Abstract

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.