I worry about commitment

If you can get out of it, what's the point?

This is this week’s regularly scheduled post! I’m not sure how I messed up the date for the one that accidentally came out Tuesday, but since it was too late by the time I discovered it, I’ll just take Thanksgiving off.

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If you think too hard about it, commitment is a funny thing.

And of course, I have been thinking too hard about it. Writing last week’s post about why we commit to life-partnerships opened up, as often happens, much bigger questions about the nature of commitment.

A commitment is a way of binding ourselves in ways that prohibit some activities and give us reasons to perform others. The binding component is crucial: once you make a commitment, you’re supposed stick to it.¹ That’s the point, after all.

But it seems that we release ourselves and each other from commitments fairly routinely. If that’s the case, in what sense were they ever binding?

Let’s back up.

The basics

Commitments limit the scope of decisions by narrowing the field of choices, thus helping us to manage our sometimes overwhelming freedom.² They anchor us. They define who we are.

There are at least two types. One is internal, a commitment we make to ourselves, as when we take up a hobby or promise ourselves to get up early so we can eat a good breakfast. A commitment to a project or cause expresses and reinforces our values and provides reasons to do things that further the project. Another type is interpersonal, as when we promise someone we’ll do something. A committed relationship (even a nontraditional one) expresses the parties’ dedication to one another and provides reasons to favor that relationship over others.

In both cases, but especially for internal commitments, we’re meant to hold ourselves accountable. Similarly, in both cases but especially for interpersonal commitments, others also participate in keeping us accountable.

Others can also help regulate and adjust the terms of a commitment when we need some space or forgiveness as a result of contingencies that aren’t our fault. Sometimes others can also release us from commitments we’ve made to them, when they agree that circumstances have changed enough that the original commitment no longer makes sense. Amicable divorce might be an example of this. In a more everyday case, so is a rescheduling of a coffee date when something comes up.

The hard part

It starts to get tricky, though, when the commitment you make is personal and the person responsible for holding you accountable for honoring it is you. Suppose I reserve the first hour of my workday for writing. The point of committing is both to preserve that space and to make myself do it. Then circumstances change—maybe I have to teach an 8 a.m. class—and this no longer works. I could, of course, modify the timing and reserve some other hour for writing. I can make whatever adjustments seem reasonable and in keeping with the spirit of the commitment, which I’m free to interpret as I wish, since I’m the only party. I can manage reasonable exceptions. I could also, however, drop the commitment. But if I do that, in what sense was it ever a commitment? If I’m allowed to release myself from my commitments, how are they binding?

Consider also the even harder case when an interpersonal commitment is no longer working for you and you want to back out of it but the other parties don’t agree. I take it most divorces are like this. Working as I do at institutions founded by monasteries, withdrawing from the monastery also comes to mind as an example. Given that people and circumstances inevitably change over time, it seems that we do sometimes have good reason to modify or end our commitments. Leaving a marriage or a monastery you’ve vowed to live within isn’t a decision made lightly. Sometimes it feels like the thing we have to do to be true to ourselves, though, and then we’re wronging the people to whom we’ve committed.

Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

“Being true to ourselves” seems to be an important part of this mix. We tend to think we owe things to ourselves.³ When doing so breaks a commtiment (to someone else) it seems selfish and wrong and also liberating. The language we often hear here is “I had to.” Being true to ourselves can feel like a necessity even in the face of commitments.

Do all of our commitments come with an implicit “unless the circumstances change sufficiently” clause, then?

To make this even stickier, if a commitment is an expression of our values and a part of what makes us who we are—and I contend that it is—living up to it is also supposed to be a way of staying true to ourselves. This suggests that the scenarios I sketched above involve a kind of tear in our volitional fabric, an internal contradiction resulting from having deep reasons for two incompatible actions. (Which would explain why therapy is often needed.)

Except—by the time we feel strongly enough to break a longstanding commitment, whatever reasons it gave us for sticking with it have diminished in importance for us, enough to be outweighed by our new⁴ reasons to choose something else. Otherwise we wouldn’t break the commitment.

Although he arrives at it from a very different direction, I think what I’m getting at here is similar to what Nikhil Vintakesh is arguing in his paper “Against Commitment.” There’s an old objection to utilitarianism famously voiced by Bernard Williams that our connections to others, in the form of morality, may undermine our commitments—at least internal ones—by requiring us to demote their importance when others’ needs are great enough. On the flip side, however, Vintakesh points out that our internal commitments may in turn alienate us from others in equally unacceptable ways, given that our projects are only possible because of the social context in which we live. Either way, he claims, we must ultimately regard commitments as defeasible.

Are they any good, then? We still have a practice of making commitments, and it’s one we tend to take seriously. So there must be something to it even if commitments can’t be regarded as permanent.

It’s worth noting that commitments to others can always be released by the people to whom we committed. If I’ve promised to meet you for lunch and then my child gets sick, I can call you and explain, and you can say that of course I should stay with the child, thereby releasing me from my lunch promise. I should still honor the fact that I had committed by apologizing and suggesting that we reschedule, however. The accountability incurred by the commitment requires this; the reason created by my original commitment leaves a residue that needs attention.

There’s no real reason to think the structure of commitment is different when it’s an internal commitment and the person to whom you’re accountable is yourself.⁵ We talk in terms of parts of ourselves all the time, and while that’s probably metaphysically loose talk, the metaphor is powerful and useful. By committing, then, you’re exercising your authority to give yourself a reason to do whatever you’re committing to. You then have to have good reasons to let yourself out of it.

This accountability is, I think, the value of commitment. When we commit—to ourselves or to others—we use what Ruth Chang calls our “normative powers” to create a reason to do the action to which we’re committing. It’s a strong reason, taking priority over most other reasons. But it’s not iron-clad. It can be outweighed or overridden when circumstances give us stronger competing reasons.

That doesn’t mean we’re not accountable for broken or modified commitments. The reason created by a commitment doesn’t simply dissolve when it’s outweighed. (Philosophers call this a pro tanto reason.) Even if it’s not strong enough to move us to perform what we committed to, its residual power requires some form of acknowledgment, apology, and reparation.

Photo by Emmanuel Ikwuegbu on Unsplash

As an accountability relation, then, commitment is a practice of social connection. While we may not always be bound to perform precisely what we committed to, we’re nevertheless bound to respond to the authority we give others (or ourselves) by making commitments. Breaking them creates an imbalance that calls for restoration. This, I conclude, is the sense in which commitments are binding: they create bonds that reinforce identity and connection between people.

1. Unless it came with some clause defining under what conditions or at what time it comes to an end.

2. As a friend pointed out, many commitments bind us now so that we can be more free later: saving for retirement is one example of this.

3. Though, philosophically speaking, this is really pretty weird and puzzling.

Jared Henderson

recently explored this in an interview with Daniel Muñoz, whose work is about this.

4. New, or of increased importance. I like to think of reasons as having dials that can move up and down. Sometimes reasons are more salient or important, sometimes less.

5. Janis Schaab argues in “Commitment and the Second-Person Standpoint” that the structure of commitments (including internal ones) is second-personal—meaning that have the authority to create moral reasons by addressing one another (or ourselves) with demands—and therefore that they give us obligations. This seems right to me.