Replacing Obligation with Commitment: A Responsible Voluntarism

Abstract

Obligations undermine social freedom in two key ways. First, consent theory maintains that voluntary agreements are reinforced by an imminent coercive force, leaving the question as to how free these acts actually are. Second, since social freedom connotes substantive freedom from oppression, coercive enforceability raises the further question of authenticity and problematizes evaluative claims about the conditions of social freedom. Under complete freedom, the regulatory nature of internal and external conditions for narrative authenticity precludes the need for external enforcement and so makes obligation superfluous. Yet in the absence of obligation, there remains a need for an action guiding concept that signifies freedom and authenticity in acting. For this, I propose the concept of commitment. Commitment is distinct from, though related to, both obligation and responsibility, and accounts for acts that properly fall under the umbrella of social freedom. In this chapter, I reject the notion of obligation and articulate the concept of commitment as the appropriate corollary of social consent. One point to emphasize is that conditions of complete freedom will not likely be attained and so, like freedom, there will be varying degrees of commitment. This means that complete reliance on commitment, though theoretically sound, is practically infeasible, and so must allow for given responsibilities.