Roxanne promised Luke that she would finish their report while he was on vacation; however, the deadline for that rep...

shunhe on May 29, 2020

Hi @hkolon,

Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at the stimulus. Roxanne promised Luke she’d finish a report while on vacation, but the deadline was pushed back. We’re then told about an analogous case: if you promise a friend to meet them for lunch but fall ill before you meet them, it’s not wrong for you to miss the lunch since your friend wouldn’t expect you to be there if you were sick. Now we need to complete the argument based on this analogy.

What seems to be the principle here is that if you make a promise, but circumstances change, and under the new circumstances something else would be expected, it’s not wrong to renege on the original promise. In the lunch example, you made a promise to make lunch. Then you got sick. Your friend wouldn’t expect you to go if you were sick. So it’s not wrong to renege on the original promise and not go, since you are sick, and your friend wouldn’t expect you to go if you were sick, even though you technically promised.

Applying that to the original case: Roxanne promised Luke to do the report, but then circumstances changed, since the due date was pushed back. What would make this analogous to the case of the lunches? If Luke wouldn’t expect Roxanne to do the report if the due date was pushed back, then she doesn’t have an obligation to do it anymore. This is what (D) tells us. It wouldn’t be wrong for Roxanne to fail to finish the report (wordy, but basically, it’s not wrong for her to not do it) if Luke doesn’t expect her to finish the report under the circumstances.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.