Promises Schmomises

In this piece, I argue that promises need not be kept just because they were made. This is not to say, however, that unwise, unhappy, and unfortunate promises do not generate obligations. When broken promises will result either in wrongful gains to promisors or wrongful losses to promisees, obligations of corrective justice will demand that such promises be kept if their breach cannot be fully repaired. Thus, when a broken promise will constitute a deliberate loss transfer for personal gain, the duty not to exact unjust enrichment (a wrongful gain) will require a promisor either to honor her promise or craft a means of ensuring that the promisee’s impoverishment is not traded for her enrichment. And when a broken promise will constitute the culpable imposition of a reliance-based injury on a nonculpable promisee (a wrongful loss), the duty to make others whole when one has purposefully, knowingly, or recklessly injured them will require one either to keep one’s promise or to fashion a remedy for its breach that ensures that the promisee is left no worse off than he would be had the promise not been made. This account explicitly parts ways with normative powers theories of promising. It places no weight at all on the raw fact that a promise has been made. Instead, it locates the gravamen of a promissory violation in the harm that is caused to a promisee who nonculpably relies upon and changes her position in anticipation of the prediction about the promisor’s future conduct that is embedded in his promise. Absent any adverse reliance on the part of a promisee, there is nothing that gives rise to an obligation of performance or repair on the part of the promisor. But this account is also to be distinguished from utilitarian theories that take promises to be instruments of wealth maximization that properly give way whenever the reason for honoring them speaks in favor of violating them. On my account, the balance of reasons for action that determines the morality of performance includes deontological rights and duties, agent-relative permissions, and Hohfeldian liberties. As I shall argue, even if one rightly concludes that one has no duty either to keep a promise or to craft a remedy for its breach, one must nevertheless remember that virtue requires one to be or become the kind of person who often goes beyond the call of duty. But the fact that virtue often requires us to do what we have no duty to do should not cause us to confuse its conditions with the conditions of right and wrong action. We have a duty to keep promises or to otherwise protect the reliance interests that they generate only when failing to do so will lead either to our own unjust enrichment or to others’ unjust injury. And this means that we have a duty to keep promises in far fewer circumstances than is commonly believed.     

In remembrance of Robert D. Tollison

We discuss the mechanisms related to quadratic voting, from Vickrey’s counter-speculation mechanism and his second-price auction, through the family of Groves mechanisms and its most notable member, the Clarke mechanism, to the expected externality mechanism, Goeree and Zhang’s mechanism, the Groves–Ledyard mechanism, and the Hylland–Zeckhauser mechanism. We show that each mechanism that involves collective decisions has a quadratic aspect and that all of the mechanisms that we discuss are applications of the fundamental insight that for a process to be efficient, all parties involved must bear the marginal social costs of their actions.     

论市场机制下的水污染物排放许可制度革新

水污染物排放许可制度经过多年发展,已成为我国水污染防治的核心制度之一,但该制度尚有许多不足之处,不能有效回应现实的需要,有待进一步完善.本文基于对水污染物排放许可制度历史沿革和立法现状的梳理,从行政法治和市场化两个维度审视该制度存在的问题,提出完善水污染物排放许可制度的建议:完善相关法律法规体系,统一许可实施主体,拓展许可适用范围,完善许可中的公共利益保护机制.     

新媒体:社会风险放大的新型场域——基于技术与文化的视角

媒介天然具有"放大"潜能。相对传统媒体而言,新媒体技术及其创生文化所构建的新媒体环境,更是成了社会风险前所未有的放大场域。一方面,新媒体与风险扩散之间形成了高度的技术耦合,新媒体技术在风险扩散速度、扩散范围、感知渠道、体验效果、不确定性等方面大幅提升了风险放大的概率、加剧了其放大后果;另一方面,新媒体技术创生的文化进一步驱动了风险放大中的信息传播机制与社会反应机制,导致风险的非理性放大以及相关社会运动的激化,使得风险又衍生出其他更多的社会风险。     

The Anti-Axial Age

Karl Jaspers famously characterized the period from the beginning of the eighth to the end of the third century before Christ as an “Axial Age” in which intellectual freedom and creativity blossomed as never before. This article argues that it was followed, five hundred years later, by an “Anti-Axial Age”, which devised a novel formula for intellectual and political repression. Its essence was the state’s capture of the millenial narrative, which had first been developed as religious doctrine within Zoroastrianism and Christianity. Involving the two great classical empires of Western Eurasia, Persia and Rome, and then empowering the expansion of Islam, the Anti-Axial Age left an ideological legacy that continues to haunt the contemporary world.