Ethics

I think that most of us have had the experience of making a promise to ourselves. A person might promise herself that she will study harder next semester, for instance, or quit smoking. Is it immoral to break promises to oneself? Is it just less bad than breaking promises to other people, or equally as bad?

Comments

That's a really fantastic question! It raises interesting questions about how to understand promises and the moral obligations they impose (a much-discussed topic in philosophy) and also about how to understand personal identity through time (when I promise myself I'll do X in the future, is the promiser the same person as the promisee?) and weakness of will.

When I see such a good question, my first thought is some philosopher must have written about this. Indeed, a quick google search turned up this very recent article by Allen Habib. Since I don't know the literature and am writing this before reading that article, I just offer two thoughts off the cuff:

1. One might answer your question in a somewhat circular way by simply defining promises in certain ways. For instance, if one defines a promise as a vow one person makes to a different person, then you could not really make a promise to oneself (one might be doing something analogous to promising), unless one takes an odd view of personal identity that says you are not the same person in the future. On the other hand, if one defines promises as making a vow to do something such that one thereby has a moral obligation to do it, then not only might one make promises to oneself, but by definition, one would be immoral in breaking it (other things being equal--e.g., it is generally accepted that it is not immoral to break a promise, say, to pick up a friend at the airport, if doing so is necessary to, say, save a child).

2. I have a very strong intuition that breaking a promise to oneself is not as bad as breaking a promise to another person. But now I have to do what philosophers often do--figure out reasons for why I have that intuition!

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