i guess davelj is serious but it’s difficult to believe he really believes this. It just sounds like crazyland.
Query: if there really really were this moral component, why not really put it unambiguously in the contract.
“I promise” is a bit vague and incomplete, especially when the doc is read as a whole, with default provision (compare your wedding vows, which typically don’t includee an “in the event of divorce ” clause at the end (but since you haven’t been married davelj, I wuld understand if you weren’t aware of that). Would a minister agree to marry you if you put a default provision in your wedding vows? Hell no! Because it would be seen as a vioaltion of the PROMISE you were undertaking. a real violation.
But if you want the contract to contain this moral obligation, there are lawyers writing this thing, why not have them draft it in, clearly, unambiguously, addressing the existence of the defaul provision:
For instance, why couldn’t the contract read: “I promise to pay ____. I understand that I have taken on my solemn oath to make a good faith effort to continue to make payments in spite of the available default rememdy, and that it would be a breach of my ethical duties under this contract to fail to continue to pay so long as I have in excess of $5,000 in assets. I hereby affirm an oath on the heads and souls of my wife/kids/loved ones. should i fail to make these payments willfully, I am scum. Literally, pond scum, Human feces.
I acknowledge that it would be just if I got cancer, and my children died, and my testicles rotted if i failed to wilfully make a payment. I should roast in hell if I breach this solemn ethical duty.
I should be subject to ridicule and I hereby asset to the publication of this document with my photo in my local newspaper so that appropriate levels of public opprobrium can be heaped in my direction”.
I understand that the Bank has a team of paid praying professional who will pray for bad things to happen to me if I breach this solemn oath and that a just god would ensure their prayers are swiftly carried out.
Strong contract language like that. Make the signer initial each terrible thing that should justly happen to him if he doesn’t make payment. Make him swear to his lord (jesus christ, etc.) that he will make these payments if at all possible come hell or highwater.
The reason there is no such language in the contract? Can you guess why?
Because there is no “moral component” to the contract davelj! that’s a component that we’re just making up after the fact. It may be “understood”, hoped for as a matter of historical practice. But contracts are interpreted by the four corners of the document, not what you would like them to mean, and the single word “promise” here is to vague to carry all the freight you’re trying to load upon it.
