Marriage, the Giving What We Can Pledge, and the damage caused by vague public commitments

To the list of actions I want to add: don't use commitments to extend the reach of your social pressure.

There's a trap where people ask for ambiguous commitments in ways that are socially awkward to say no to (because obviously they mean the weak version that only a mean or autistic person would say no to!), and then try to hold you to the strong version later (because you committed!).

The marriage vow allows one partner to veto divorce, which seems like a bad idea. 

I would click the "disagree" button if there was one, because many parts of this post are askew to how I understand marriage, divorce, commitment, etc., 

I think of a marriage as two people deciding to build a life together, and commitment as essentially about being "in" on that shared project. This post seems to be coming at it from a different angle, where explicitly specifying things in advance is much more fundamental. It centers honesty vs. dishonesty, ironclad promises, and public accountability in places where those don't feel like the central concepts to me.

A few of the places where that disagreement came up most strongly:

• The paragraph about marriage beginning "The point of a public pledge is help structure our own incentives to fulfill our commitment." That does not seem like the main point of having a public ceremony, which IMO is more about marking the occasion of the couple building a life together, in common knowledge so that their surrounding community will treat them as a unit.
• The paragraph about the mountain climbing promise. Agreeing to climb a mountain before a divorce is finalized doesn't actually seem to help with the things this post is describing as important. This promise mainly just seems to be acknowledging that an escape clause (divorce) already exists, and adding in an extra step which perhaps is symbolically meaningful to the couple.
• The partial sentence "I want people to build within themselves the machinery to be able to make strict pledges that mean things". As if a pledge needs to be strict in order to be meaningful. There are plenty of meaningful marriages which didn't specify in advance criteria for a divorce or social consequences of a divorce.

The complaints in the GWWC Pledge section also don't seem that similar to the arguments in the section on marriage. Standards like 'Don't say false things' (like "till death do we part") and 'make it possible to opt out later on, and acknowledge this possibility up front' which seemed like central parts of the section on marriage are already covered by the current version of the GWWC Pledge.

Reading the title my immediate reaction was "Oh no, lots of marriages are being damaged by people commiting to Giving What We Can Pledges". I'm unsure if what you're pointing out is better or worse /s.

Our marriage vows [LW · GW]^[1] have well-defined exit conditions! Some commenters thought they are too strict, but time will tell provide a little Bayesian evidence.

I attended a wedding of some friends recently where they promised not to get divorced unless they both climbed a particular mountain first. They’re planning on staying together, but they recognize that they can’t know for sure they will want this, so they’ve left themselves a way out.

This gives me an idea — is there a medical way to temporarily die then come back to life? That is, to stop your heart and then get resuscitated, with >90% chance of living through. That seems like quite a valid way of keeping your commitment to any "until death do us part" clause, and nonetheless ending the marriage.

I had read this post at the time, but forgotten about it since then. I've also made the central point of this post many times, and wish I had linked to it more, since it's a pretty good explanation.

Further reading: Notes on Honesty [? · GW] (particularly the Collateral damage of “harmless” dishonesty [? · GW], Honesty about future commitments [? · GW], and Oaths, pledges, and formal declarations of intent to honesty [? · GW] sections).

Pretty related/relevant: Reneging prosocially

A solution for "some people take promises (marriage, GWWC, etc.) more seriously, some people take them less seriously, and there is no consensus on what degree of seriousness is right" could be something like this: make a public list of public promises, together with information about which promises were kept and which were not. No judgment, just information. If you believe that promises are super important to keep, let's hope you can keep your personal list 100% clean. If you believe that breaking promises all the time is no big deal, I am not judging you... I just hope that you are okay with making this fact about you publicly known.

To add your promise to this list, you need to specify how your promise can be verified. For example, there would need to be an authority that verifies your GWWC pledge if you give them your tax report and a proof of sending money to the charity. (Promises that cannot be verified either can't be entered to the public list at all, or are clearly marked as "not officially verifiable".)

On a second thought, there is a potential for abuse, basically by making promises under pressure. If someone has a power over you, they can force you to make a promise (or punish you for refusing to make one), and thus extend their power over you to the future. For example, imagine that you desperately need to keep your job, and your employer forces you to make some specific long-term public promise -- a few years later you find a new job and no longer depend on your old employer, but the promise you made remains on your public record.

Not sure how to solve this problem, in general. In my ideal world, promises would only be made voluntarily. (I would judge more harshly people who spontaneously made a public promise and then broke it, compared to people who made a promise at gunpoint and then broke it.) Problem is, it is hard to draw a line between voluntary and involuntary actions, if other people can punish you for failing to do a "voluntary" action.

From my current understanding, there is so much more going on in a marriage ceremony that is worth mentioning here. A carefully designed, meaningful, public ritual seems to be a huge way that humans reinforce their sense of what they value & what their life narratives are about.

Relevantly, I would guess that the act of making the GWWC pledge has much less of this positive effect of reinforcing one's values and sense of meaning, and thus is easier to break.

Thanks for sharing your perspective here Jeffrey!

[Note: I wasn’t involved in the decisions around the wording of The Pledge so am speaking from my personal perspective as a member of The Pledge, and as a staff member at GWWC who has spoken with many members and prospective members.]

I agree that there is a downside to having ambiguity around the technicality of GWWC pledges. There are members who, from my perspective, I think they take it too loosely and others who take it too seriously.

However, the level of specificity is a very difficult tradeoff to make when making a short standardised simple language moral commitment for a large and diverse group of people with different backgrounds, contexts, and levels of scrupulosity.

If GWWC were to try to precisely state everything in the pledge language then it’d be less of a moral commitment and more of a legal contract – it certainly wouldn’t fit on a pledge certificate. We’d certainly miss many circumstances and getting agreement from members who’ve already taken a pledge to be backwards compatible would be very difficult.

Furthermore, I think an overly legalistic pledge would make it harder for most people to make (it’d be too scary/confusing) and keep their commitments. I think that trusting people to use their conscience (while providing guidance like is done in the FAQ and in member conversations) is a feature not a bug.

if I agreed to a pledge like this, I'd need to carefully specify the conditions under which I'd allow myself to exit this pledge or not, since it's not nearly clear enough to me in its current wording.

…

I want to be a person of unusual honesty and integrity, and so I want to think about what commitments mean to me and how I can structure my environment to help me make good ones and keep them.

I'm glad that you have self-knowledge to know that you'd like to have more specificity. Many people who’ve taken a pledge have also gone further in specifying things that they think are important to their commitment (such as under what specific conditions they would resign from their pledge) and sometimes write up a document (or blog post) and share it with several close friends they want to hold them accountable. If someone were considering a pledge and had these strong preferences around specificity then I’d encourage this route.

I think it’s great that the pledge now asks you to specify a starting and end time and particular percentage by default. (Previously, it read “until I retire”).

Actually, this depends on whether you are taking a Trial Pledge (which requires a specific amount and period) or The GWWC Pledge (which is still a 10% pledge of lifetime earnings, “until I retire”).

I think it’s quite bad that the main text of the pledge doesn’t include any mention of an exit clause.

This is where it is quite similar to marriage and I’d argue that’s generally a good thing. Of course there are reasons that marriages end, but they’re variable and relevant to the individual people. If you look at the reasons marriages end sometimes people could work through those things and other times it’s best it ends. I wouldn’t include something like “infidelity” or “poor communication” as an exit clause within my wedding vows, but I can imagine both cases where the marriage would survive the common reasons people end marriages and also other cases where it’d be best to end it for some of those reasons (in good conscience). That being said, I’m all for people customising their vows (me and my wife did!) but still generally committing to the same thing as other married folk (put a damn good effort into sticking with the person for the rest of your lives until it's clear it’s no longer a good thing for you to do). The same can be said for giving pledges: you can generally commit to the same thing, but also customise to what makes sense to you (e.g. write up a separate document also).

Hope that helps to provide an alternative perspective and is useful to hear a bit of the reasoning behind why things might be the way they are right now, and why I’m not currently in favour of any major changes to the pledge language to include an exit clause.

GWWC is also currently in the process of updating our new FAQs and would love any input here.

Giving What We Can’s mission is to make giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm. If you think that any changes (e.g. to the FAQ, pledges language, or ways of communicating these ideas) would help us better achieve that mission then we’d be especially grateful to hear those suggestions.

Public commitments / Marriages

Are essential to keep a narcissist married and breeding.

• Histrionics and Narcissists desperately seek validation and hence are restrained by public "shame".
• They will seldom risk the humiliation of being publicly named as a "cheat" in a public marriage,
• Hence, will keep the marriage sacred, in the public domain.
• However, private domain is completely a separate matter.
• If they do get caught cheating, they will Amber Heard themselves as the victim, in public.