1. This article has been a long time in the making, and I owe thanks to many people. First, I am grateful to those who participated in Gary Watson's seminar on promissory obligation at UC Riverside during winter quarter 2004, where the ideas for this article originated. I presented an early version of it at the 2004 Berkeley-Stanford-Davis Conference, where I received helpful feedback from my commentator, Gerardo Vildostegui, as well as from those who were present at my session, Rico Vitz in particular. As I continued to develop these ideas, I benefited greatly from conversations with and/or written comments from John Martin Fischer, Niko Kolodny, Gustavo Llarull, Sam Page, Nathan Placencia, Andrews Reath, Robert Sanchez, Matthew Talbert, and Christopher Yeomans. The Editors ofPhilosophy & Public Affairssaved me from a number of errors, both stylistic and substantive, and I thank them for their help. Finally, and most of all, thanks to Gary Watson for more engaging and enlightening conversations about promissory obligation than I can count, and for the same number of comments on previous drafts. He is responsible both for my interest in the subject, and for much of what is good about this article.
2. For an example of this kind of view, see John Rawls,A Theory of Justice(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), especially pp. 344-50.
3. Scanlon on Promissory Obligation