Moral and Rational Commitment

We often use the term ‘commitment’ to make claims of apparent normative import. An ontologically scrupulous philosopher says that she cannot accept a certain principle because it would commit her to abstracta. A conscientious friend says that he’d like to make your party but feels bound by a prior commitment. A campaigning politician says that she’s the only candidate who’s really committed to cleaning up Washington. It is surprising, given the ubiquity of such claims, that philosophers seldom discuss the notion of commitment. The first goal of this paper is thus to remedy an oversight. The notion of commitment is interesting and deserving of analysis. My second aim is to provide some evidence for a unifying thesis about commitment. Rational commitments, like the commitment to believe what you know to follow from one of your beliefs, and moral commitments, like the commitment you take on by making a promise, share several important underlying features. I’ll suggest that they are indeed two instances of one normative relation, the relation of being committed. And this relation is distinct from those—especially the relation of having a reason, and the relation of being required—that philosophers have recognized and invoked in constructing their theories. An analogy may be helpful. Many of us recognize that there are moral requirements, and recognize that there are rational requirements. But it would be strange to suppose that there is nothing in common between moral and rational requirements that merits calling them both requirements. It is more natural, I take it, to assume that they are on the contrary two instances of one requirement relation. This does not mean that moral requirements and rational requirements must have all the same qualities; domain-specific differences are likely to arise. Nonetheless, it is potentially important for us to understand what requirements are, in a general sense. This general understanding of the