t) comes to be "not-quite-commitment". I might then additionally promise it. Now I have "not-quite-commitment plus full-promise" as my strength. It's important to keep both in the strength. FOr you might release me from the full-promise without releasing me from the not-quite-commitment. Moreover, each of these separately generates a reason, unless I took the promise to override the not-quite-commitment. (While the promiser can't cancel or weaken a promissive act, she can upgrade it.)

And so there are promise strength modification speech acts. However, unlike in the command and request case, they bifurcate naturally into strengtheners that promisers can make and weakeners that promisees and some authorities can make.

The same points about conditionality and expiry that I made about requests apply to promises and commands.

The prodigal son

I was yesterday struck by a dimension of the parable of the prodigal son that I hadn't noticed before: prayer. The younger son asks for two outrageous things—his inheritance ahead of time and being received back—and in both cases his requests are granted (in the latter case, he gets more than he asked for, since he is not asking for his sonship). The older son complains that he never got a young goat to eat with his friends. But it is clear that he never bothered to ask for one. After all, the father says: "all that is mine is yours." (The younger son reminds me a little of Mrs. Fidget in C. S. Lewis's Four Loves, who quietly works her fingers to the bone, suffering for others in ways that they don't want her to. Mrs. Fidget, too, would not bother asking you to come back by a certain time—she would just stay up and wait.)

Maybe the older son could try to complain: "But didn't you know that I wanted a goat?" However, a request is not just the expression of a desire: a request has normative effects that a mere desire does not.

How to ever tell that your prayers have been answered?

Can we Christians ever tell that our prayers have been answered? I pray for E and E occurs. Can I ever know that God acted on my prayer rather than E occurring completely independently of my prayer? It turns out that the answer is simpler than one might think, and that we can know this much more often than one might think.

Consider the property of Reasons Maximalism (RM) that an agent might have. An agent has RM if and only if whenever she chooses an action A, she chooses it on account of all the unexcluded reasons she is aware of in favor of A. Suppose, for instance, that I have a duty to visit a sick friend and I enjoy her company even when she is sick, but, on the other hand, it's a long drive and the hospital is depressing. Nonetheless, I do visit her. If I don't have RM, I might be visiting her only out of duty or only for pleasant companionship. But if I have RM, I am visiting her because of both duty and pleasant companionship. And if I have RM and decide not to visit her, then I will decide to do that because of both the long drive and the depressingness of the hospital.

I submit that God has RM. Being perfectly morally good and perfectly rational, in every decision God takes into consideration all the unexcluded reasons he has. Of course, in the end, it may not be possible for him to act on all the reasons, because some of the reasons will pull in different ways. But his choice will have been made on the basis of all the reasons he is aware of in favor of it. Moreover, in the case of an omniscient being, the reasons she is aware of in favor of A is the same as the reasons she has in favor of A. Thus, God chooses A on the basis of all the unexcluded reasons he has that favor A.

Now, that I've requested something good and grantable is always a reason to grant the request. In rare cases, it will be an excluded reason—perhaps I earlier authoritatively commanded the person to stop granting my requests for a day. But I cannot think of an exclusionary reason God might have against considering our requests for good things. (If God promised not to hear our requests, that would be an exclusionary reason, but he made no such promise.)

I don't know exactly how to analyze "grantable". One class of non-grantables are states of affairs ruled out by divine promises. Another class of non-grantables are states of affairs that cannot be brought about, whether because they are metaphysically impossible or because they are metaphysically necessary. It may also be that people's free choices are non-grantables. However, perhaps when we pray that x (where x is not God) might freely do A, God reinterprets our prayer charitably as a prayer that x be given lots of reason to do A, and that is a grantable. I do not know whether things that God has already promised are grantables, but I am inclined to think they are (cf. the sick friend visit case).

So, our requests for grantable good things are always an unexcluded reason for God to grant the request, and God being omniscient is aware of this. Moreover, God is a concurrent cause in all good events (in fact, in all events, because evil is a mere privation, but nevermind that), so that all good events count as caused by God. Therefore, by RM, if I pray for grantable good, and God brings about the request, then God produces the good in part because of the request. So, a sufficient condition for my knowing that an event has happened as a result of my request is that (a) I prayed for it, (b) it was good, (c) it was grantable and (d) it occurred.

In particular cases, these conditions are very commonly satisfied. If you pray for someone's safety during a trip, and she returns safely, she does so in part because of your prayers. If you pray that you find a lost object, and you do find it, you find it in part because of your prayers. If you pray that a friend might recover from an illness, and she recovers, she recovers in part because of your prayers.

Now, you might say that because of the "in part" this is unsatisfying. You might want to know when it is that God grants it solely on account of your prayers. Assuming the thing you prayed for was good, the answer is: never. If it was good, then God had a reason to bring it about, and by RM if he brought it about, he brought it about in part because it was good. The one exception would be if there were an exclusionary reason, such as a divine promise that he will only bring this good about as a result of prayer. But Revelation does not, I think, tell us that god has such exclusionary reasons, and we can presume he doesn't. So it is never the case that a good you prayed for was granted solely because you prayed for it.

But perhaps you want to know something else: You want to know if it is the case that the good would not have been granted had you not prayed for it? Well, sorry: this can only be known if Molinism is true and God reveals it to you. But I think Molinism is false. Given the falsity of Molinism, there will be no facts of the form: The good would not have been given had you not prayed for it. For had you not prayed for it, God would still have had the reason in favor of it given by the fact that it was good, and he still might have acted on the reason. That said, sometimes you can know that the event would still have been given—for instance, when the event was promised by God. However, you can never know that the event would not have been produced had you not prayed for it, when the event is good. (I leave open some questions about praying for neutral and bad things.)

Can we ever know that our prayers have not been granted? Maybe not. For it seems reasonable for God to grant our prayers by giving us something greater than what we prayed for, something we weren't wise enough or knowledgeable enough to ask for. Suppose George has a flu he knows about an undiagnosed cancer he doesn't know about. He prays to be cured of the flu, but instead God cures the cancer. That's better than what George asked for, and George cannot complain that his prayer has been unanswered. Any substantive good in curing the flu is there in the curing of the cancer, and if George had known he had the cancer and had any sense, that is what he would have prayed for the healing of. In that case, George's prayer was, arguably, answered, but George cannot know how it has been answered. Though if he is a Christian and reflects on Scripture, he can know that it has been answered somehow. And of, course, healing faults in the soul would be even better than curing the flu or healing a cancer.