Suppose you became deeply religious as a young adult and married someone of the same religion with a traditional promise to be loyal to them until death. Divorce was unthinkable to your spouse and you had repeatedly reassured them that you fully meant to keep your promise to never leave them, no matter what changes the future brought. You are now no longer religious and remaining married to this person makes you miserable in ways you are sure you can’t fix without betraying who you currently are. Is it moral to leave your partner? Why and why not? (Don’t worry, this is a hypothetical situation.)
but you probably weren’t thinking that at the time
Maybe a good method to evaluate the strenght of this objection would be to invent many other scenarios that people are not thinking about when they speak about “no matter what changes the future brings”, and ask how they feel about the other scenarios. Then use them as an outside view for the change of religion.
Divorcing someone because of a change in religion brings up two points at once. The first is that they should divorce because a marriage between people with different beliefs doesn’t work. The second is that he should find divorce acceptable because he no longer believes in a religion that says divorce is unacceptable.
Assuming we’re talking about the second, then a scenario that does not involve a change in religion would be something like “I didn’t realize it, but my religion says God is okay with divorce after all”. That’s implausible without something else going on, but it’s possible that his religious leaders changed their minds, or that he misunderstood some points of his religion (for instance, perhaps his religion doesn’t consider a secular divorce to be a divorce, and finds those acceptable). I would say that under those circumstances, yes, he probably would be okay with divorce.
Any moral reasoning that results in ”...and I will be miserable for the rest of my life” that is not extremely difficult to prevent and has few other tradeoffs is probably not correct, no matter how well-argued.
Being someone who keeps their word can have value, but sometimes it doesn’t. If someone kidnaps you and then forces you to promise to give them all your money when they release you, it’s bad. If they knew you wouldn’t keep your word, they wouldn’t have kidnapped you. That’s why contracts made under duress aren’t binding. I don’t think duress is the only reason to break a promise. Another one is that you were stupid. You don’t want to make promises you’ll later regret, so if someone doesn’t accept your promise because they predict you’ll come to regret it, that’s good.
The kidnapper should precommit to kidnap a fixed number of people regardless of their propensity to keep to contracts made under duress. Like many precommitments, this harms the kidnapper if he actually has to follow through with it under unfavorable circumstances (he may know that nobody keeps such contracts, in which case he’s precommitted to kidnapping people for no profit at all). However, it reduces the measure of worlds with such unfavorable characteristics, thus financially benefitting the kidnapper on average—if you know the kidnapper has made this precommitment, you can no longer use the reasoning you just use above and so you will obey contracts made under duress.
Being kidnapped isn’t that big a deal. Are you saying that he should just kill everyone who isn’t known to keep contracts made under duress? If “he” is a large organized crime syndicate or a government or something, that might work, but there’s no way one person could kill enough people to make it worth while to start paying people to kidnap you just because he might be the one getting payed. He’d have to cooperate on the prisoner’s dilemma with all the other kidnappers, who are themselves defecting from the rest of society. Why would he do that?
There’s a reason for the idea of fairness. Consider the ultimatum game. There’s a Nash equilibrium for every strategy where one player will accept no less than x points and the other no less than 1-x points. It seems like you could demand 1-ɛ and they’d have to accept the ɛ because it’s better than nothing, but by the same logic you wouldn’t be able to ask for more than ɛ because they’d demand 1-ɛ. So you pick a schelling point and demand that much. You demand half. They demand half. You agree to split it evenly. If they demand more than the schelling point, you give them nothing. If there’s some reason that the schelling point isn’t completely obvious, you might give them some benefit of the doubt and probabilistically accept so you don’t both get nothing, but you make it unlikely enough that them demanding more than the schelling point is not a viable strategy. This is what fairness is. It’s why shouldn’t agree to unfair deals, even if the alternative is no deal.
The point is that “if they knew, they wouldn’t have kidnapped you” is defeated by a precommitment to kidnap people whether they know or not. They don’t have to kill anyone to do this.
Being kidnapped, promising to pay ransom, being released, and not paying is better than being kidnapped, promising to pay ransom, being released, and paying. Keeping your word gives no advantage.
Precommitment is relevant in a second way here. You have to (before being released) precommit to pay ransom after being released. Once you are released, your precommitment would force you to pay the ransom afterwards.
If you are incapable of rewiring your brain so that you will pay the ransom, there could instead be laws recognizing that contracts made under duress are valid. That would have the effect of precommitting.
This precommitment is disadvantageous in the sense that being released without it is better than being released with it, but it also increases your chance of surviving to be released rather than being shot for not having any ransom. Precommitments tend to work like that—precommitting to do an action that can only harm you in a particular situation can be overall advantageous because it alters the odds of being in that situation.
I don’t consider it moral for two people to make each other suffer for years instead of admitting their mistake and moving on with their lives. That’s the result of pride, not forbearance. Still worse if one party suffers while the other remains pleased.
If there are severe practical obstacles to divorce then that’s one thing, but even then there are ways around that. It’s nothing unusual for a couple to separate while remaining married. For example, Warren Buffett had such an arrangement for nearly 30 years—until his wife died.
So now I’m praying for the end of time To hurry up and arrive ’Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you I don’t think that I can really survive I’ll never break my promise or forget my vow But God only knows what I can do right now I’m praying for the end of time, It’s all that I can do Praying for the end of time so I can end my time with you
File this under “things that could probably be said better, but which might be better said than not said given I won’t action it for later”.
Whenever I see a post or question of the type “is X moral”, I have an instinctual aversive reaction because such questions seem to leave so much that still needs to be asked, and the important questions are not even addressed, so even taking a potshot at the question requires wheeling some rather heavy equipment up to do some rather heavy digging as to the values, priorities, risk tolerance, etc of the person asking the question.
Re “the important questions are not even addressed”: Fundamentally, are you trying to satisfice or maximize here? Are you trying to figure out the “optimal” action per those values that you group in the “morality” category, or are you trying to figure out which actions have an acceptable impact in terms of those values (such that you’re then going to choose between the acceptable possibilities with a different set of values?) Once the meta’s taken care of, what are the actual things that you value? Inferential distance is often pretty humongous in this regard, so more explicit often is better.
Maybe a more concrete example will be useful. If I ask you “what computer should I buy?”, I should not take an immediate answer seriously with no further info, because I know you have no way of knowing what my decision criteria are (and its kinda hard for your recommendation to align with them by chance.) As such, I would probably want to give you a decent amount of information regarding my relevant preferences if I ask for such a recommendation...am I going to play games? Office work? Might even be useful to specify the type of games I’m playing and whether graphics are a biggie for me, etc.
When I don’t see this type of info flow occurring, it feels like a charade, because if I were the one asking the question I would have to discard any answers that I got in the absence of such info about preferences, etc.
Again, apologies for going meta + possibly abrasive tone at the same time. Just trying to help discussions like this get started off on the right foot, as it feels like I see them more and more lately. Probably tapping out.
This sounds like a place where Kantian ethics would give the right answer. I think, there is some point at which it would be stupid to not seek divorce, and some point at which the promise you made is indeed more important, and the thing that differentiates those two states is not whether you want divorce now, but whether which procedure would it be better for people to follow—the one that has you stay married here, or the one that has you divorce here.
Even if we ignore for a moment the fact that Kantian ethics doesn’t say anything because it’s not well-defined, it’s not at all clear to me that this is true. As it stands, your statement sounds like it’s based more on popular impressions of what Kantian ethics is supposedly like than an actual attempt at Kantian reasoning.
The issue is with the decision, so asking “Is it moral?” is a potentially misleading framing because of the connotations of “moral” that aren’t directly concerned with comparing effects of alternative actions. So the choice is between the scenario where a person made promises etc. and later stuck with them while miserable, and the scenario where they did something else.
“Justify” has a similar problem. Justifications may be mistaken, even intentionally so. Calling something a justification emphasizes persuasion over accuracy.
Suppose you became deeply religious as a young adult
This assumes that different kinds of religiosity tend to converge on similar ethics about marital commitments and fidelity. You could become “deeply religious” in a way which allows for divorce or outside relationships.
This also assumes that your religion’s doctrine on these matters remains stable over many generations. If your religious community accepts 22nd+ Century medicine and permits its members to seek treatment for engineered negligible senescence and superlongevity, then you could live long enough to see your religion undergo a Reformation-like event which allows for a more flexible view of marriage and sexual relationships.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I find Ridley Scott’s portrayal of Future Christians in the film Prometheus interesting. The space ship’s archaeologist character, Elizabeth Shaw (played by Swedish actress Noomi Rapace), wears a cross and professes christian beliefs at a time when christianity has apparently gone into decline and christians have become relatively uncommon. Yet as a single christian woman she has a sexual relationship with a man on the ship, which suggests that christian sexual morality during that religion’s long twilight will tend to converge with secular moral views.
First two paragraphs seem reasonable. To the third though:
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I find Ridley Scott’s portrayal of Future Christians in the film Prometheus interesting. The space ship’s archaeologist character, Elizabeth Shaw (played by Swedish actress Noomi Rapace), wears a cross and professes christian beliefs at a time when christianity has apparently gone into decline and christians have become relatively uncommon. Yet as a single christian woman she has a sexual relationship with a man on the ship, which suggests that christian sexual morality during that religion’s long twilight will tend to converge with secular moral views.
Many, many self-identified Christians from pretty much all denominations have premarital sex. See e.g. here. And this isn’t a new thing, even among the Puritans this was not uncommon (in there care we can tell based on extremely short times between many marriages and when children had their births recorded).
Identity may be continuous, but it is not unchanging. You are not the person you were back then and are not required to be bound by their precommitments. No more than by someone else’s precommitments. To be quasi-formal, the vows made back then are only morally binding on the fraction of your current self which are left unchanged from your old self.Or something like that.
Imagine you’re elected leader of a country. The last leader defended against an invasion by putting the country into debt. If he hadn’t done that, the country would now be under control of the other country’s totalitarian regime. You can pay the debt, but if you don’t nobody can force you. Should you repay the debt? Are you bound by the precommitments of your predecessor?
A country that is known to elect new leaders cannot credibly precommit to paying back a loan unless it is in a situation that is robust against new leaders refusing to pay back the loans. So you would in fact be bound by the precommitments of your predecessor whether you wanted to be or not, though the exact mechanism can vary depending on exactly what made the precommitment credible.
Suppose the mechanism is that they’re electing people that care about the country. Would this mechanism work? Would you and the other leaders consistently pay back loans?
If the mechanism didn’t work, then the precommitment wouldn’t be credible, and the people making the loans would have known that there is no credible precommitment.
And thus the country will fall. Since the leaders care about the country, they’d rather pay back some loans than let it fall, so the mechanism will work, right?
That’s highly misleading. Empirically, many countries have successfully raise debt, and paid it back, despite debt-holders having no defense against a new leader wanting to default.
I think one defence those debt-holders have is that those countries have traditions of repaying debts.
Another is that, regardless of whether you’re formally committed to repaying loans, if you default on one then you or your successors are going to get much worse terms (if any) for future loans. So a national leader who doesn’t want to screw the country over is going to be reluctant to default.
Derek Parfit, on identity, talks about psychological connectedness (examples: recalling memories, continuing to hold a belief or desire, acting on earlier intentions), and continuity, which is the ancestral of connectedness. It sounds like you are saying that commitments should be binding based primarily on connectedness, not on continuity. But this has certain disadvantages. If I take the suggested attitude, I will be a less attractive partner to make deals and commitments with.
(I didn’t downvote your comment BTW. But I bet my worries are similar to those of whoever did.)
Suppose you became deeply religious as a young adult and married someone of the same religion with a traditional promise to be loyal to them until death. Divorce was unthinkable to your spouse and you had repeatedly reassured them that you fully meant to keep your promise to never leave them, no matter what changes the future brought. You are now no longer religious and remaining married to this person makes you miserable in ways you are sure you can’t fix without betraying who you currently are. Is it moral to leave your partner? Why and why not? (Don’t worry, this is a hypothetical situation.)
No, since “no matter what changes the future brought” includes changes of religion.
Does it? It literally does, but you probably weren’t thinking that at the time.
Good. :D
Maybe a good method to evaluate the strenght of this objection would be to invent many other scenarios that people are not thinking about when they speak about “no matter what changes the future brings”, and ask how they feel about the other scenarios. Then use them as an outside view for the change of religion.
Divorcing someone because of a change in religion brings up two points at once. The first is that they should divorce because a marriage between people with different beliefs doesn’t work. The second is that he should find divorce acceptable because he no longer believes in a religion that says divorce is unacceptable.
Assuming we’re talking about the second, then a scenario that does not involve a change in religion would be something like “I didn’t realize it, but my religion says God is okay with divorce after all”. That’s implausible without something else going on, but it’s possible that his religious leaders changed their minds, or that he misunderstood some points of his religion (for instance, perhaps his religion doesn’t consider a secular divorce to be a divorce, and finds those acceptable). I would say that under those circumstances, yes, he probably would be okay with divorce.
So the answer is yes, you can break your promise.
Is there some reason why this was modded down aside from saying things that go against people’s ideas about morality?
ETHICAL INJUNCTION:
Any moral reasoning that results in ”...and I will be miserable for the rest of my life” that is not extremely difficult to prevent and has few other tradeoffs is probably not correct, no matter how well-argued.
Assuming they only married me because they knew I was never going to leave them, no it isn’t.
Being someone who keeps their word can have value, but sometimes it doesn’t. If someone kidnaps you and then forces you to promise to give them all your money when they release you, it’s bad. If they knew you wouldn’t keep your word, they wouldn’t have kidnapped you. That’s why contracts made under duress aren’t binding. I don’t think duress is the only reason to break a promise. Another one is that you were stupid. You don’t want to make promises you’ll later regret, so if someone doesn’t accept your promise because they predict you’ll come to regret it, that’s good.
The kidnapper should precommit to kidnap a fixed number of people regardless of their propensity to keep to contracts made under duress. Like many precommitments, this harms the kidnapper if he actually has to follow through with it under unfavorable circumstances (he may know that nobody keeps such contracts, in which case he’s precommitted to kidnapping people for no profit at all). However, it reduces the measure of worlds with such unfavorable characteristics, thus financially benefitting the kidnapper on average—if you know the kidnapper has made this precommitment, you can no longer use the reasoning you just use above and so you will obey contracts made under duress.
Being kidnapped isn’t that big a deal. Are you saying that he should just kill everyone who isn’t known to keep contracts made under duress? If “he” is a large organized crime syndicate or a government or something, that might work, but there’s no way one person could kill enough people to make it worth while to start paying people to kidnap you just because he might be the one getting payed. He’d have to cooperate on the prisoner’s dilemma with all the other kidnappers, who are themselves defecting from the rest of society. Why would he do that?
There’s a reason for the idea of fairness. Consider the ultimatum game. There’s a Nash equilibrium for every strategy where one player will accept no less than x points and the other no less than 1-x points. It seems like you could demand 1-ɛ and they’d have to accept the ɛ because it’s better than nothing, but by the same logic you wouldn’t be able to ask for more than ɛ because they’d demand 1-ɛ. So you pick a schelling point and demand that much. You demand half. They demand half. You agree to split it evenly. If they demand more than the schelling point, you give them nothing. If there’s some reason that the schelling point isn’t completely obvious, you might give them some benefit of the doubt and probabilistically accept so you don’t both get nothing, but you make it unlikely enough that them demanding more than the schelling point is not a viable strategy. This is what fairness is. It’s why shouldn’t agree to unfair deals, even if the alternative is no deal.
The point is that “if they knew, they wouldn’t have kidnapped you” is defeated by a precommitment to kidnap people whether they know or not. They don’t have to kill anyone to do this.
Being kidnapped, promising to pay ransom, being released, and not paying is better than being kidnapped, promising to pay ransom, being released, and paying. Keeping your word gives no advantage.
Precommitment is relevant in a second way here. You have to (before being released) precommit to pay ransom after being released. Once you are released, your precommitment would force you to pay the ransom afterwards.
If you are incapable of rewiring your brain so that you will pay the ransom, there could instead be laws recognizing that contracts made under duress are valid. That would have the effect of precommitting.
This precommitment is disadvantageous in the sense that being released without it is better than being released with it, but it also increases your chance of surviving to be released rather than being shot for not having any ransom. Precommitments tend to work like that—precommitting to do an action that can only harm you in a particular situation can be overall advantageous because it alters the odds of being in that situation.
Currently, laws do not enforce contracts made under duress. How frequently are people murdered in protest of this?
I don’t consider it moral for two people to make each other suffer for years instead of admitting their mistake and moving on with their lives. That’s the result of pride, not forbearance. Still worse if one party suffers while the other remains pleased.
If there are severe practical obstacles to divorce then that’s one thing, but even then there are ways around that. It’s nothing unusual for a couple to separate while remaining married. For example, Warren Buffett had such an arrangement for nearly 30 years—until his wife died.
--Meatloaf
File this under “things that could probably be said better, but which might be better said than not said given I won’t action it for later”.
Whenever I see a post or question of the type “is X moral”, I have an instinctual aversive reaction because such questions seem to leave so much that still needs to be asked, and the important questions are not even addressed, so even taking a potshot at the question requires wheeling some rather heavy equipment up to do some rather heavy digging as to the values, priorities, risk tolerance, etc of the person asking the question.
Re “the important questions are not even addressed”: Fundamentally, are you trying to satisfice or maximize here? Are you trying to figure out the “optimal” action per those values that you group in the “morality” category, or are you trying to figure out which actions have an acceptable impact in terms of those values (such that you’re then going to choose between the acceptable possibilities with a different set of values?) Once the meta’s taken care of, what are the actual things that you value? Inferential distance is often pretty humongous in this regard, so more explicit often is better.
Maybe a more concrete example will be useful. If I ask you “what computer should I buy?”, I should not take an immediate answer seriously with no further info, because I know you have no way of knowing what my decision criteria are (and its kinda hard for your recommendation to align with them by chance.) As such, I would probably want to give you a decent amount of information regarding my relevant preferences if I ask for such a recommendation...am I going to play games? Office work? Might even be useful to specify the type of games I’m playing and whether graphics are a biggie for me, etc.
When I don’t see this type of info flow occurring, it feels like a charade, because if I were the one asking the question I would have to discard any answers that I got in the absence of such info about preferences, etc.
Again, apologies for going meta + possibly abrasive tone at the same time. Just trying to help discussions like this get started off on the right foot, as it feels like I see them more and more lately. Probably tapping out.
ETA punctuation.
This sounds like a place where Kantian ethics would give the right answer. I think, there is some point at which it would be stupid to not seek divorce, and some point at which the promise you made is indeed more important, and the thing that differentiates those two states is not whether you want divorce now, but whether which procedure would it be better for people to follow—the one that has you stay married here, or the one that has you divorce here.
Kantian ethics would almost definitely say to never divorce. Kantianism is not the same as Rule Utilitarianism!
Even if we ignore for a moment the fact that Kantian ethics doesn’t say anything because it’s not well-defined, it’s not at all clear to me that this is true. As it stands, your statement sounds like it’s based more on popular impressions of what Kantian ethics is supposedly like than an actual attempt at Kantian reasoning.
Okay, thanks :)
The issue is with the decision, so asking “Is it moral?” is a potentially misleading framing because of the connotations of “moral” that aren’t directly concerned with comparing effects of alternative actions. So the choice is between the scenario where a person made promises etc. and later stuck with them while miserable, and the scenario where they did something else.
I’m asking what would make you justify leaving or staying.
“Justify” has a similar problem. Justifications may be mistaken, even intentionally so. Calling something a justification emphasizes persuasion over accuracy.
This assumes that different kinds of religiosity tend to converge on similar ethics about marital commitments and fidelity. You could become “deeply religious” in a way which allows for divorce or outside relationships.
This also assumes that your religion’s doctrine on these matters remains stable over many generations. If your religious community accepts 22nd+ Century medicine and permits its members to seek treatment for engineered negligible senescence and superlongevity, then you could live long enough to see your religion undergo a Reformation-like event which allows for a more flexible view of marriage and sexual relationships.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I find Ridley Scott’s portrayal of Future Christians in the film Prometheus interesting. The space ship’s archaeologist character, Elizabeth Shaw (played by Swedish actress Noomi Rapace), wears a cross and professes christian beliefs at a time when christianity has apparently gone into decline and christians have become relatively uncommon. Yet as a single christian woman she has a sexual relationship with a man on the ship, which suggests that christian sexual morality during that religion’s long twilight will tend to converge with secular moral views.
First two paragraphs seem reasonable. To the third though:
Many, many self-identified Christians from pretty much all denominations have premarital sex. See e.g. here. And this isn’t a new thing, even among the Puritans this was not uncommon (in there care we can tell based on extremely short times between many marriages and when children had their births recorded).
Identity may be continuous, but it is not unchanging. You are not the person you were back then and are not required to be bound by their precommitments. No more than by someone else’s precommitments. To be quasi-formal, the vows made back then are only morally binding on the fraction of your current self which are left unchanged from your old self.Or something like that.
Would you not object to your neighbor’s refusal to return the set of tools you lent him on account of his having had a religious conversion?
What religion would compel you to do that?
Then don’t make it a set of tools but a money loan. He switches to Islam and now things that interests on loans is immoral.
Imagine you’re elected leader of a country. The last leader defended against an invasion by putting the country into debt. If he hadn’t done that, the country would now be under control of the other country’s totalitarian regime. You can pay the debt, but if you don’t nobody can force you. Should you repay the debt? Are you bound by the precommitments of your predecessor?
A country that is known to elect new leaders cannot credibly precommit to paying back a loan unless it is in a situation that is robust against new leaders refusing to pay back the loans. So you would in fact be bound by the precommitments of your predecessor whether you wanted to be or not, though the exact mechanism can vary depending on exactly what made the precommitment credible.
Suppose the mechanism is that they’re electing people that care about the country. Would this mechanism work? Would you and the other leaders consistently pay back loans?
If the mechanism didn’t work, then the precommitment wouldn’t be credible, and the people making the loans would have known that there is no credible precommitment.
And thus the country will fall. Since the leaders care about the country, they’d rather pay back some loans than let it fall, so the mechanism will work, right?
That’s highly misleading. Empirically, many countries have successfully raise debt, and paid it back, despite debt-holders having no defense against a new leader wanting to default.
I think one defence those debt-holders have is that those countries have traditions of repaying debts.
Another is that, regardless of whether you’re formally committed to repaying loans, if you default on one then you or your successors are going to get much worse terms (if any) for future loans. So a national leader who doesn’t want to screw the country over is going to be reluctant to default.
Derek Parfit, on identity, talks about psychological connectedness (examples: recalling memories, continuing to hold a belief or desire, acting on earlier intentions), and continuity, which is the ancestral of connectedness. It sounds like you are saying that commitments should be binding based primarily on connectedness, not on continuity. But this has certain disadvantages. If I take the suggested attitude, I will be a less attractive partner to make deals and commitments with.
(I didn’t downvote your comment BTW. But I bet my worries are similar to those of whoever did.)
Ah, yes, connectedness is indeed what I meant. Thanks! My point was that, while legal commitments transcend connectedness, moral need not.