Are Wagers Similar to Promises?
Autor: André Coelho | Publicado: 2013-08-14T06:43:00-07:00


Most contemporary philosophers explain the normativity of
promises with one of these two strategies: conventionalists say that promises
bind because there is a conventional practice (bearing normative meaning) of
making promises and every actor whose utterance meets the requirements of that
practice is obligated to do what he or she has said; expectationalists say that
promises bind because they raise expectations of fulfillment and (at least in
most of the cases) it would be wrong for an actor to disappoint expectations that
he or she raised. What I want to examine in this post is whether wagers can be
considered to bind in the same way that promises can and for the same reasons
too. In order to know that, I will compare wagers and promises and see whether
they are sufficiently similar to each other. For the sake of this post, I will
consider both strategies successful and will establish that, in &nbsp;defending that some institution is similar to a
promise, said similarity can hold either by the conventionalist or the expectationalist
conception of promises.



As for wagers, they bear the following intuitive similarity
to promises. If I bet with you that,
if your team wins the game, I will buy you a beer, that appears to be tantamount to me promising that, if your team wins the game, I will buy you a beer.
In this treatment, a wager looks like a case of a conditional promise, a
promise whose obligation is conditioned to a hypothetical fact, a promise in
the form if–then. (The fact that this kind of wager is usually made with a reciprocity
clause, such as “but if mine wins, you buy me a beer”, is not a real problem,
because it would just be a case of two promises, each one made by each of the
betters and intertwined with each other. For the sake of simplicity, I will
consider only the case of unilateral wagers, where the first better is
committed to do something for the second one if the condition obtains, but the second
better is not committed to do something for the first one if the condition does
not obtain.) That intuitive similarity between a wager and a conditional promise
is the departing point to our analysis.



There is, however, at least two important differences
between a wager and a conditional promise. The first one is that, in a wager,
the disbelief of the first better in that the condition will obtain is implicit
in the wager proposal itself, while a similar disbelief is not necessary in a
conditional promise. Betting that I will buy you a beer if your team wins the
game suggests that I have a considerable disbelief that your team will in fact
win the game. My utterance implies the prediction that your team will not win
the game and, to show how confident I am in my prediction, I am even willing to
buy you a beer if the future does not confirm it. On the other hand, by saying
something like: “Let’s watch the game together in a bar, I promise you that, if
your team wins the game, I will buy a beer”, I do not imply that I don’t
believe that your team will win the game, but, on the contrary, I believe that
it is at least one of the possibilities and commit myself that, if that
happens, I will buy a beer. For making the difference still more evident, you
can think of a father that knows that his son will apply for a place in a prestigious
university. If the father says: “I promise you that, if you get the place, I
will give you a car”, that is a kind of incentive, but if he says: “I bet with
you that, if you get the place, I will give you a car”, that is a kind of
discouragement, or even an offensive challenge.



The second difference between a wager and a conditional
promise is that, in a wager, both betters position themselves in a competition
picture, in a win-lose situation. If I bet with you that, if your team wins the
game, I will buy you a beer, and it turns out that your team does win the game
and I do have to buy you a beer, as said in the wager proposal, then I have
suffered a kind of loss and you are even expected to feel free to mock me for
that. But the same would be strange for a promise. If I promised you that, if
your team won the game, I would buy you a bear and it turned out that your team
did win the game and I did have to buy you a beer, it is only the fulfillment
of a promise, for your team’s winning the game was something that I had
expected to possibly happen and my having to buy you a beer was something that
I even wanted to do if your team won (which is kind of a win-win situation).
There would be no reason to mock me for that; maybe there is even place to
thank me in a way for having made that promise and for having complied with it
in the end.


In my point of view, those two differences have distinct
impacts on the similarity between wagers and promises according to the choice
for the conventionalist or the expectationalist strategy to explain promises. From
the point of view of the conventionalist strategy, those two differences look
like sufficient reasons to infer that, even if wagering is a practice, in the
same sense that promising is, it is not
the same practice as promising. It would be a different practice, one that
would have different rules and requirements and would call for a different justification.
But from the point of view of the expectationalist strategy, whatever the
differences between wagering and promising, there would be no denying that a
wager, similarly to a promise, raise expectations that would be wrong not to
fulfill. We could think of wagering and promising as two different cases (one
involving a challenge and a win-lose situation, the other involving help or
favor and a win-win situation) of the same moral phenomenon, that is, of the
expectation-raising behavior. It would be matter for an ulterior investigation
to know whether this conclusion shows an advantage of the expectationalist strategy
(the range of its classification, going beyond promises and encompassing other
behaviors, for example, wagers) that should be taken into account as an
epistemic reason to favor it over the conventionalist one. Another matter for
an ulterior investigation would be to know whether similar conclusions would
result from the comparison of both promises and wagers with other behaviors of
the kind, such as threats.