The distinction between obligations de resultat and obligations de moyens was proposed at the beginning of the last century by Demogue, a famous French scholar. According to the distinction, while an obligation de resultat is directed at guaranteeing the attainment of a specific result, an obligation de moyens consists of the employment of the duty of care in performing a contractual obligation. Such distinction gained some success and was transplanted in many jurisdictions. This contribution considers the distinction between obligations de resultat and obligations de moyens as a juridical epiphany of those conceptions of contract law founding the enforceability of promises on the mere will of the parties. In this contribution two questions are posed: the first concerns the conditions under which responsibility for breach of contract is triggered and the second deals with the extent to which the promisor shall be bound to the given promise. By providing an answer to these questions, this contribution reveals that the distinction between obligations de resultat and obligations de moyens is logically based upon a questionable method of abstraction rooted in the evolution of the law towards the abandoning of the traditional ideas and concepts having characterized contract law for centuries. The historical process of abandonment of the criteria of enforceability of promises, with particular regard to the subjectivization of causa, has provided the conceptual grounds for the coming into existence of the distinction between obligations de resultat and obligations de moyens. The distinction between obligations de resultat and obligations de moyens is based upon the reduction of causa to any subjective reason or motive for contracting. Precisely, the distinction between obligations de resultat and obligations de moyens holds and presupposes causa as the promisor's subjective motive to which the obligation tends and which shall be realized by the promise. This process is however flawed since causa in its objective meaning represents something unavoidable for the enforcement of promises. The existence of causa (intended as the contractual exchange) represents a juridical necessity in contracts. Although shaped into different forms, the objective contractual exchange represents the same entity for every obligation; thus, in every obligation the requirement of an objective causa must exist to make it enforceable. As the necessity of the existence of an objective causa is ascertained, the validity of the distinction between obligations de resultat and obligations de moyens is strongly challenged.
