Have you ever felt guilty for how you treated yourself? Maybe you promised yourself you would work towards some goal and you failed to do so, or you continued to feed yourself unhealthy food, or kept yourself sleep-deprived because you wouldn’t stop doomscrolling in bed. Of course, we all sometimes make unwise choices or do things that have bad consequences. But there’s another intriguing possibility: that, in some cases, we owed it to ourselves to treat ourselves better – in other words, that we have moral obligations to ourselves. So, do such self-obligations exist? Do we feel their pull in everyday life?
Perhaps surprisingly, there is little consensus on whether we have moral obligations to ourselves. Nearly everyone agrees, of course, that we have obligations to other people. Most of us have felt guilty at some point for how we treated someone else; guilt is, often, a sign that (we think) we’ve done something morally wrong. Such failures can be big (seriously injuring someone in a bar fight, or cheating on a spouse) or small (forgetting a promise to pick up someone from the airport, or saying something unkind). Indeed, it is widely thought that morality exists as a set of norms that govern our interactions with other people. But, because of this, the question of whether there are also moral norms about how we treat ourselves is much more controversial. Obligations to the self don’t sit well with many standard ways of thinking about the nature of morality.
Some theorists question whether there are any genuine obligations to the self, for several reasons. One is that morality has been described as a system that arises when there’s a need to coordinate the competing interests of different people. Thus, it’s possible that how we treat ourselves is not inherently a moral issue. This is a perspective that many psychologists studying morality have taken, including proponents of social domain theory, dyadic morality, and the cooperative theory of morality. A stronger version of this view is that it would be overreaching to think of morality as governing how people treat themselves, in light of essential values of personal liberty or autonomy. For instance, in Fatal Freedom (1999), the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz used this perspective to argue that even suicide is morally permissible.
Another kind of objection is that obligations to the self are conceptually incoherent – they make no sense. With many interpersonal obligations, the person who is owed something can release the one who owes them: if you promise to cook me dinner, I can simply waive your obligation by telling you I don’t need you to keep that promise. But if the person who’s owed something and the person who owes it are the same person, couldn’t I just release myself from any obligation I don’t want to fulfil? This is known as the ‘paradox of self-release’, and philosophers such as Marcus Singer have worried that this renders obligations to the self either impossible or trivial.
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