CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Kanygina, Yuliya |
|---|---|
| Title | What We Owe to Ourselves: An Essay on Duties to Oneself |
| Summary | In this dissertation, I defend the view that, apart from duties to others, we also have duties to ourselves. In order to defend this claim, I rely on the intrinsic value of personhood, autonomy, and the capacity for well-being, and the resulting account is meant to appeal both to scholars sympathetic to Kant's moral theory and those skeptical of it. I begin by rebutting two classical objections to the idea of duties to oneself. First, I consider the charge that the notion of a duty to oneself is self-contradictory. In response, I argue that the explanation of why we can release others from their duties to us at will lends no support to the claim that we can release ourselves from duties to ourselves in a similar way. Instead, the moral justification for releasing oneself from a duty to oneself derives from the value and significance autonomy, and thus requires us to act consistently with it (Chapter 1). Second, I examine the objection that, since morality is essentially social, purely self-regarding actions fall outside of moral realm. In response, I argue that this objection would rule out the possibility of genuinely moral duties to oneself only on the presupposition that it provides a definition of morality. Such a definition, however, cannot be established prior to a substantive first-order moral inquiry. Additionally, I address the skepticism stemming from the connection between wrongdoing and blame and argue that, while we have the standing to blame the person who treats herself badly, the importance of personal growth and of self-trust renders the expression of our blame inappropriate (Chapter 2). My argument is then further developed by critically engaging with two arguments for duties to oneself. First, I consider and reject Kant’s argument on account of its being too closely tied to a single aspect of our rational nature, namely, our capacity for moral reasoning. I suggest instead that a plausible view of persons’ value is hybrid which among other factors includes persons’ capacity to form emotional ties and to autonomously set up and pursue meaningful goals (Chapter 3). Second, I examine a recent attempt by Paul Schofield to ground duties to oneself by relying on Stephen Darwall’s second-personal framework of morality. I argue that this view is ultimately unsuccessful, because it is phenomenologically suspect, it is vulnerable to an intra-personal version of the non-identity problem, and it cannot provide a plausible account for choosing between a course of action that will result in greater aggregate benefit of a cluster of perspectives and another course of action that will produce greater benefit per perspective (Chapter 4). Having cleared the ground for my own proposal, I argue that the value we have as persons grounds two standing duties to ourselves: the duty of self-respect and the duty of well-being. I focus on the duty of well-being and show that the duty of care for the well-being of others is importantly different from the duty of well-being that we owe to ourselves. The nature of persons’ well-being is such that it is partly up to the agent herself to realize it. Given the intrinsic value of persons and given the critical relation between person’s well-being and her autonomy, I conclude that we have a duty to strive to realize our well-being and that those who fail at it, fail morally (Chapter 5). |
| Supervisor | Moles, Andrés |
| Department | Philosophy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/kanygina_yuliya.pdf |
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