This is the time for promises to ourselves about what we’ll do this year (I’ll go to the gym more, eat better, drink less, be hyper-efficient, make lists, meet deadlines, and the rest). Promises that in most cases get broken.
When we promise someone else that we’ll do something, simply uttering a form of words sincerely puts us under a moral obligation to them, and in some cases a legal one too: “I promise to pay you back next year,” “I promise it won’t happen again,” “I promise to care for you in sickness and in health.”
Promising is making an undertaking not to let the other person down. If you promise, you intend to make good on the promise, or else it’s not really a promise at all. A promise is an example of what JL Austin called an illocutionary act: an act performed in saying something. Uttering the words “I promise” puts you under an obligation that you didn’t have before you spoke. This is a strange phenomenon in some ways. David Hume noticed this: he wrote that promising is “one of the most mysterious and incomprehensible operations that can possibly be imagined”. But promises to oneself are even stranger.
Obviously people break promises to other people, for many reasons. But when they do, they typically either acknowledge that they are imperfect beings and that this is a shortcoming, or else they make a case that a more overwhelming unforeseen commitment gazumped the original promise.
Someone who promised to meet you for a coffee, but didn’t show up because her father had just had a stroke, wouldn’t be blameworthy for breaking her promise. She might still apologise, but she could have correctly anticipated that you wouldn’t feel you had a right to expect her to show up in the circumstances.
Promises to ourselves have a superficially similar structure to promises to other people, but with this difference: the person who is let down by the broken promise is also the person who made the promise. A broken promise to myself is a failure to deliver to my present self what my past self (which is continuous with my present one) promised to provide.
Yet with promises made to other people, the person promised – the promisee – has the power to release the promiser from the promise. They can wipe off the debt, say “I won’t hold you to that promise”, or something similar, and, abracadabra, the obligation vanishes. They don’t have to have good reasons for doing this, but, like a US president issuing pardons, can do it on a whim.
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But if in my role as promisee I have the power to release myself as promiser then what’s the force of a promise made to myself in a new year’s resolution, since I can easily let myself off the obligation? In that respect it’s very different from a promise made to someone else. If I believe I can let myself off the moral obligation to fulfil my promises to other people just by changing my mind, then I don’t understand the convention of promising at all. But with a new year’s resolution, because I made the promise to myself, as promisee I have the power to release myself from it.
Perhaps, that’s not the full story, though. I think it’s better to see new year’s resolutions as a special kind of double promise. Unlike most promises to others, new year’s resolutions imply a second promise: not to release oneself from the original promise – a kind of double lock.
If I make a promise to myself that I’ll meet all my writing deadlines this year, and fail to do so, this might just be from my weakness of will, my incapacity to organise my time well, sloth, or whatever, despite my best intentions. But if I decide to release myself from that new year’s resolution (in my role as promisee) then I will be doubly blameworthy since that special kind of promise involves not just a commitment to keeping the promise made, but also a commitment not to release myself from that promise, even though in principle I could.
If I’m right, this could explain why breaking new year’s resolutions and releasing myself from the obligation of trying to follow them for the rest of the year (something I admit I’ve done) feels so bad. It’s because in doing so, I break two promises to myself, not just one.
