The Logic of Commitment

Gary Chartier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351401654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book develops and defends a conception of commitment and explores its limits. Gary Chartier shows how commitment serves to resolve conflicts between ordinary moral intuitions and the reality that the basic aspects of human well-being are incommensurable. He outlines a variety of overlapping and mutually reinforcing rationales for making commitments, explores the relationship between commitment and vocation and the relevance of commitment to love, and notes some reasons why it might make sense to disregard one's commitments. The Logic of Commitment will appeal to ethicists interested in the connection between commitment and personal well-being, and to anyone who wonders why and when it might make sense to make or keep commitments.

1 Commitment and Instrumental Reason

Making and keeping commitments can help us realize our preferences—by encouraging our subsequent pursuit of particular goals, changing our assessments of contrary preferences, helping us develop valuable character traits, and evoking positive responses from others.

I. Commitments Help Us Achieve a Broad Range of Goals

Making and keeping commitments makes sense strategically or instrumentally. In Part II, I reflect on the general question of how thinking about the future and the past can make sense when we’re reasoning instrumentally. In Part III, I examine specific links between commitment-keeping and instrumental rationality. I sum up in Part IV.

II. Thinking Instrumentally Outside the Present

Rightly or wrongly, instrumental reason is often thought to be the simplest and most transparent variety of reason.¹ It is concerned straightforwardly with achieving one’s goals in as inexpensive a manner as possible. Making sense of commitment in this context requires some sense of our identity over time and of our entitlement to speak for our future selves.

A. Making and Keeping Commitments Presupposes Identity over Time

Whether making and keeping commitments is instrumentally rational depends in part on whether one’s identity is meaningfully preserved over time, on whether the self making the commitment and the self wondering whether to honor the commitment are in important respects the same. Sorting out the challenge of keeping commitments need not involve exploring complex cases about (full or partial) brain-switching, resurrections, disembodiment, and the like. A fairly straightforward and simple understanding of personal identity as narrative continuity will do.² I need enough of a sense of personal identity over time that it makes sense for me to hold myself responsible for past choices (as, of course, for others to hold me responsible for these choices as well in appropriate circumstances) and to constrain future choices. If I can hold myself responsible for past choices, then it seems as if I can make choices for which I can expect myself to accept responsibility in the future and so, when they are intended to shape the future direction of my actions, to adhere to them.

To the challenge that I can reinvent myself on a moment-by-moment basis, and so needn’t regard my present self as identical with my past self in a way that imposes any obligations on me, I might consider a multifold response, quite apart from the intricate metaphysical issues involved.³ (i) Reasoning in this way would be inconsistent with choosing rationally and planning for the future. The practice of planning for the future presupposes continuity of identity. (ii) Reasoning in this way is inconsistent with our actual practices of holding ourselves and others responsible. (iii) Reasoning in this way would make social life of various sorts impossible. While hardly decisive, these considerations at least suggest how disruptive of individual lives and social institutions were we to abandon the practice of treating ourselves as persisting over time.

B. Speaking for My Future Self

One might wonder what entitles me to tie my own future hands. (i) Perhaps there is some reason to be suspicious that the later influence one seeks in the present to blunt will be worth rejecting. There may be multiple justifications for this stance, but the most obvious is that the influence interferes with the capacity for rational choice itself, with a capacity that is essential if an agent is to pursue and achieve (almost) any goal imaginable (allowing for the cases in which rational choice actually conflicts with the achievement of one’s goals). So, in the interest of achieving all of one’s other goals, one might reasonably tie one’s hands, literally or figuratively.

(ii) In many cases, though, the future contingencies I want to preclude by committing now won’t involve any interference with the capacity for rational choice. Consider the training regimen to which I might commit in order to prepare for a half-marathon. What’s likely to impede it is not some sort of rationality-stultifying plague, but simply the physical tiredness associated with persistent training, the boredom that accompanies it, the thought that I have no chance of doing well in the final contest in any case. None of these is a disposition that simply eliminates rationality. Instrumental rationality serves simply to help us achieve our goals. And the coming-to-preeminence of one of the negative motives to which I’ve alluded here would simply mean that I had come to embrace a goal different from the one that had previously claimed my loyalty.

Of course, I can’t avoid making choices that will affect my future self. Any choice I make in the present will causally influence my future circumstances in various ways. In addition, my present choices can be expected to reshape my future preferences. It makes no sense to treat those future preferences as formed in pristine fashion, independent of what I’m doing in the present. Non-interference with my future self isn’t realistically possible.

At the same time, the issue of commitment arises precisely because our preferences frequently conflict. Accepting the goal to which I’m committed in the face of contrary current preferences will mean treating my commitment as decisive. It will mean forming and acting on preferences shaped by my commitment. And it will mean grounding my resistance to my current preferences for another option or options in the preferences shaped by my commitment. Keeping the commitment will need to be, in one way or another, the most efficient way of achieving one’s goals.

C. Instrumental Reason and Commitment

Instrumental rationality is essentially forward-looking, though of course it can feature various derivative reasons for attending to the past. But a commitment is a past event. The point of a commitment might be thought to be precisely to constrain one’s future choices when one might prefer to do something other than whatever it is to which one is committed. A commitment need not be counter-preferential, since one might well prefer at many or all points in the future to do whatever one has committed oneself to doing. But a commitment will obviously matter, particularly when one desires strongly to abandon the plan embodied in the commitment. The point of the commitment will be to interpose itself between reaction and choice, so that one will not, in fact, act on one’s preference to abandon the pursuit of one’s goal.

It might seem, then, that a prior commitment could play no independent role in purely instrumental reasoning. Ex ante, I may be able to influence my future preferences by self-investing emotionally. But why should I care, ex post, about a prior commitment? My preferences may change over time. And, if they do, it seems as if, on a model of purely instrumental rationality, I should be concerned with the ones I actually have, not with the ones I wanted to have at some earlier point.

III. When Making and Keeping Commitments Is Instrumentally Rational

In fact, however, commitments will be relevant to future preferences in at least two ways. I can contribute causally to shaping or reshaping what my preferences actually will be in the future by making a commitment in the present. And I can give myself reason to ignore or discount some future preferences and to attend instead to those embodied in my commitment. In either case, making and keeping commitments is instrumentally rational for at least two broad kinds of reasons. It helps us to achieve specific goals. And it equips us to achieve other, potentially unrelated goals.⁴

A. Commitments and Achieving Particular Goals: The Ex Ante Perspective

Some kinds of commitment involve hedging our choices by putting causal constraints on them in place, rather as one might plant booby traps designed to steer someone around the course on which a game is taking place. They may also involve simply investing emotionally in a given project in a way that leads to ongoing pursuit of the project.

Suppose I want to realize a particular preference over an extended period—to continue using the example I’ve already employed, to train for a half-marathon. I will have reason to make commitments supportive of my goal. As I continue to train for the half-marathon, my desires fluctuate: sometimes I wish to prepare satisfactorily for the half-marathon, while at other times I experience the associated difficulties as overwhelming and tell myself that they are simply “not worth it.”

Already aware that this might occur, I can, at the time I embrace a plan to train, also take steps to reduce the risk that I will defect. Perhaps I relocate to a site at which distractions will not be in evidence. Or perhaps I empower someone else to impose a penalty (of a sort on which we agree in advance) on me if I abandon or dilute my training regimen. Thus, to use an example that has become justifiably famous in this context, Odysseus arranges for his associates to tie him to the mast of their ship so that he will not yield to the blandishments of the sirens.⁵ At the time he asks to be bound, he knows that his later self will prove all too responsive to the sirens’ songs; wishing to prevent this, he ensures that his own hands are tied before he can be seduced. Perhaps in my own case I make a bet with a friend, agreeing to pay a painfully large sum if I don’t qualify for the marathon. Given my goal of participating, imposing the risk of a penalty on myself in this way can be a rational means of achieving my goal.

But the primary form making a commitment will likely take on the spare view of instrumental rationality I am considering here will be to form habits.⁶ That is, making a commitment will mean contributing causally in various ways to the formation of the disposition to adhere to whatever plan is embodied in the commitment. That fact that I make a commitment now will matter at some later time when I am disposed to ignore the commitment precisely because I will have made myself into the kind of person who will keep the commitment anyway. “Until one is committed,” W. H. Murray observes in The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, “there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.”⁷ But in committing, one invests oneself—and pushes oneself forward.

Of course, once a commitment is made, it will become easier to keep not only because keeping it will become a habit but also because having made and begun to keep it will shape one’s preferences in such a way that keeping it will be an increasingly natural expression of those preferences, with the result that one will feel good about the achievement of one’s goals because of one’s commitment to achieving them and because, since one has organized one’s life in relation to the commitment, there will be an increasingly smooth fit between keeping the commitment and the other choices one makes. (Obviously, the focus here is on more extensive commitments. All of this will be less evident, but also less necessary, where short-term commitments—avoiding the phone during a morning of work, say—are concerned.)

The focus here, then, is on my ex ante self-cultivation. That I have reason to form the requisite habits does not show that it will on its own be rational to ignore preferences contrary to my commitment when they arise, ex post. What it shows, rather, is just that I have reason ex ante to develop and solidify preferences supportive of my goal, together with the habit of ignoring or eliminating preferences likely to undermine my commitment-keeping.

B. Commitments and Achieving Particular Goals: The Ex Post Perspective

Commitment can also operate without external restraints and penalties, and even in the absence of felt emotional investment. The committed person may survey the situation she confronts and judge in each moment that she has good reason to keep her commitment even when she feels the urge to avoid doing so. Even in the absence of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Exploring Commitment
• 1 Commitment and Instrumental Reason
• 2 Commitment, Identity, and Integrity
• 3 Commitment and Basic Goods
• 4 Commitment and Vocation
• 5 Commitment and Love
• Conclusion: Commitment and Flourishing
• Index
• About the Author