Content area
Abstract
Many of us share the experience of having privately bound ourselves to an end or goal. Through an act of the will, we take on a previously optional end in a way that now normatively constrains our future choices. I call this sort of act a "personal commitment."
I argue that three attempts to assimilate personal commitments to more familiar normative phenomena each fail to recapture a distinctive characteristic of that initial picture. First, personal commitments are more robustly normative than bare intention. There are substantive constraints on when we get to revoke them, constraints that go beyond considerations of efficient agency. Second, though integrity and personal commitments can both change our reasons for action, integrity-based reasons are generally holistic in their demands. Commitment-based reasons, by contrast, seem to apply each time one's personal commitment is at issue. Finally, we might be tempted to understand personal commitments as inwardly-directed promises, since both promising and commitment seem to generate non-holistic reasons through the exercise of a normative power. But even if personal commitments are genuinely normative, they do not seem to be strongly moral in character, like promises. A personal commitment to run a marathon may really obligate one to undertake the appropriate training, but it stretches a common sense of the moral to say that it would be unethical to fail to do so. For those of us who found the initial idea of a personal commitment compelling, accepting any one of these analyses would require a significant revision in our pre-theoretical experience of personal commitment.
I conclude by arguing that we have good reason to resist that sort of revision. Recognizing a sui generis normative power of personal commitment adds to a more nuanced picture of normativity as such, and the means by which agents can bind themselves. It also adds to our understanding of the ways in which agents can be self-defining.
