Moral Self-Regard

Duties to Oneself in Kant's Moral Theory

Lara Denis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138884342
• eBook ISBN: 9781135724573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Moral Self-Regard draws on the work of Marcia Baron, Joseph Butler and Allen Wood, among others in this first extensive study of the nature, foundation and significance of duties to oneself in Kant's moral theory.

Introduction

By way of introduction it is to be noted that there is no question in moral philosophy which has received more defective treatment than that of the individual’s duty towards himself. No one has framed a proper concept of a self-regarding duty. It has been regarded as a detail and considered by way of an after thought, as an appendix to moral philosophy, on the view that a human being should give thought to himself only after he has completely fulfilled his duty towards others. All moral philosophies err in this respect.

—Immanuel Kant (Lect 117)

I. INTRODUCTION

This study concerns the nature, place, and significance of duties to oneself within Kant’s moral theory. The project consists in explicating Kant’s notion of duties to oneself and using that explication to reveal some important strengths of Kant’s ethics.

The duties that Kant identifies as duties to oneself encompass a vast range of prohibitions and commands. They include (among other things) duties to develop one’s natural capabilities, to refrain from lying, to pursue self-knowledge, and to avoid false humility. What concerns me most regarding the more exegetical part of my project, however, is not the specific duties that Kant identifies as duties to oneself. I am more interested in such issues as Kant’s rationale for including duties to oneself in his system of duties, how they relate to other elements of his theory, the role that Kant attributes to them in the agent’s life and willing, and the attitude that they embody: that of moral self-regard.

Kant holds that a common element among many moral theories that relegate duties to oneself to a derivative, even peripheral, status is their assumption that self-regarding duties are concerned with the agent’s well-being or happiness. This is a conception of self-regarding duties that Kant explicitly rejects (e.g., Lect 117–18). Kant sees duties to oneself as concerning humanity in one’s own person. That is, they require the agent to treat herself with the respect that she deserves as a rational being with dignity, as an end in itself. Part of what I hope to do in this work is show what Kantian self-regard entails and how it differs from other ways one might perceive oneself (say, on a utilitarian account). To that end, I will both show how the formula of humanity grounds duties to oneself, and flesh out what it means to treat oneself as an end in itself.

The part of my project that looks at the significance of duties to oneself for Kant’s moral theory as a whole aims to defend Kant against some standard objections to his position—e.g., that his theory is alienating, too rigoristic, too abstract, and so on. Many who have sought to defend Kant against contemporary critics have concerned themselves primarily with Kant’s notions of moral worth and willing from duty. Barbara Herman and Marcia Baron, for example, have focussed on the relation between the motive of duty and other incentives in attempts to make the notion of acting from duty seem more palatable.¹ My approach, on the other hand, is to argue from an interpretation of Kant’s self-regarding duties to an overall account of what a good Kantian agent would be like, and to defend Kant on those two bases.

The remainder of this chapter sets the context for my discussion and defense of Kant’s duties to oneself in the following way. I sketch what I take to be a number of important objections to the general idea of duties to oneself. These objections provide a context for the body of the book because they express concerns about what duties to oneself would be like or entail. Throughout the exegesis and defense of Kant’s duties to oneself (Chapters Two through Six), we should bear in mind the suspicions raised in the following section. Part of what I need to show in my articulation and defense of Kant’s duties to oneself is that they can avoid, or can respond adequately to, these objections.

2. OBJECTIONS TO DUTIES TO ONESELF

2.1 DUTIES TO ONESELF AS INCOHERENT

One common kind of objection to duties to oneself is that their postulation is somehow conceptually confused; the very notion of duties to oneself is incoherent in some way. Marcus Singer, for example, argues that “it is actually impossible . . . for there to be any duties to oneself.”² He argues that we do not stand in the kind of relation to ourselves that would make self-regarding duties possible. His argument is this: (1) Duties to particular people entail correlative rights. So if A has a duty to B, then B has a right against A. (2) A person with a right against someone can choose not to enforce that right, releasing the bound person from the obligation. For example, if you promise me that you will lend me a copy of Crime and Punishment but I decide that I do not want it, I can release you from your duty to lend it to me.³ (3) One cannot release oneself from an obligation. Therefore, Singer concludes, it is impossible to have a duty to oneself. Such a duty would be a duty from which a person could release herself; and that is not a duty at all.⁴ When we talk about duties to ourselves, we are speaking, according to Singer, in a metaphorical but psychologically useful way: “what we have here is an appeal to self-interest disguised in the language of duty.”⁵

2.2 MORALITY AS SOCIAL

Another class of objections to the idea of duties to oneself springs from the position that moral duties are necessarily other-regarding because of the nature of morality. Often the key presupposition of those who think that morality excludes duties to oneself is that, because we already look out for our own well-being, morality’s purpose is to get us to consider the well-being of others. According to these theorists, morality is social: it does not extend to our purely self-regarding conduct.

Kurt Baier offers one version of this second form of objection to duties to oneself. Part of Baier’s rejection of self-regarding duties rests on what he takes to be the nature of duties. He maintains that one “comes to acquire duties by concluding contracts in which they are mentioned or by acquiring a certain status, such as citizen, husband, or father, of which they are a recognized part.”⁶ The root of Baier’s objection to duties to oneself, however, is not the nature of obligation but the nature of morality. Baier rejects duties to oneself primarily because he thinks that morality “arises out of the relations between individuals” and “presupposes interaction between people” (ibid., 215, 231). Since contracts or social relations may require certain self-regarding behavior, it is understandable if we mistake certain duties to others, or more general moral norms, for duties to ourselves. If I am a parent of a young child, for example, I have a duty to my child to keep myself reasonably healthy. This is not a duty to myself, but a duty to my child with regard to myself. According to Baier, moral rules properly extend to my self-regarding conduct only insofar as it bears on the interests of others: “If individuals live by themselves and cannot affect one another, then, morally speaking, there is nothing they may not do or refrain from doing. A world of Robinson Crusoes has no need for a morality and no use for one” (ibid., 215). A community that propagates such moral rules as “don’t kill yourself” or “develop your talents” when no harm is done to others by failing to obey these rules is guilty of paternalism. Such a society treats “adults as if they were children, as if they needed to be protected not only from others, but also from themselves” (ibid., 230). So Baier finds duties to oneself objectionable on two counts: they do not make sense as duties, and their postulation invites social interference in purely private matters.

2.3 SELF-REGARDING DUTIES AS PATERNALISTIC

While paternalism constitutes only a part of Baier’s concern about the acceptance of self-regarding duties, it forms an independent source of concern for other philosophers. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill worries about paternalistic interference without suggesting either that duties to oneself are incoherent or that morality does not concern one’s treatment of oneself. Mill’s objection to duties to oneself stems from two assumptions of his moral theory. The first is that morality aims at the general happiness;⁷ the second is that a duty is something that one may be “compelled to fulfill . . . a thing which may be exacted from a person, as one exacts a debt” (ibid., 47). Given these premises, it follows that duties to ourselves constrain us to promote our own happiness, and that these duties could be publicly enforced. In short, society could compel us to do things that it thinks will make us happy.

Utilitarianism limits the kinds of objections Mill can make to paternalism. That it entails treating adults as if they were children is not enough; if such treatment promoted the general happiness, Mill would have to embrace paternalism as a good thing. Mill does not always support his deepest and most interesting objection to paternalism—that it threatens liberty and individuality—with traditional (i.e., hedonistic) act-utilitarian arguments;⁸ his defense of liberty in “purely self-regarding actions” does not purport to treat all pleasures and pains on a par.⁹ But one of his claims demands no special understanding of “utility in the largest sense.” Mill claims that paternalism is self-defeating: “the strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct is that, when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly and in the wrong place” (ibid., 81, 74). Despite the many possible flaws in an individual’s ideas about what will make her happy, her interest in her own happiness and her knowledge of herself give her judgment the best chance of being right on the whole. External compulsion is unlikely to succeed in contributing to people’s happiness; it is more likely to do the reverse.¹⁰

2.4 SELF-REGARDING DUTIES AS FRAUDULENT

The last objection I will introduce here is that duties to oneself are not real moral duties at all. Again, this objection is based on the assumption that alleged self-regarding duties must directly pertain to promoting the agent’s well-being or happiness. Bernard Williams states this concern compellingly. Williams agrees with Singer about what so-called duties to oneself are. Williams calls self-regarding duties “fraudulent items” largely because he thinks that they are merely a way to cloak one’s pursuit of happiness under the mantle of duty, or as Williams himse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations: References to Kant’s Works
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Kant’s Taxonomy of Duties
• Chapter Three: Rational Nature as an End in Itself
• Chapter Four: Duties to Oneself
• Chapter Five: Duties to Oneself and Duties to Others
• Chapter Six: Virtue, Character, and Self-Regard
• Chapter Seven: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index