MT22 Internal Research WiP Seminar: Dr Muriel Leuenberger
23 November 14:30 to 15:30
Suite 1, Littlegate House
Dr Muriel Leuenberger (Oxford Uehiro Centre)
Duties to the unified self
Abstract: An influential argument against the possibility of duties to oneself states that they are incoherent. If there were such duties, we could release ourselves from them; but releasing oneself from a duty is impossible. Recent years have seen a growing interest in duties to oneself and various attempts at defending them against this argument. A common strategy to defend duties to self entails that the self is fractured. One fraction of the self owes a duty to another. I argue that understanding duties to self as being owed to a fraction of the self leads to a range of problems. Instead, I suggest that duties to oneself are owed by a local self (or to be more precise, a perspective) to an extended, unified self/perspective. This view of duties to oneself can account for common candidates of duties to oneself, answer the waivability objection, and avoid the problems caused by views based on a fractured self.
In-person Venue: Suite 1 Seminar Area, Littlegate House, 16-17 St Ebbe’s Street, Oxford OX1 1PT (buzzer 1)
