T. Shelling. Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays
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T. Shelling. Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006, 360 pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-674-01929-4. $39.95 Hb. ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02967-7. $19.95 Pb Iskra Fileva
Published online: 28 November 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
This essay collection comes from an economist and so is not, strictly speaking, a philosophy book. But the author is an outstanding economist, and Strategies of Commitment is a very philosophical book. All pieces in it are remarkably lucid and truly engaging; each contains an original idea, and some read as series of insights; many offer examples of the kind that works effectively in a variety of settings – a conference talk, a journal article, a university class or even at the dinner table. Topics covered include old as well as relatively recent interests of the author: commitment as it figures in the contexts of threats, promises, bargaining and selfcommand, the dynamics of social segregation, arms control and climate change. The book will be of interest to philosophers of economics, rational choice theory, game theory, ethics, political theory and environmental philosophy. Strategies of Commitment contains a total of nineteen essays grouped in eight chapters. Two chapters will serve as focal points of this discussion: the opening chapter which gives title to the collection and section number three under the heading, ‘‘Commitment as Self-Command.’’ What is ‘‘commitment’’? The term ‘‘commitment’’ is likely to trigger two groups of associations in the mind of a philosopher. Associations from one group have their origin in a Kantian understanding of commitment traceable back to Plato and recently revived by neo-Kantians. On that understanding, to make a commitment is to bind oneself with reasons, reasons to pursue particular courses of action and avoid others. If one fails a commitment, on this view, one fails as a moral being and possibly, echoing more recent versions of the account, scathes one’s own practical identity. The other chain of associations begins with Hobbes’s idea that commitments should be made and kept for self-interested reasons. Keeping a commitment is in one’s own interest, on Hobbes’s reckoning, just in case a strong I. Fileva (&) University of North Carolina, Caldwell Hall, CB #3125, 240 East Cameron Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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coercive power exists such as makes it imprudent or – what is the same for Hobbes – unreasonable for either side to fail a commitment. It may seem that these two standard construals of commitment – one normative and the other one instrumental – are polar opposites and exhaust the theoretical possibilities available. But in fact, there is a sense in which the two conceptions are closely aligned and the pair could be contrasted with at least one alternative, Schelling’s conception. The two interpretations of commitment sketched are alike in that both can be read as possible answers to the same guiding questions, ‘‘Should I keep
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