Here is the relevant version of the pledge, from December 2014:
I recognise that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good in the developing world. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that for the rest of my life or until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever organisations can most effectively use it to help people in developing countries, now and in the years to come. I make this pledge freely, openly, and sincerely.
A large part of the point of the pledge is to bind your future self in case your future self is less altruistic. If you allow people to break it based on how they feel, that would dramatically undermine the purpose of the pledge. It might well be the case that the pledge is bad because it contains implicit empirical premises that might cease to hold—indeed I argued this at the time! - but that doesn’t change the fact that someone did in fact make this commitment. If people want to make a weak statement of intent they are always able to do this—they can just say “yeah I will probably donate for as long as I feel like it”. But the pledge is significantly different from this, and attempting to weaken it to be no commitment at all entails robbing people of the ability to make such commitments.
Your argument about damages seems quite strange. If I buy something from a small business, promise to pay in 30 days, and then do not do so, my failure to pay damages them. This is the case even if they hadn’t made any specific plans for what to do with that cashflow, and even if I bought through an online platform and hence don’t know exactly who would have received the money. The damages are precisely equal to the amount of money I owe the firm—and hence, in the case of the pledge, the damages would be equal to (the NPV of) the pledged income.
I agree with Buck that people should take lifelong commitments more seriously than they have. Part of taking them seriously is respecting their lifelong nature.
Here is the relevant version of the pledge, from December 2014:
A large part of the point of the pledge is to bind your future self in case your future self is less altruistic. If you allow people to break it based on how they feel, that would dramatically undermine the purpose of the pledge. It might well be the case that the pledge is bad because it contains implicit empirical premises that might cease to hold—indeed I argued this at the time! - but that doesn’t change the fact that someone did in fact make this commitment. If people want to make a weak statement of intent they are always able to do this—they can just say “yeah I will probably donate for as long as I feel like it”. But the pledge is significantly different from this, and attempting to weaken it to be no commitment at all entails robbing people of the ability to make such commitments.
Your argument about damages seems quite strange. If I buy something from a small business, promise to pay in 30 days, and then do not do so, my failure to pay damages them. This is the case even if they hadn’t made any specific plans for what to do with that cashflow, and even if I bought through an online platform and hence don’t know exactly who would have received the money. The damages are precisely equal to the amount of money I owe the firm—and hence, in the case of the pledge, the damages would be equal to (the NPV of) the pledged income.
I agree with Buck that people should take lifelong commitments more seriously than they have. Part of taking them seriously is respecting their lifelong nature.