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.
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.