How much is one's word worth today? From an evolutionary point of view, keeping one's word is favorable for humans because it creates bonds of cohesion and cooperation. However, promises are also going through a time of crisis, both in private life and in politics. Or so claims Montserrat Herrero (Philosophy ‘89, PhD '94), who is a political philosophy professor and principal investigator at the Institute for Culture and Society. "As the Nobel Prize-winning poet Vicente Aleixandre said, ‘Being faithful to yourself is the only way to be faithful to others.'"

Why does man have the need to make promises?

We are temporal; our existence moves on the coordinates of the past, present and future. With our actions we do not just live in the present, but rather we set up a future. That is, we require some stability and have a need to engage our will in a long-term plan. And we can only do so by giving of the most intimate thing we have, i.e., our word, which is not something external, but rather a fundamental part of our being. A person who cannot give his word lacks an identity. Moreover, in looking at this way of ensuring the future, we can glimpse a desire for eternity. There are things that we do not want to be diluted or to disappear because their nature is "forever," for example, true love, be it for a person, family, one's homeland or God. These relationships elicit the strongest commitments and most inviolable promises.

Do you share the idea that promises been the basis of every society?

Yes of course. In On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche raises an extreme case to the contrary by supposing that human beings have an innate inclination to deception, which engenders a situation of mistrust that results in a struggle to the death. The only way out of this situation is to artificially generate something like the truth. Hence, through an agreement, men determine unambiguous meanings for words, setting the foundation for agreements. All men must decide to respect these valid meanings if they want to live in peaceful places. Driven by his interest in subverting values, Nietzsche places lies at the root of the truth, but he still needs respect for truth and veracity to build a society. No society can survive on the basis of lies, that is, on the devaluation of promises, which even Nietzsche recognized.

Promises and oaths became common practice thousands of years ago.

Juridical institutions are an endorsement of this anthropological-political basis: oaths, and loyalty to them, are the basis of all social order. In one of his books, Il sacramento del potere. Il giuramento politico nella storia costituzionale dell'Occidente (In English: The sacrament of power: The political oath in Western constitutional history), the Italian political scientist Paolo Prodi reviewed the different forms that this legal institution has acquired with the passage of time. Indeed, the oath (ius iurandum) held enormous importance in antiquity and for the Roman jurists. The term ius seems to be related to oath and probably with Iovis (Jupiter), the god invoked in the oath to punish perjury. From this reality, case law developed the concept of fides, or loyalty to a promise, which played a decisive role in the formation of Roman law and, in particular, in the law of nations that preceded international law and the new global law.

Until recently, "to give one's word" was almost sacred. Are we going through a crisis of trust?

It was sacred because, as John Locke argued, people understood that there was a sacred witness who had power over the world and language. Not respecting that witness meant sure self-destruction. God is dead, as Nietzsche would say, thus we only have language left to guide us. But a postmodern turn in philosophy, which has also taken into account this "linguistic turn," has destroyed even that presumption. One can violate one's word without problem. It seems not to be made of anything. A new strain of philosophy with a libertarian bent promotes the idea that neither the reality of things can limit my word, nor am I subject to my own word. In the postmodern context, we function in what, after Wittgenstein, we understand as "language games."

Have we devalued promises?

According to Wittgenstein, words and sentences have no meaning independent of us. If we want to understand a word's meaning, we must examine the circumstances around it, i.e. determine how it is used, and accept that plural forms of life do not generate unifiable meanings. For his part, Michel Foucault rejects the idea that there is an individual founder of discourse that transcends it and the idea that there are pre-existing meanings in the foundations of experience, which themselves are neutral. All speech is a kind of violence applied to things.

Do you mean that reality is created in language and not the other way around?

Yes, indeed. My words do not have to adapt to anything. They are pure will to power. This is the context we are in. If I say there is no crisis, there is no crisis here and now... at least during my term. Is it true or not? It doesn't matter if I manage to win the elections and remain in power a few more years. The current structure of language functions as pure will to power for many people. Ernesto Laclau's discursive theory is a great example of this practice.

What happens when one does not believe in promises?

Things that we see everyday happen, including corruption, dissolution, distrust, enmity, and fighting.

How can we retrieve the value of promises?

On a personal level, I think it's simple: never lie. The truth seems to me to be the most important virtue, simplifying and correcting everything. It can be seen in Moses' tablets and, without it, people cannot follow any of the commands on this tablet. People lie out of fear or in pursuit of something useful. However, one generally does not know the real value of action. The future is unknown to us and, in retrospect, we usually find that we were wrong in our calculations. The simplest thing to do is to be truthful. It is also important to remember the old saying: "Lies have short legs."

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Religion and Civil Society

Montserrat Herrero (Philosophy ‘89, PhD '94) is a moral and political philosophy research professor at the University of Navarra. She also directs "Anuario Filosófico," a quarterly journal that has been in circulation since 1968.

She combines her teaching activities within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences with her work as the principal investigator for the Religion and Civil Society project, located within the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), the University of Navarra's Humanities and Social Sciences research center.

This project explores why religion is a fundamental element in the constitution of every society— in the form of family, institutions of civil society and political community— from different perspectives, including theology, philosophy, history, and legal, social and communication sciences.

Each year, this research group organizes an international conference where leading experts from around the world gather. This year, it will be held on March 10 and 11 and aims to achieve greater understanding between the Abrahamic religious traditions, i.e., Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Participants will discuss to what extent their research can promote efforts of peace and understanding in today's context.