Promisee

Also, recall that “efficiency” is in the eye of the beholder, and someone who wants to breach has a powerful incentive to misvalue the costs borne by the promisee. ❋ Unknown (2010)

So even if we assume for the sake of argument that the AoA was the promisee under the 1891 Agreement as suggested above, a case could be made that in fact the individual alumni were actually the promisees and not third-party beneficiaries, individual alumni were quite obviously the intended beneficiaries of the agreement and have standing to sue. ❋ Unknown (2009)

Scanlon discusses another sort of case, the Profligate Pal (Scanlon 1999, p. 312) where the promisee fails to have the standard expectations because the promiser (the profligate pal) has made and broken too many promises in the past. ❋ Unknown (2009)

He thinks this because he thinks that people are passionate creatures whose reason is often overwhelmed by those passions, and because he conceives of covenants as cases where the trust the promisee puts himself at risk by trusting the promiser. ❋ Unknown (2009)

The intuitively obvious reason for the trust of a promisee has is that the promiser has promised, and as such has placed herself under a moral obligation to do the deed. ❋ Unknown (2009)

For expectationalists, a promise is a perlocutionary act, as it's only successful if it actually produces the expectations in the promisee that the promise will be carried out. ❋ Unknown (2009)

So it seems that the trust of my promisee is both the cause and the effect of my promise, and this seems an unacceptable circle. ❋ Unknown (2009)

Why should the promisee believe you, knowing that it may be to your advantage to renege? ❋ Unknown (2007)

There is a longstanding rule that permits even incidental beneficiaries to sue if there is an inability of the promisee to enforce the right such as because of death or disability or an “outright refusal” of the promisee to enforce the rights. ❋ Unknown (2009)

In another vein, Margaret Gilbert (2004) has critiqued (Scanlonian) expectationalism on the grounds that the theory leaves no room for a right in the promisee. ❋ Unknown (2009)

If the trust of the promiser is the ground of the moral obligation to keep a promise, then prior to the promisee coming to trust the promiser, no such obligation exists. ❋ Unknown (2009)

In such cases expectationalists must either admit that there is no obligation to keep the promise, which seems very counterintuitive, or come up with some reason for the obligation apart from the fact that the promise created expectations in the promisee. ❋ Unknown (2009)

But this clashes with our firm intuition that a broken promise harms primarily the jilted promisee. ❋ Unknown (2009)

So when the promisee goes searching for a reason to trust, the standard one is barred from consideration. ❋ Unknown (2009)

Where there is a third-party beneficiary, the standard rule is that duty can run to either the promisee or the third-paty beneficiary and either the promisee or the third-party has standing to sue to enforce the promise (Restatement (2d) section 305). ❋ Unknown (2009)

The act utilitarian explanation for promissory obligations is that these obligations arise from the negative consequences that attend the breaking of promises, where these negative consequences are, at least in part, created by the effects of the promise on the promisee, specifically, the creation in the promisee of the expectation that the promiser will keep her promise. ❋ Unknown (2009)

The Desert Island/Deathbed cases described above (Section 4.2) are one such problem, where the expectations are lacking because the promisee is dead. ❋ Unknown (2009)

In support of this picture utilitarians offer that promises are the sorts of things which are generally made because the promisee wants the thing promised, and so wants to be assured of getting it. ❋ Unknown (2009)

There is a further distinction to be made, between those expectationalists that hold that a promisee must have experienced a tangible harm as the result of a broken promise for a wrong to have been committed, and those who hold that the mere disappointment is sufficient. ❋ Unknown (2009)