Sustained commitment usually depends on external social institutions for enforcement.
Evidence
The demands made by this commitment might sound commonplace—after all, monks of various religions have chosen celibacy. They do so, however, with substantial social and institutional constraints to keep them celibate, and even then they often fail. Alberich commits himself without any social structure to give him the incentive to stay unloving. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 195
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Directly relevant to Hardin’s core thesis that trust requires observable constraints — social institutions here supply the constraint that individual will alone cannot maintain.
- QUESTION: Worth pursuing: if commitment needs institutional scaffolding, what institutional scaffold makes the doctor’s wife’s self-commitment credible in Blindness?
Related
- Bare commitment without social support is superhuman and rarely sustained. (similarity 0.84)
- Credible commitment requires evidence, not mere declaration (similarity 0.81)
- Strength of character alone can sustain dramatic commitments (similarity 0.81)
- External institutional incentives can align interests with commitments (similarity 0.80)
- Mere stated intent cannot establish credible commitment (similarity 0.80)
- Loose social conventions undermine our capacity to make credible long-term commitments (similarity 0.80)
- Social backing from a whole society makes commitment trustworthy across time (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Institutional and legal constraints give people strong external incentives to be trustworthy
#expands(0.88) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 167 - Public commitment makes future fulfillment costly to renege on by invoking present social constraints
#exemplifies(0.85) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 231 - Trust is sustained by sanctions of relational withdrawal or community shunning
#exemplifies(0.82) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 112 - Obligation arises when social pressure and general demand for conformity are intense
#corroborates(0.80) — , Hart HLA - The Concept of Law, 299 - Loose social conventions undermine our capacity to make credible long-term commitments
#corroborates(0.78) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 244 - Trust presupposes a structured environment supplied by the existence of other systems.
#corroborates(0.75) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 184