How to Release Oneself from an Obligation: Good News for Duties to Oneself

Oakley, Tim

doi:10.1080/00048402.2016.1149735

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The literature discusses a number of counterarguments (or instance, Hills [2003], Rosati [2011], Cholbi [2015], Oakley [2017], Muñoz [2020]). For example, arguably neither (P 1 ) nor (P 2 ) is universal in scope.…”

Section: The Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alison Hills [2003] invokes the intuition that some rights are inalienable and argues, contra (P 2 ), that duties correlative to inalienable rights are non-releasable, whether they are owed to others or to oneself. Tim Oakley [2017] argues, contra (P 1 ), that no matter who the object of a duty is, any agent qua subject of that duty could release herself from it. Given our pro tanto moral right to self-direction, by settling on a course of action, we can change what we ought on balance to do, thereby releasing ourselves from what would otherwise have been our all-things-considered duty.…”

Section: The Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

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Duties to Oneself and Their Alleged Incoherence

Kanygina

2021

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

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Duties to oneself are allegedly incoherent: if we had duties to ourselves, we would be able to opt out of them. I argue that there is a constraint on one's ability to release oneself from duties to oneself. The release must be autonomous in order to be normatively transformative. First, I show that the view that combines the division of the self with the second-personal characterization of morality is problematic. Second, I advance a fundamental solution to the problem of the incoherence of duties to oneself, one that does not rely on any division of the self, temporal or otherwise. I build upon the prevalent idea that, in releasing others from duties, we exercise the power of consent. The transformative force of consent partly derives from our autonomy. Invoking a plausible characterization of autonomy, I argue that release from duties requires the right kind of mental state.

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Section: The Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

Duties to Oneself and Their Alleged Incoherence

Kanygina

2021

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

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The Paradox of Duties to Oneself

Muñoz

2020

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

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On the Supposed Incoherence of Obligations to Oneself

Schaab

2020

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

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An influential argument against the possibility of obligations to oneself states that the very notion of such obligations is incoherent: If there were such obligations, we could release ourselves from them; yet, releasing oneself from an obligation is impossible. I challenge this argument by arguing against the premise that it is impossible to release oneself from an obligation. I point out that this premise assumes that if it were possible to release oneself from an obligation, it would be impossible to violate that obligation. I point out that there are two interpretations of this assumption, one conceptual and one psychological. I argue that, on both interpretations, the assumption is false-at least according to independently plausible accounts of obligations to oneself and of what it means to waive an obligation. My arguments paint a picture of obligations to oneself that not only challenges the Incoherence Argument, but also illuminates these obligations' relationship to other parts of the moral domain.

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How to Release Oneself from an Obligation: Good News for Duties to Oneself

Cited by 5 publications

References 12 publications

Duties to Oneself and Their Alleged Incoherence

Duties to Oneself and Their Alleged Incoherence

The Paradox of Duties to Oneself

On the Supposed Incoherence of Obligations to Oneself

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