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.
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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.
Thanks! Will have a think about how any existing language could be updated or what should be added.
The TL;DR version of what my ideal would be is that people to take it seriously enough with enough foresight that there is a small (5-20%) chance of withdrawal (it’s best to keep promises), but not so seriously that they wouldn’t take it (worried that there’s some tiny chance they’ll break it) or wouldn’t resign if it were truly the best thing for the world (including not just their direct impact but also the impact on their own wellbeing and the impact their resignation/follow through has on the norm).
I see a few problems with having default norms for withdrawal, It can (a) be hard to universalise; (b) provide licence for some; (c) devalue the efforts of others.
For the purpose of look at (a) (b) and (c) let’s imagine we made an explicit default norm to be developing a chronic health issue (something that I can imagine being a good reason to withdraw for some people after careful consideration of their exact circumstance):
(a) The types of chronic health issues can vary significantly on how much they’d change someones ability to follow through; and the places in which someone lives (e.g. public/private healthcare) and their employment situation can also change that. For example, I’ve had chronic back pain and headaches/migraines since I was 14 years old, but I don’t see that as a dealbreaker.
(c) We all fall prey to motivated reasoning and pre-commitment is meant to help you avoid that to some extent. If chronic health issues were listed as a norm I might have looked at the pledge and thought “Oh, that’s for healthy people, I’m all good, I should keep 100% of my money.” Or say I took the pledge before my chronic pain started, and then at some point I reflected and thought “I guess I’ll just stop giving because that’s just for the healthy people.”.
(b) If some people with the same situation have worked through it then it can devalue their efforts and/or make them seem like a fool (e.g. given money that shouldn’t have been expected). Back to the marriage example, many people take great pride and meaning having worked through the common reasons marriages end and many have better relationships on the other side of it.
However, the proof is in the pudding and I’m open to hearing specific suggestions. Do you have specific suggestions for what good norms you think meet the bar for being presented as defaults?