As a person who stayed several extra years in a cult I didn't want to be in because I had Made a Promise, I feel like if that is what we are doing with oaths we gotta, you know..... tell people that's what we're doing. Because some of us are very literal.
These days I feel there's no situation where I would want to *absolutely* bind my future self with a vow. My future self will know things I don't, be in situations I didn't predict. And yet I understand that kind of thing would be useful for other people to be able to use to predict my behavior.
I'm just reminded of Miles Vorkosigan. "The trouble with oaths in the form 'death before dishonor' is they eventually sort everyone into the dead and the foresworn." Something like that.
Today I learned that most Americans have a cavalier attitude towards Oaths. In retrospect, this is obvious, but the two Oaths I have made, marriage and Federal Employee Oath of Office, I have been taking vary seriously, and would consider divorce or trying to Overthrow the Constitution to be some of the most immoral actions I could take. I cannot imagine a situation where I would do either. Observationally I am clearly in the minority, and yet I never realized it until I read it.
Interesting, one of the reasons we chose not to have my father-in-law move in with us is that he would lose a ton of government benefits if we did. I never considered lying as an option.
I think if I were like, a politician, I would feel that unilaterally trying to get around the Constitution would be pretty bad? If I imagine the most realistic examples of anti-Constitution behavior I can, they all seem pretty immoral.
But I don't think that means that one must think there are no improvements on the Constitution that might hypothetically be worth making? As much as I deeply respect and appreciate many of America's Constitutional rights and so on, I don't think that we should necessarily commit to having a document from the 1700s rule the land until literal eternity!
We have amended the Constitution 33 times and I am certainly not against further Amendments. But if you think a politician trying to unilaterally get around the constitution, you would presumably believe that myself, a high level government bureaucrat, unilaterally getting around the constitution would likely be worse. My Oath also precludes me from joining any organizations with the goal of overthrowing the Constitution, which I think is also a reasonable thing to want government Bureaucrats to do. I have trouble thinking of ways to change the constitution that don’t involve the Amendment process, elections, or violence, I personally am not going to be involved in violence.
I mean, there's a reason why "restore constitutional government" is a constant gripe from angry right-wingers.
There's a very strong case to be made that *most* of what the Federal government is doing is unconstitutional, because the the powers haven't been specifically assigned to the Federal government and "anything that affects interstate commerce even indirectly, which includes nearly any human action at all" is a ridiculous justification.
This also tends to include "most gun laws" and "the Civil Rights Act" and "most labor laws".
More generally, there's a system of amendments that we have, and we've never ratified one that massively reduced the scope of the Bill of Rights or massively increased Federal power across the board except to do Prohibition (which we repealed).
It does seem descriptively true that modern American culture often uses oaths to symbolically mark category transitions, rather than to make serious commitments. But I still think it would be better to have the literal meaning of the oaths be true. I would certainly feel more meaningfully category-transitioned if I actually intended to keep the oath I was swearing. Is there any reason that it would be good for oaths to have clauses which the swearer expects to violate, if that wasn't already common?
Ok but lying with excuses and extra steps is still, y'know, lying.
My marriage vows are absolutely a big tedious unromantic list of rules and edge cases that I stick to the letter of. The part we actually said out loud in front of people was a more romantic summary, though. Felt rude to make the guests sit through the conditions for divorce.
One big mitigating factor is that I usually don't get to negotiate or even clarify oaths. If I had wanted my marriage to come with an obligation to do the chicken dance every morning, or without an obligation to support each other while sick, or without any obligations at all (just the social and legal status), I could have said so. There's no government office I can tell "y'know, 'whose laws I will uphold and obey' is way too strict, I can't promise I'll *never* jaywalk, and also can we add an appeals mechanism for unjust laws?". They don't actually give a fuck if I jaywalk, they just want me to say the words of the oath.
It does feel deeply silly to pay big material costs to avoid taking false oaths, when absolutely nobody in the world even expects the oath to be sincere.
Still, I don't like lying. I'd like to say I'd refuse to swear the oath if I was entirely opposed to it, not just generally agreeing with the spirit but with quibbles. I'm not sure I'd actually be that brave, though.
I took an oath of allegiance to the queen when I was naturalised as a UK citizen/subject and it ANNOYED ME because I did not mean it. But I've been treating it more as a consensual accession to a certain polity and I do feel WAYYY more obligation to obey the laws of this land than of my (shitty) country of origin. Also, I do feel very faintly wrong when I express republican sentiments, and I wouldn't campaign for the cause, even though I feel that people born or forced to be British absolutely have all the right to be actively republican.
I think I'd NOT have sworn the "till death" church marriage vow, even tho somewhat ironically, that's what actually happened.
So I do think I take them slightly more seriously. And that's kinda weird for someone who has no serious objection to lies. So "breaking an oath" must be different than a lie, and I never quite realised this.
I would argue we are still following this basic pattern out of cultural habit (we have lots of stories with people taking oaths in them) while no longer actually imbuing the practice with the part that matters.
I honestly don't know if this is good or not. On the "not" side, people obviously are going to be more cavalier about swearing before nonexistent gods; on the other hand, I think people do take oaths more seriously because of their ceremonial weight.
I disagree extremely hard, primarily for reasons of "what do you MEAN there is no way to say you are Really Actually committing to this?"
Treating explicit statements as vague, performative vibes is really bad for anyone who wants to ever be able to make an explicit statement and have it understood as an explicit statement ever. There are much better ways to do this -- and standardized oaths that no longer match existing conditions should be revised. It isn't even that difficult to maintain ceremony while inserting a form clause establishing conventional exceptions and limitations.
And certainly my marriage vows are to be understood in the terms (though we have used other words) of "Eru Illuvatar, hear our oath, and eternal hellfire take us if we keep it not", regardless of anything that should come between us and regardless of any actions of the State and its puny armies and impotent police.
(Related: There are several reasons why the Catholic Church doesn't allow you to be a Freemason, most of which boil down to "Freemasonry is a quasi-religion", but another one is the fact that Freemasons take a pretty spiritual / sacralized oath that they clearly don't take seriously (and that would be a sin to take seriously, while not taking it seriously is blasphemy and dishonesty.)
There is an oath that a lot of republicans have to take that they are already intending to break if they get the chance.
I, [full name], do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.
(or, if affirming):
I, [full name], do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law.
There are many cases of Members of Parliament making specific comments before taking the oath because they have political objections to it.
Yeah, I temporarily forgot that other countries don't have the same experiences.
The point being that Parliament had decided that James II's successor was William III and Mary II and that the succession was happenning now - which means that they weren't breaking the oath to be loyal to his "successor according to law" - but only because they'd just changed the successor. And the oath.
I feel like this fails to sufficiently make the argument that the false parts of the oath are actually *necessary*. This is just an argument for why oaths are good, but it could still be the case that they could accomplish the same goals without making people agree to things they're not going to do.
There are other ways to make a ritual more weighty and solemn, like:
- Say it in an ancient language like Latin or Aramaic
- Do it in specific conditions (at midnight, on New Year's Eve, on your birthday, during an eclipse, after fasting, on a mountain)
- Do a symbolic physical act (light a candle, burn a letter, ring a bell, climb a mountain, spill your blood, dunk yourself in water)
Maybe there are cases where fake oaths have a certain needed quality that these other options don't, but I'd like people to exhaust the other possibilities first.
The clauses in oaths that "everyone knows" can be ignored should be removed. If the oath has symbolic, portal value then let's not dilute it before the oath taker has even left the ceremony. I strongly feel perforative laws are a scourge and deeply corrosive of long term social well-being.
Every year, on the night of 10 Tishrei, Jews begin Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of prayer in the Jewish liturgical calendar. The first prayer is Kol Nidrei, which states:
"All vows, and prohibitions, and oaths, and consecrations [etc.] that we may vow, or swear, or consecrate, or prohibit upon ourselves from this Day of Atonement until the [next] Day of Atonement...Regarding all of them, we repudiate them. All of them are undone, abandoned, cancelled, null and void, not in force, and not in effect. Our vows are no longer vows, and our prohibitions are no longer prohibitions, and our oaths are no longer oaths."
Oaths-as-intention instead of oaths-as-contract long predates the Anglosphere.
... My understanding is that this was not seen as applying to most oaths to another person, and the incorrect belief that it *did* apply to all oaths was seen as legitimizing monstrous anti-semitism for centuries (and it still shows up in anti-semitic propaganda intended for a audience of people who Really Take Oaths Very Seriously)
Yes, but Ozy wasn't talking about oaths to another person. For example, the oath of citizenship is proctored by a judge, but not made to him; likewise for the Hippocratic Oath and a medical examiner.
Or rather, "oaths which promise something of value to another person, or where nonperformance would leave another person with less than they would have otherwise" or the like.
Hm. Yes, Kol Nidrei doesn't apply in those circumstances. IIRC (TBH I've never asked my Rabbi about this, so I may be getting the details wrong now) the idea is that if you swear to someone, then you can always ask the other person to release you from the oath, but (ever since the demise of prophecy) you can't ask God to release you from your oath and await a reply.
It seems to me Ozy is talking mainly about the latter kind of oath — namely, those with counterparties infeasible to contact to renegotiate, typically because your counterparties are extremely numerous. (I guess I'm also pulling the Durkheimian move of identifying "contracts with God" with "contracts with society at large").
It's a similar story with the Lieberman Clause/pre-nup; sometimes you need oaths to be less binding than contracts. So you build in specific escape hatches for those particular instances (and then take any oath without an escape hatch really seriously, contrary to whatever the antisemites think. But antisemites gonna antisemite, y'know?).
Sadly, "antisemites gonna antisemite" and "culturally dominant people gonna be insufficiently patient with how minority cultures process things" are both very often true.
So my model of the situation is that people already know that, and disagree. i didn't learnt anything new from this post. i already know there are people who play "oaths" on first simulacra level and those who play on 3. it came up on the who much literal people are with give 10% EA oath, and with Ben's post like this: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/actors-and-scribes-words-and-deeds/
and it doesn't look like this is your model. if it was, you would not try to explain, but to persuade.
It's not that i don't know that other people preform acts, i know and think it's wrong.
because it's mean that people who want to commit can't, because not everyone knows, because the 3 level is parasite upon the first, the power of the ritual is coming from those that mean it, so without them it will become empty with time.
because people who don't want to deceive can just not lie, while people who want be trustworthy can't just invent new oaths (only for them yet again be taken away by untrustworthy people).
and i think a lot of the change for the worse in the last decade is change of loss of trust. when institutes become untrustworthy and people loss trust, and i lead to really bad places. as in anti vaxxers and covid is lie and a lot of people dying sort of bad.
trust is the foundation of our institutions, and when they breach the thermocline of trust bad things happen. it's really really important to stop the erosion of this foundation and trying to rebuilt it.
saying people just don't mean it is like saying that people are murdering. it's not that people believe there are no murders. people thing it's bad!
Would a big list of edge cases and exceptions not imply a serious oath? I imagine such an approach would also have sufficient cost that would make it less likely to be undertaken by those who intend to break such oaths.
no, i click on the user agreement every time i install new software, and it doesn't mean i take it seriously. actually, having "a big list of edge cases and exceptions" is bad thing, for Law. oaths and laws should be simple, for them to be possible for humans to remember and be able to implement.
the point of Oaths is to avoid the need for costly signals. it's bad when you need to waste resources because you destroyed the social trust. for example, i encountered some people that say that ridiculously pricey weddings are such way to make weddings more serious, because by default they don't. i don't know if it's true, but if it is, it dead wight loss.
it's very clear to me, that Actors, or 3-level people, parasite upon true oaths. there are a lot of rituals of passage that don't have oaths in them. i had nice ritual when i got my degree. no oaths! you can do that in other situations, too.
but Actors need the oaths, because they become meaningless without them. it take time, but you can see what happen to marriage.
it should be possible for person to give a Oath and mean it, and for other people to know they mean it, without someone to come decade after and say "but we all know it's not serious, right? it's just those autistic people that think that words have meaning, we all savvy here and know they don't".
and part of it is for society to expect oaths to bind, and judge those who break them (also, have, like, legal system that works, but that it part of the same problem).
and part of this is to see this "savvy" person as evil and deprived.
yes, sure, it's nice for people to mimic true commitment, try to get the good parts without paying the costs. but what if, instead, we build a garden, and throw out those who break the rules, and create place when people can trust each others? people manage to do that, in the past. and we have to do that, too.
I think affirming the Viable Paradise Oath under penalty of perjury would be an even weirder thing to do than swearing it while intending to occasionally put stories in nonpaying markets! Are private organizations even allowed to do penalty of perjury?
As a person who stayed several extra years in a cult I didn't want to be in because I had Made a Promise, I feel like if that is what we are doing with oaths we gotta, you know..... tell people that's what we're doing. Because some of us are very literal.
These days I feel there's no situation where I would want to *absolutely* bind my future self with a vow. My future self will know things I don't, be in situations I didn't predict. And yet I understand that kind of thing would be useful for other people to be able to use to predict my behavior.
I'm just reminded of Miles Vorkosigan. "The trouble with oaths in the form 'death before dishonor' is they eventually sort everyone into the dead and the foresworn." Something like that.
Today I learned that most Americans have a cavalier attitude towards Oaths. In retrospect, this is obvious, but the two Oaths I have made, marriage and Federal Employee Oath of Office, I have been taking vary seriously, and would consider divorce or trying to Overthrow the Constitution to be some of the most immoral actions I could take. I cannot imagine a situation where I would do either. Observationally I am clearly in the minority, and yet I never realized it until I read it.
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-honesty-tax
Interesting, one of the reasons we chose not to have my father-in-law move in with us is that he would lose a ton of government benefits if we did. I never considered lying as an option.
🤝
I think if I were like, a politician, I would feel that unilaterally trying to get around the Constitution would be pretty bad? If I imagine the most realistic examples of anti-Constitution behavior I can, they all seem pretty immoral.
But I don't think that means that one must think there are no improvements on the Constitution that might hypothetically be worth making? As much as I deeply respect and appreciate many of America's Constitutional rights and so on, I don't think that we should necessarily commit to having a document from the 1700s rule the land until literal eternity!
We have amended the Constitution 33 times and I am certainly not against further Amendments. But if you think a politician trying to unilaterally get around the constitution, you would presumably believe that myself, a high level government bureaucrat, unilaterally getting around the constitution would likely be worse. My Oath also precludes me from joining any organizations with the goal of overthrowing the Constitution, which I think is also a reasonable thing to want government Bureaucrats to do. I have trouble thinking of ways to change the constitution that don’t involve the Amendment process, elections, or violence, I personally am not going to be involved in violence.
I mean, there's a reason why "restore constitutional government" is a constant gripe from angry right-wingers.
There's a very strong case to be made that *most* of what the Federal government is doing is unconstitutional, because the the powers haven't been specifically assigned to the Federal government and "anything that affects interstate commerce even indirectly, which includes nearly any human action at all" is a ridiculous justification.
This also tends to include "most gun laws" and "the Civil Rights Act" and "most labor laws".
More generally, there's a system of amendments that we have, and we've never ratified one that massively reduced the scope of the Bill of Rights or massively increased Federal power across the board except to do Prohibition (which we repealed).
It does seem descriptively true that modern American culture often uses oaths to symbolically mark category transitions, rather than to make serious commitments. But I still think it would be better to have the literal meaning of the oaths be true. I would certainly feel more meaningfully category-transitioned if I actually intended to keep the oath I was swearing. Is there any reason that it would be good for oaths to have clauses which the swearer expects to violate, if that wasn't already common?
Ok but lying with excuses and extra steps is still, y'know, lying.
My marriage vows are absolutely a big tedious unromantic list of rules and edge cases that I stick to the letter of. The part we actually said out loud in front of people was a more romantic summary, though. Felt rude to make the guests sit through the conditions for divorce.
One big mitigating factor is that I usually don't get to negotiate or even clarify oaths. If I had wanted my marriage to come with an obligation to do the chicken dance every morning, or without an obligation to support each other while sick, or without any obligations at all (just the social and legal status), I could have said so. There's no government office I can tell "y'know, 'whose laws I will uphold and obey' is way too strict, I can't promise I'll *never* jaywalk, and also can we add an appeals mechanism for unjust laws?". They don't actually give a fuck if I jaywalk, they just want me to say the words of the oath.
It does feel deeply silly to pay big material costs to avoid taking false oaths, when absolutely nobody in the world even expects the oath to be sincere.
Still, I don't like lying. I'd like to say I'd refuse to swear the oath if I was entirely opposed to it, not just generally agreeing with the spirit but with quibbles. I'm not sure I'd actually be that brave, though.
I took an oath of allegiance to the queen when I was naturalised as a UK citizen/subject and it ANNOYED ME because I did not mean it. But I've been treating it more as a consensual accession to a certain polity and I do feel WAYYY more obligation to obey the laws of this land than of my (shitty) country of origin. Also, I do feel very faintly wrong when I express republican sentiments, and I wouldn't campaign for the cause, even though I feel that people born or forced to be British absolutely have all the right to be actively republican.
I think I'd NOT have sworn the "till death" church marriage vow, even tho somewhat ironically, that's what actually happened.
So I do think I take them slightly more seriously. And that's kinda weird for someone who has no serious objection to lies. So "breaking an oath" must be different than a lie, and I never quite realised this.
My marriage vow was for "as long as I can", which ended up being until my wife died.
Tangent, but our marriage vows (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PySEyxTKh5hzDeK9y/my-marriage-vows) are completely literal and sincere, and specifically designed to be such.
Counterpoint, classically oaths *were* promises where you basically asked the gods to enforce them, thus making them more reliable:
https://acoup.blog/2019/06/28/collections-oaths-how-do-they-work/
I would argue we are still following this basic pattern out of cultural habit (we have lots of stories with people taking oaths in them) while no longer actually imbuing the practice with the part that matters.
I honestly don't know if this is good or not. On the "not" side, people obviously are going to be more cavalier about swearing before nonexistent gods; on the other hand, I think people do take oaths more seriously because of their ceremonial weight.
We still remember who dwell in the shadow of the Lord.
I disagree extremely hard, primarily for reasons of "what do you MEAN there is no way to say you are Really Actually committing to this?"
Treating explicit statements as vague, performative vibes is really bad for anyone who wants to ever be able to make an explicit statement and have it understood as an explicit statement ever. There are much better ways to do this -- and standardized oaths that no longer match existing conditions should be revised. It isn't even that difficult to maintain ceremony while inserting a form clause establishing conventional exceptions and limitations.
And certainly my marriage vows are to be understood in the terms (though we have used other words) of "Eru Illuvatar, hear our oath, and eternal hellfire take us if we keep it not", regardless of anything that should come between us and regardless of any actions of the State and its puny armies and impotent police.
(Related: There are several reasons why the Catholic Church doesn't allow you to be a Freemason, most of which boil down to "Freemasonry is a quasi-religion", but another one is the fact that Freemasons take a pretty spiritual / sacralized oath that they clearly don't take seriously (and that would be a sin to take seriously, while not taking it seriously is blasphemy and dishonesty.)
There is an oath that a lot of republicans have to take that they are already intending to break if they get the chance.
I, [full name], do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.
(or, if affirming):
I, [full name], do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law.
There are many cases of Members of Parliament making specific comments before taking the oath because they have political objections to it.
"According to law" at least sounds like a big-ass loophole, because Parliament can change the laws.
Parliament added that to the oath in 1689. Wonder why it was that year in particular?
::googles::
Well, this happened at around that time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution
Quite!
[Sorry, question was rhetorical, I thought it was obvious. 1688 is one of the dates we Brtos get drilled into our memory in high school]
Sorry, American here! 😊
Yeah, I temporarily forgot that other countries don't have the same experiences.
The point being that Parliament had decided that James II's successor was William III and Mary II and that the succession was happenning now - which means that they weren't breaking the oath to be loyal to his "successor according to law" - but only because they'd just changed the successor. And the oath.
I will go so far as to say that this is a challenge against Republicanism and that this oath does indeed hold weight.
I feel like this fails to sufficiently make the argument that the false parts of the oath are actually *necessary*. This is just an argument for why oaths are good, but it could still be the case that they could accomplish the same goals without making people agree to things they're not going to do.
There are other ways to make a ritual more weighty and solemn, like:
- Say it in an ancient language like Latin or Aramaic
- Do it in specific conditions (at midnight, on New Year's Eve, on your birthday, during an eclipse, after fasting, on a mountain)
- Do a symbolic physical act (light a candle, burn a letter, ring a bell, climb a mountain, spill your blood, dunk yourself in water)
Maybe there are cases where fake oaths have a certain needed quality that these other options don't, but I'd like people to exhaust the other possibilities first.
The clauses in oaths that "everyone knows" can be ignored should be removed. If the oath has symbolic, portal value then let's not dilute it before the oath taker has even left the ceremony. I strongly feel perforative laws are a scourge and deeply corrosive of long term social well-being.
Every year, on the night of 10 Tishrei, Jews begin Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of prayer in the Jewish liturgical calendar. The first prayer is Kol Nidrei, which states:
"All vows, and prohibitions, and oaths, and consecrations [etc.] that we may vow, or swear, or consecrate, or prohibit upon ourselves from this Day of Atonement until the [next] Day of Atonement...Regarding all of them, we repudiate them. All of them are undone, abandoned, cancelled, null and void, not in force, and not in effect. Our vows are no longer vows, and our prohibitions are no longer prohibitions, and our oaths are no longer oaths."
Oaths-as-intention instead of oaths-as-contract long predates the Anglosphere.
... My understanding is that this was not seen as applying to most oaths to another person, and the incorrect belief that it *did* apply to all oaths was seen as legitimizing monstrous anti-semitism for centuries (and it still shows up in anti-semitic propaganda intended for a audience of people who Really Take Oaths Very Seriously)
Yes, but Ozy wasn't talking about oaths to another person. For example, the oath of citizenship is proctored by a judge, but not made to him; likewise for the Hippocratic Oath and a medical examiner.
Or rather, "oaths which promise something of value to another person, or where nonperformance would leave another person with less than they would have otherwise" or the like.
Hm. Yes, Kol Nidrei doesn't apply in those circumstances. IIRC (TBH I've never asked my Rabbi about this, so I may be getting the details wrong now) the idea is that if you swear to someone, then you can always ask the other person to release you from the oath, but (ever since the demise of prophecy) you can't ask God to release you from your oath and await a reply.
It seems to me Ozy is talking mainly about the latter kind of oath — namely, those with counterparties infeasible to contact to renegotiate, typically because your counterparties are extremely numerous. (I guess I'm also pulling the Durkheimian move of identifying "contracts with God" with "contracts with society at large").
It's a similar story with the Lieberman Clause/pre-nup; sometimes you need oaths to be less binding than contracts. So you build in specific escape hatches for those particular instances (and then take any oath without an escape hatch really seriously, contrary to whatever the antisemites think. But antisemites gonna antisemite, y'know?).
Sadly, "antisemites gonna antisemite" and "culturally dominant people gonna be insufficiently patient with how minority cultures process things" are both very often true.
So my model of the situation is that people already know that, and disagree. i didn't learnt anything new from this post. i already know there are people who play "oaths" on first simulacra level and those who play on 3. it came up on the who much literal people are with give 10% EA oath, and with Ben's post like this: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/actors-and-scribes-words-and-deeds/
and it doesn't look like this is your model. if it was, you would not try to explain, but to persuade.
It's not that i don't know that other people preform acts, i know and think it's wrong.
because it's mean that people who want to commit can't, because not everyone knows, because the 3 level is parasite upon the first, the power of the ritual is coming from those that mean it, so without them it will become empty with time.
because people who don't want to deceive can just not lie, while people who want be trustworthy can't just invent new oaths (only for them yet again be taken away by untrustworthy people).
and i think a lot of the change for the worse in the last decade is change of loss of trust. when institutes become untrustworthy and people loss trust, and i lead to really bad places. as in anti vaxxers and covid is lie and a lot of people dying sort of bad.
trust is the foundation of our institutions, and when they breach the thermocline of trust bad things happen. it's really really important to stop the erosion of this foundation and trying to rebuilt it.
saying people just don't mean it is like saying that people are murdering. it's not that people believe there are no murders. people thing it's bad!
Would a big list of edge cases and exceptions not imply a serious oath? I imagine such an approach would also have sufficient cost that would make it less likely to be undertaken by those who intend to break such oaths.
no, i click on the user agreement every time i install new software, and it doesn't mean i take it seriously. actually, having "a big list of edge cases and exceptions" is bad thing, for Law. oaths and laws should be simple, for them to be possible for humans to remember and be able to implement.
the point of Oaths is to avoid the need for costly signals. it's bad when you need to waste resources because you destroyed the social trust. for example, i encountered some people that say that ridiculously pricey weddings are such way to make weddings more serious, because by default they don't. i don't know if it's true, but if it is, it dead wight loss.
it's very clear to me, that Actors, or 3-level people, parasite upon true oaths. there are a lot of rituals of passage that don't have oaths in them. i had nice ritual when i got my degree. no oaths! you can do that in other situations, too.
but Actors need the oaths, because they become meaningless without them. it take time, but you can see what happen to marriage.
it should be possible for person to give a Oath and mean it, and for other people to know they mean it, without someone to come decade after and say "but we all know it's not serious, right? it's just those autistic people that think that words have meaning, we all savvy here and know they don't".
and part of it is for society to expect oaths to bind, and judge those who break them (also, have, like, legal system that works, but that it part of the same problem).
and part of this is to see this "savvy" person as evil and deprived.
yes, sure, it's nice for people to mimic true commitment, try to get the good parts without paying the costs. but what if, instead, we build a garden, and throw out those who break the rules, and create place when people can trust each others? people manage to do that, in the past. and we have to do that, too.
How about they affirm under penalty of perjury, and I swear oaths? That sounds much better for all of us.
I think affirming the Viable Paradise Oath under penalty of perjury would be an even weirder thing to do than swearing it while intending to occasionally put stories in nonpaying markets! Are private organizations even allowed to do penalty of perjury?
Probably not, but I bet they could arrange a complicated financial instrument that would have similar effects!
Having just sworn my naturalization oath last month, I _am_ going to go ahead and renounce my former citizenship to fully comply with it, to be fair.
But then, I always did have some "well, the world may disagree with me on this point, but that just means it's wrong" tendencies.