Don't Burn Your Bridge before You Come to It: Some Ambiguities and Complexities of Precommitment

Abstract

I. Introduction The idea of precommitment (or self-binding) is very old. Besides the paradigmatic Homeric story of Ulysses and the Sirens, an early discussion occurs in Seneca's On Anger: [T]he great Julius Caesar . . . exploited his victory in the civil war. Having come upon folders of letters to Gnaeus Pompey from men who appeared to be either on the opposite side or neutral, he burned them. Although his anger was normally moderate, he preferred to avoid the very possibility of it, believing ignorance of a person's misdeeds to be the most gracious form of pardon.1 . . . . We are faced with a powerful evil, and one most agreeable to us; so long as we are of sound mind and in control of our faculties, we should call upon them for help.... People who cannot carry their wine, and are afraid of being rash or boisterous when drunk, tell their servants to take them away from the party. Those who have experienced their own lack of self-control in sickness give orders that they are not to be obeyed when their health is bad.2 I have not made a systematic search for later occurrences, but my impression is that until the twentieth century the idea of precommitment rarely received systematic discussion. The only theoretical passage I have come across is from Spinoza, who wrote that: Even kings follow the example of Ulysses; they usually instruct their judges to have no respect for persons in administering justice, not even for the king himself, if by some odd mischance he commands something which they know to contravene established law. For kings are not gods, but men, who are often enchanted by the Sirens' song.3 By contrast, de Tocqueville makes fun of the whole idea when he writes: A single fact is enough to show that the stage is not very popular in America. The Americans, whose laws allow the utmost freedom, and even license, of language in other respects, nevertheless subject the drama to a sort of censorship. Plays can only be performed by permission of the municipal authorities. This illustrates how like communities are to individuals: without a thought they give way to their chief passions, and then take great care not to be carried away by tastes they do not possess.4 Among more recent writers, the idea of precommitment first became prominent in the writings of R.H. Strotz and Thomas Schelling.5 It seems that there was no interaction at the time between the authors of these two seminal and virtually simultaneous papers. Whereas Schelling's paper had an immediate and durable impact on economics and political science, it took longer for the ideas of Strotz to become part of mainstream social science.6 In this Article I focus on some of the ambiguities in the concept of precommitment. I begin in Part II with an exposition of the ends and means-rationales and techniques-of the concept. In Part III, I consider whether the intuitively meaningful idea of individuals precommitting themselves can be extended to the collective level. In Part IV, I discuss the distinction between strategic and nonstrategic precommitment. In Part V, I consider the traditional claim that precommitment is a cold decision carried out to forestall hot decisions at later times. In Part VI, I address a vexing problem that arises in many cases of precommitment: the tension between rigidity and flexibility, and how to distinguish good reasons for wanting to undo one's ties from spurious ones. In Part VII, I warn against confusing genuine or intentional precommitment from the restrictions on choice that merely happen to benefit the agent. Part VIII offers a brief conclusion. II. Why and How People Precommit Themselves7 A. Defining Precommitment When precommitting himself, a person acts at one point in time in order to ensure that at some later time he will perform an act that he could but would not have performed without that prior act.8 As I define it, precommitment requires an observable action, not merely a mental resolution. …