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Is that a bad thing? Past me was a different person. Why should I be beholden to him? I appreciate continuity of obligations to others, but why should I feel obligated to honor past commitments (e.g. not to make a profit) that I made to myself?
Because ability to commit is one of the fundemental building blocks of all relationships. It is one of the basic things that seperates intelligent life from mere biology and you can't have a society with out it.
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Freedom of contract includes the freedom to abrogate prior contracts, but binding in the future is something people want to do all the time.
For example, you have an agreement between A and B to purchase B's business. A gets three months of due diligence before he needs to close. B is willing to give A two months extension at a price, but he wants to put it in the contract that there will be no additional extensions of the due diligence after that. B wants it to be binding on both parties that A can't get to the end of the extension period and say he needs more time. Regardless of price, B doesn't want it to go any further than the first extension, after five months A has to close or leave.
But saying that in the contract doesn't really mean anything. A can still come to B at the end of the five months and say, I'm not buying, give me an extension or I'm walking. And the contract in that case doesn't really mean anything if B wants to give in, by mutual agreement they can sign an addendum that gives an extension and specifically states that the clause against additional extensions is stricken from the agreement.
You have to resort to really complicated maneuvers to create a really binding agreement on both future parties, involving third parties. If you put some kind of penalty in, both parties can agree to forgive the penalty. Anything you ban can be abrogated or amended. Unless a party with enforceable rights says no, any contract can be changed with the consent of all parties.
Here though, I haven't studied it in great depth so I could be wrong, I think what we're really talking about is OpenAI making a public promise that it was a non-profit, but the actually binding contractual part of the promise only bound as long as the board kept it binding. OpenAI has been telling everyone it is a non-profit, and pointing to its non-profit status as binding proof that this promise was going to be kept. But the promise wasn't binding, not really, if the parties to whom it was made were willing to release it; which in this case is an insider circle-jerk.
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Well, for one thing, because people who know you see it this way are a lot less likely to transact with you.
Is that so? I mean, sure, that's how it's supposed to work. But Trump doesn't pay his contractors and they still work for him, over and over again. In industry, obviously Machiavellian behavior has no lasting ramifications. My experience tells me that reputation has less of an effect than might be believed.
Yes, it is so. Can't speak to your example because I don't know anything about it but fixating on a really unusual edge case is unwise here.
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"When a man takes an oath... he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again."
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Because you didn't make that promise to yourself. If it was like a private oath to quit drinking then sure, it's between past you and future you. But more often it's a restriction that you publicized and used to build goodwill and generally improve your position. OpenAI got where it is partly because people were permissive of a "non-profit" doing shady stuff "for the greater good".
Revoking a commitment like that is a really obvious act of duplicity and the correct move is for the broad public to punish them harshly for it. Keeping one's word is basically the highest virtue in my eyes and I hate that we've reached this point where duplicity is normalized.
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