Taking on responsibility and trusting others: A response to Shiffrin

My response begins by highlighting two distinctive and particularly helpful features of Shiffrin’s view. First, Shiffrin presents us with a conception of responsibility that is prospective, constitutive, and independent of fault. Second, she focuses on the way in which the rule of strict liability for performance affects the relationship between the promisor and promisee, rather than focusing only on the benefits to each of them, considered separately. I then question whether this relationship really does involve trust, as Shiffrin claims, and I conclude with some suggestions about how we should understand promises in the moral domain.