Do Your Bad Habits Excuse Your Broken Promises?
The Professor Who Couldn’t Say “No”
Imagine you’re a professor, and a clever student asks you to review their paper. If you agree, and actually write the review, the student will land a fantastic job. If you agree but blow it off — maybe you’ve got a pile of Netflix to catch — the student gets nothing. If you politely decline, the student will ask someone else, get a so-so review, and still land a decent job.
But here’s the trouble: you know yourself. Every time you commit to a big task, you end up procrastinating. You’re almost certain that if you say “yes” today, you’ll fail to deliver. What should you do?
This is more than a sticky question about manners. Since the 1970s, philosophers have built a whole debate around cases just like this. The two main teams are called actualism and possibilism, and they disagree about whether your future flakiness should affect your obligation right now.
What You Would Do vs. What You Could Do
At the heart of the fight is a single question: when deciding what you ought to do, should you pay attention to what you would do, or only to what you could do?
Possibilists answer “only what you could do.” They think your moral duty comes from the entire life you are capable of living. In the professor’s case, the best possible plan she can pull off is “accept & then write the review.” That plan leads to the best outcome. Since she can do it — she has the ability — she is obligated to accept, even if she suspects she won’t follow through. On this view, your moral obligations are about your potential, not your likely slip-ups.
Actualists disagree. They say what matters is what would actually happen if you performed a certain action. If the professor accepts, the grim reality is that she would end up on the couch and the student would get nothing. If she declines, the student gets a solid second-rate job. Since the actual result of declining is better than the actual result of accepting, actualists claim she ought to decline. Her bad habit fixes the shape of her obligation.
Notice what’s happening: both sides agree the professor can do the full plan. The disagreement is about whether her known laziness should be part of the moral picture. Possibilists say you must aim for your best self; actualists say you must face the facts about your real self.
The Dark Side of Aiming High
Possibilism has a beautiful, demanding spirit — it expects you to do the very best you can. But that strength can become a severe weakness.
Imagine a high-stakes version of the same story. The professor knows that if she accepts and flakes, the student will not only miss the job — they’ll sink into despair. No matter how firm her intentions are today, she would flake. Possibilism still tells her to accept, because accepting is part of the best possible life she could live. It doesn’t care that acting on that obligation would make the world the worst it could be. Critics call this the worst-outcome objection: a view that orders you to walk straight into a catastrophe, just because you could have avoided it if you were someone else.
Philosophers who defend possibilism reply that there are two kinds of obligations: unconditional ones (do the absolute best you can) and conditional ones (if you’re not going to do the best, at least do the next best thing). The professor may have an unconditional duty to accept, but she also has a conditional duty to decline, given that she would flake anyway. Both can be true at once.
But for many people, that still feels like an advice-column contradiction: “You should say yes… but since you won’t actually write, you should say no.”
The Danger of Letting Laziness Win
If possibilism is too idealistic, actualism often seems too lenient. Critics point out that actualism can let people off the hook simply because they have rotten habits.
Return to the professor: according to actualism she should decline, and by doing so she avoids any obligation to help the student. She wriggles out of a duty precisely because she is disorganized. If she were a more reliable person, she would be obliged to accept. So her poor character works like a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. This is the getting-off-the-hook objection.
The worry grows in extreme cases. Suppose a brutal person is faced with a choice: if he kills one innocent person now, he’ll then stop; if he spares that person now, his rage will explode and he’ll kill ten people later. Actualism (at least in its simplest form) would say he is obligated to kill the one, because what would happen if he spares that person is ten deaths — a worse outcome. But that seems monstrous. Most people feel that a decent moral theory should never order you to do something terrible just because your own future viciousness makes it “prudent.”
Possibilism, in this nightmarish case, says the man is obligated to kill nobody — right from the start. That’s the best possible life he can live, and he can do it. Actualism’s result feels much harder to stomach.
A Middle Ground: Securing Your Own Better Future
Some philosophers think both sides are right about something — and wrong about something. They have built a compromise view often called securitism.
The idea goes like this: at any moment, you only have direct control over your present decision, not over future acts that depend on choices you haven’t made yet. So when deciding what to do now, you should hold fixed only what is truly beyond your control — and use your present control to secure the best possible sequence of actions.
Imagine the professor can, right this second, form a firm resolution to both accept and write the review. If she makes that resolution, she will actually write it. The other possibilities — the lazy Netflix route — are still possible, but she can choose now to shut them out. For a securitist, the professor is obligated to form that resolution and therefore to accept. The obligation doesn’t treat her weakness as permanent; it asks her to lock in her best self while she still can.
This view avoids the worst-outcome objection (it doesn’t order her to accept if accepting would guarantee flaking) and it also avoids letting her off the hook (her obligation to do the right thing is as big as the good she can secure right now). Securitism still has its own puzzles — for instance, what if the only way to secure the best outcome is to hold an irrational belief? — but it has become a strong third player in the debate.
Why It Matters for Every Broken Promise
You don’t have to be a professor to face this problem. Every time you promise to clean your room, help a friend with homework, or practice an instrument, you make a bet about your own future behavior. Should you only promise what you’re sure you’ll actually do? Or should you promise what you genuinely believe you could do if you tried your hardest?
The fight between actualism and possibilism doesn’t just belong in philosophy journals. It appears whenever a parent says “But you should have been able to!” and the child replies “But you knew I wouldn’t!” Our moral judgments hover uneasily between holding people to their potential and holding them to their predictable habits. Both feel fair. Both feel incomplete.
Seeing the debate laid out doesn’t hand you a single answer. But it helps you notice the question — and it reminds you that taking responsibility for yourself means grappling with the gap between your capabilities and your character.
Think about it
- If a friend knows they’ll probably forget to return your book, should they still promise to do it? Is your answer the same if you’re the one making the promise?
- Imagine you set a big goal, like learning a new language, but your track record suggests you’ll quit after a week. Should you plan as if you’re your ideal self, or as if you’re your real self? What would each plan look like?
- Is it ever fair to blame someone for not doing their best, even if they honestly tried — yet deep down you knew their laziness would sabotage the effort? Can you blame them for something that was, in a sense, predictable?
