Contracts and Vows

If religious vows are in pertinent respects like contracts, even thoroughly promise-like contracts, they are unlikely in many or most cases to be morally binding. We might reasonably take vows to be contracts—contracts of a particular kinds, contracts understood as promises. Talk of contracts with God makes sense only if the future is genuinely open for God, as some theistic views deny. Because a promise must be accepted to be binding, belief in the intelligibility of promissory obligation to God is dependent on the availability of an account of divine action in virtue of which it is reasonable to expect God to communicate acceptance of a promise. Even when God might be thought to have accepted a promise, performance of the contract thus made might not be morally required. And alternative accounts of the wrongness of failing to fulfil a vow that do not treat it as a kind of promise-breaking seem unsatisfactory. Thus, there is little reason to treat most religious vows as morally binding.

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