Knowledge and respect exhibit a puzzling self-other asymmetry: Self-respect generates an imperative to know oneself, but as the objectionability of paternalism and privacy violations illustrate, respect for others can require that we avoid acquiring, or making use of, knowledge we have about them. This article elaborates this asymmetry and offers a solution to it, rooted in the distinctive importance that self-knowledge has for self-respecting rational agents: Self-respecting agents have reasons to have others defer to their ‘surfaces’ or self-presentations in order (...) to inhibit making themselves vulnerable to others in ways that undermine their self-respect by subordinating their wills to the wills of others, as well as to ensure that self-knowledge can play its desired role in the lives of self-respecting agents. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim that we have a duty to know our motives. However, prominent theories of the mind suggest that we can’t. Such scepticism about knowledge of one’s motives is based on psychological evidence. I show that this evidence only mandates scepticism about knowledge of one’s motives if we rely on a mistaken assumption which I call ‘the myth of the one true motive’. If we reject this myth, we see that there is space to plausibly interpret the empirical data (...) such that knowledge of one’s motives is difficult, but not impossible. (shrink)

Morality is fundamentally impartial. No one can be simply excluded from moral consideration without justification in terms of a morally relevant distinction. I claim that moral impartiality justifies establishing the presumption in favor of duties to oneself. I vindicate this claim against the challenge that there must be a morally relevant self-other distinction which explains the commonsense moral asymmetry. I show that the asymmetry can be explained instead by the presupposition of consent. I end by responding to the objection that (...) the consent-based explanation of the asymmetry condemns potential duties to oneself as practically uninteresting. (shrink)

Duties to self are commonly considered as incoherent. If I owed a duty to myself, I could release myself from it at will which would be incoherent with it being a duty. Recent years have seen various attempts at defending duties to self against this argument. A common strategy entails that the self is divided. One part of the self owes a duty to another. I argue that understanding duties to self as being owed to a part of the self (...) leads to problems because a person has interests that go beyond those of the single parts. Instead, I suggest that duties to self are owed by a local self (or rather, a local perspective) to an extended or unified self. (shrink)

What moral value, if any, is there to unsuccessful self-scrutiny? I answer this question by drawing on Kant’s discussion of the duty of self-knowledge in the Metaphysics of Morals. On my interpretation, the duty of self-knowledge is a demand to understand the generic structure of our moral agency: fulfilling it requires that we appreciate ourselves as fundamentally flawed, but also fundamentally morally worthy. This interpretation renders the duty consistent with Kant’s claims about moral self-opacity and explains why Kant called self-knowledge (...) the ‘First Command’ of all duties. But this interpretation has value beyond the exegetical: by appreciating the value of generic moral self-knowledge, we can understand why self-scrutiny can be worthwhile even when it does not yield particular self-knowledge. (shrink)

I draw on ideas salient in contemporary literate African philosophy to construct two new theoretical ways of capturing the essence of duties to oneself. According to one theory, a person has a foundational duty to “relate” to herself in ways similar to how the African field has often thought that a person should relate with others, viz., harmoniously. According to the second, one has a foundational duty to produce liveliness in oneself. In addition to articulating these novel attempts to capture (...) what all duties to oneself might have in common and showing that each one captures several intuitions about them, I offer some reasons to think that the harmony theory is more attractive than the vitality one. I conclude that there are values prominent in the African tradition that, upon some reformulation, ground comprehensive accounts of what one owes oneself that merit consideration by a global audience as rivals to, say, Kantian-rationalist approaches common in the West. (shrink)

This paper defends a strong link between personal integrity and morality in a way that preserves the overriding and universal authority of impartial morality. I argue that, when we are committed to a personal project or relationship, we hold ourselves accountable, from the perspective of a corresponding practical identity, for living up to the commitment. Under the right conditions, this generates an obligation to ourselves. Supposing that holding someone accountable constitutively presupposes a version of Kant’s Formula of Humanity (as Stephen (...) Darwall argues), such obligations of integrity turn out to be moral obligations. Although the picture presented here resembles Christine Korsgaard’s account of the link between integrity of morality, it has several advantages over that account. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of self-directed duties concern not merely those duties one has regarding oneself, but those one owes specifically to oneself. In this paper, I take up the question of what it even means to owe something to oneself in the first place. A proper appreciation of what it means, I argue, will help answer skeptics who doubt the coherence of duties to self.

This article argues that resolutions are reason-giving: when an agent resolves to φ, she incurs an additional normative reason to φ. I argue that the reasons we incur from making resolutions are importantly similar to the reasons we incur from making promises. My account explains why it can be rational for an agent to act on a past resolution even if temptation causes preference and even judgment shifts at the time of action, and offers a response to a common objection (...) to the normativity of resolutions known as the bootstrapping problem, on which if resolutions were reason-giving they would problematically allow us to bootstrap any action into rationality simply by resolving to perform it. (shrink)