This seems like it describes the most relevant considerations when thinking about how the pledge directly affects your own future actions. I think there’s another angle worth considering, and that’s the pledge as a report about your likely future actions.
You might be reluctant to take the pledge, not just out of a worry that you’ll bind your future self to a wrong decision, but out of a worry that if your future self acts differently, people in the meantime will have made decisions based on your assurance. It’s quite difficult to model others well enough to figure out whether they’ll take the optimal action as you see it, but potentially easy to decide whether to believe their promises. This makes coordination easier.
A couple of years ago, a friend was considering a relocation that improved their expected lifetime impact substantially. Moving would potentially have put their personal finances under strain, so I offered to lend them a few thousand dollars if money should happen to be tight for a while. They found this offer sufficiently reassuring that they were happy to go ahead with the move without delay. I felt that the offer was morally binding on me barring severe unforeseen circumstances, but the point of my promise was neither to coercively bind my future self, nor simply to determine my future self’s course of action by establishing some momentum. The point was to accurately report my future willingness to lend to my friend, with high confidence.
If it had turned out to be somewhat harder than anticipated to lend my friend the money, I would have considered myself obliged to work hard to figure out a solution. I don’t think this was especially related to the fact that the behavior I was making a promise about was mine. If I ever make an assurance to someone, and they end up harming themselves because it turned out to be a false assurance, I consider myself at least somewhat obliged to try to make them whole.
Giving What We Can, for example, uses the number of people who have taken the pledge as a measurement of their impact. Giving What We Can itself and potential GWWC donors make decisions about whether promoting the pledge is a good use of resources, based on both the observed behavior of pledgers, and some beliefs about how serious pledgers’ intent is. When considering publicly pledging, you should consider not just its effect on you, but that you’re either providing accurate information or misinformation to those who are paying attention.
For this reason, I think that serious pledges should not be entered into unless the pledge is either easy (i.e. you predict with high confidence that you would do the pledged behavior anyway) or very important (you predict that taking the pledge gives you options much more valuable than the ones that might otherwise be available). An example of an easy pledge would be assuring a future houseguest that coffee will be available (if you regularly stock coffee). An example of a very important pledge might be marriage, in which by promising to stick with someone, you get them to promise the same to you—though many people delay getting married until the promise feels easy as well.
This seems like it describes the most relevant considerations when thinking about how the pledge directly affects your own future actions. I think there’s another angle worth considering, and that’s the pledge as a report about your likely future actions.
You might be reluctant to take the pledge, not just out of a worry that you’ll bind your future self to a wrong decision, but out of a worry that if your future self acts differently, people in the meantime will have made decisions based on your assurance. It’s quite difficult to model others well enough to figure out whether they’ll take the optimal action as you see it, but potentially easy to decide whether to believe their promises. This makes coordination easier.
A couple of years ago, a friend was considering a relocation that improved their expected lifetime impact substantially. Moving would potentially have put their personal finances under strain, so I offered to lend them a few thousand dollars if money should happen to be tight for a while. They found this offer sufficiently reassuring that they were happy to go ahead with the move without delay. I felt that the offer was morally binding on me barring severe unforeseen circumstances, but the point of my promise was neither to coercively bind my future self, nor simply to determine my future self’s course of action by establishing some momentum. The point was to accurately report my future willingness to lend to my friend, with high confidence.
If it had turned out to be somewhat harder than anticipated to lend my friend the money, I would have considered myself obliged to work hard to figure out a solution. I don’t think this was especially related to the fact that the behavior I was making a promise about was mine. If I ever make an assurance to someone, and they end up harming themselves because it turned out to be a false assurance, I consider myself at least somewhat obliged to try to make them whole.
Giving What We Can, for example, uses the number of people who have taken the pledge as a measurement of their impact. Giving What We Can itself and potential GWWC donors make decisions about whether promoting the pledge is a good use of resources, based on both the observed behavior of pledgers, and some beliefs about how serious pledgers’ intent is. When considering publicly pledging, you should consider not just its effect on you, but that you’re either providing accurate information or misinformation to those who are paying attention.
For this reason, I think that serious pledges should not be entered into unless the pledge is either easy (i.e. you predict with high confidence that you would do the pledged behavior anyway) or very important (you predict that taking the pledge gives you options much more valuable than the ones that might otherwise be available). An example of an easy pledge would be assuring a future houseguest that coffee will be available (if you regularly stock coffee). An example of a very important pledge might be marriage, in which by promising to stick with someone, you get them to promise the same to you—though many people delay getting married until the promise feels easy as well.
I agree this seems relevant.
One slight complication is that donors to GWWC might expect a small proportion of people to renege on the pledge.