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Rachel Nunez
October 5, 2019
Ethics 101
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary the meaning of the word promise is “a legally
binding declaration that gives the person to whom it is made a right to expect or to claim the performance
or forbearance of a specified act”. For most people a promise is a person word, and then in turns is a
contract of trust. We’ve all heard the saying “A person is only as good as their word”. That saying alone
is evidence that for most people this evokes as much emotion as “keeping our word.” We make
commitments to others and ourselves all the time. A person character/worth can be measured in several
different ways, but for this discussion board I’d like to focus on promise keeping.
A promise is a way of saying how we value a certain person. When we fail to keep a promise, it
communicates to the other person that we don’t value him or her. We have chosen to place something else
ahead of our commitment. This can result in the loss of trust with that person. In our reading Stivers et
al.: Part 3 we learned that Ethics concerns the norms and principles groups accept and set forth as proper
guides and directives for moral action. Actions considered ethical have peculiar characteristics:
objectivity, a generalized or universalized validity, rational intelligibility. One thing that stuck out from
the reading was when we promise, what we are doing is boldly asserting that the future will turn out as we
say. In chapter five of the “Rule Utilitarianism.” is basically stating we should adopt as our moral code to
those rules of conduct that will result in the greatest good for the most people. In other words, a person
who thinks ahead can devise a set of moral precepts by which to guide his actions based on what precepts
are likely to most often result in the greatest good for the most people1. Then when that person finds
1 Jones, Michael 2017. Moral Reasoning: An Intentional Approach to Distinguishing Right from Wrong. 1st ed.
Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt.
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himself facing a moral dilemma, he doesn’t need to make a cost-benefit analysis of the various courses of
action: he merely acts in accord with the moral precept that he has decided on ahead of time.
The question is then raised when it is okay to break a promise. One may argue that it is only okay
to break a promise if the cause was from an uncontrollable circumstance. A person should understand that
they can not control everything. To make a promise you are basically predicting the future. This just can’t
be done. A person’s word is an important foundation of person character of being trust worthy. It is not
okay in my opinion to break a promise. When you don’t do something that you said you are going to do
results in you lying to that person. When a person lies they are being unethical. I was always taught that
you do not make promises that you can’t keep. Almost everybody has made promises one time or another
that we weren’t able to follow through with, but I challenge you to view it as the same as you lying to a
person face. This would result in a feeling that you have done something morally wrong, and your
integrity would be in question. Some may not have a problem with that, but one of the ten commandment
state “Thou shall not lie”.
