Ulysses Rebound: Recommitting Constitutional Precommitment

Standard arguments around constitutional precommitment – both in favour and against – presuppose a mistaken view about the concept of commitment itself. I will call this mistaken belief the agent-dependent condition. The agent-dependent condition is a feature of the operative understanding of commitment which requires that commitment, to be real or true or valid, be imposed on oneself by oneself. Real commitments, on this view, are necessarily self-imposed. To me, constitutionalism’s significant focus on democratic legitimacy arises because democracy serves as a conceptual shorthand for the agency which is thought necessary in the concept of commitment: a commitment which has not been chosen seems no commitment at all. This is the implication of the agent-dependent condition. Conflating the concept of commitment with the agent-dependent condition is a mistake, the pervasiveness of which is a result of a gross misrepresentation of the real core of commitment. I want to challenge the agent-dependent condition of commitment, arguing that whether and how one is committed is often a matter quite outside of an individual’s control. I put forward a novel conception of commitment that places less emphasis on the agent and more emphasis on the conceptual constraint of commitment. In doing so, I choose to present these ideas from within and alongside the constitutional precommitment debate for two reasons. First, the two most general objections to constitutional precommitment – the ‘non-bindingness problem’ and the ‘binding-others problem’ – rely on the very confusions that make up the core of the agent-dependent conception of commitment. As such, the constitutional precommitment debate provides a useful frame in which to situate and demonstrate my arguments. Second, my conceptual work on commitment may serve the constitutional debate by allowing for an alternate means of discussing the purpose and rules of the constitutional game, thereby offering some theoretical wiggle room. The tools I develop in my conceptual work on commitment can be used to develop a view of constitutional precommitment motivated by the concept of commitment itself. This is something far enough ‘outside the box’ to provide some novel questions and ideas for those working on constitutional precommitment, and constitutionalism more broadly.