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.

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)

The role that the first-person perspective is allowed to play in moral reasoning is a major source of contemporary debate between partialists and impartialists. The discussion usually revolves around the question of partiality’s justification when it is intended to benefit our loved ones. Surprisingly, the issue of partiality to oneself is rarely addressed directly and its link with egoism is left unexplored. This is a gap that this paper attempts to fill by focusing on some of the difficulties raised by (...) the idea of justified partiality to oneself. (shrink)

Moral philosophy is often said to be about what we owe to each other. Do we owe anything to ourselves?

According to relational egalitarianism, justice requires equal relations. The theory applies to those who stand in the relevant social relations. In this paper, I distinguish four different accounts of what it means to be socially related and argue that in all of them, self-relations—how a person relates to themselves—fall within the scope of relational egalitarianism. I also point to how this constrains what a person is allowed to do to themselves.