do i have a duty to help others essay

Accessibility Options:
Skip to Content
Skip to Search
Skip to footer
Office of Disability Services
Request Assistance
305-284-2374
High Contrast
School of Architecture
College of Arts and Sciences
Miami Herbert Business School
School of Communication
School of Education and Human Development
College of Engineering
School of Law
Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science
Miller School of Medicine
Frost School of Music
School of Nursing and Health Studies
The Graduate School
Division of Continuing and International Education
People Search
Class Search
IT Help and Support
Privacy Statement
Student Life

University of Miami

Division of University Communications
Office of Media Relations
Miller School of Medicine Communications
Hurricane Sports
UM Media Experts
Emergency Preparedness

Explore Topics

Latest Headlines
Arts and Humanities
People and Community
All Topics A to Z

Do we have a moral obligation to help others?

By Barbara Gutierrez [email protected] 04-29-2020

The parable of the Good Samaritan can be helpful in this age of the coronavirus and its painful aftermath.

The Bible tells the story of a man who was robbed, beaten, and left for dead on the road. Two passersby ignore his plight while a Samaritan who sees him, helps him and takes him to safety.

At a time when about 60,000 people have died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, millions are unemployed, and many others are in need of basic staples such as food, there is a great deal of need.

“There are a lot of people struggling now. And moving forward, things are going to be difficult for a great many,” said Richard Chappell, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences.

Images of people carrying out good deeds abound on the internet and on television. But there are also troubling images of carefree people gathering at beaches and other public areas without masks and ignoring the physical distancing measures which health officials have said will help keep the virus at bay.

All this begs the question: Do we have a moral responsibility to help others? Do we all have to become Good Samaritans?

“I think most of us who work in ethics believe there is a moral responsibility to others,” said Michael Slote, UST Professor of Ethics in the Department of Philosophy. “It is really also common to the world’s religions and even to the world’s cultures.”

The Hebrew Bible mentions the ideal of helping “widows and orphans and people who are disadvantaged,” pointed out Dexter Callender, associate professor of religious studies.

“The ideal society in the Torah (the first books of the Hebrew Bible) and Deuteronomy is organized around taking care of other people,” he added.

“You get this idea in ancient Judaism and Christianity that you have to love your neighbor; you have to take care of your neighbor,” said Slote. “You have to be responsible to make sure that your neighbor does not suffer too much.”

The teachings of the Torah prompted Jesus to preach that we should “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Many religious scholars have asked: Who is our neighbor? Are we obliged to help only those close to us, our families, friends, colleagues?

“According to Jesus, our neighbor is anyone we are responsible for,” explained Slote. “It is all of humanity.”

Callender agreed, noting that even in the ancient Hebrew Bible there is a belief that one should help “resident aliens or people who come from other cultures and places, who may not be able to support themselves in the same way as others.”

The Judaic teachings also stress the need to be empathetic of other people and their plight.

“They are constantly told to remember that they were slaves in Egypt,” said Callender. “All the commandments are premised on the memory of being oppressed.”

According to Chappell, besides the religious, “here is a moral principle that states that if you are in a position to prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything comparably significant, then you should do it.”

This rule can also extend to helping others financially, if one has the means to do so, Chappell added.

Peter Singer, well-known Australian philosopher and professor of bioethics, has made a reputation by teaching the effective ways of altruism. He believes that societies and individuals can do much more to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty.

But another biblical parable in the Book of Genesis warns us of why it may be imperative to help our fellow humans.

When Cain kills his brother Abel, God asks him, “Where is Abel your brother?”

Cain answers “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”

God curses Cain to a life as a fugitive and a wanderer for his crime.

“The narrative teaches us that there are unintended consequences to our selfish actions,” said Callender. “This suggests that it is in our own best interest to be aware of the best interest of others.”

Coral Gables , FL 33124
305-284-2211 305-284-2211
UM News and Events
Alumni & Friends
University Hotline

Tools and Resources

Academic Calendar
Parking & Transportation
social-facebook
social-twitter
social-youtube
social-instagram

Individuals with disabilities who experience any technology-based barriers accessing the University’s websites or services can visit the Office of Workplace Equity and Inclusion .

Essay Papers Writing Online

The impact of helping others – a deep dive into the benefits of providing support to those in need.

Compassion is a virtue that ignites the flames of kindness and empathy in our hearts. It is an innate human quality that has the power to bring light into the lives of those in need. When we extend a helping hand to others, we not only uplift their spirits but also nourish our own souls. The act of kindness and compassion resonates in the depths of our being, reminding us of the interconnectedness and shared humanity we all possess.

In a world that can sometimes be filled with hardships and struggles, the power of compassion shines like a beacon of hope. It is through offering a listening ear, a comforting embrace, or a simple gesture of kindness that we can make a profound impact on someone else’s life. The ripple effect of compassion is endless, as the seeds of love and understanding we sow in others’ hearts continue to grow and flourish, spreading positivity and light wherever they go.

The Significance of Compassionate Acts

Compassionate acts have a profound impact on both the giver and the receiver. When we extend a helping hand to others in need, we not only alleviate their suffering but also experience a sense of fulfillment and purpose. Compassion fosters a sense of connection and empathy, strengthening our bonds with others and creating a more caring and supportive community.

Moreover, compassionate acts have a ripple effect, inspiring others to pay it forward and perpetuate kindness. One small act of compassion can set off a chain reaction of positive deeds, influencing the world in ways we may never fully realize. By showing compassion to others, we contribute to a more compassionate and understanding society, one that values empathy and kindness above all else.

Understanding the Impact

Helping others can have a profound impact not only on those receiving assistance but also on the individuals providing help. When we lend a hand to someone in need, we are not just offering material support; we are also showing compassion and empathy . This act of kindness can strengthen bonds between individuals and foster a sense of community .

Furthermore, helping others can boost our own well-being . Studies have shown that acts of kindness and generosity can reduce stress , improve mood , and enhance overall happiness . By giving back , we not only make a positive impact on the lives of others but also nourish our own souls .

Benefits of Helping Others

There are numerous benefits to helping others, both for the recipient and for the giver. Here are some of the key advantages:

Increased feelings of happiness and fulfilment
Improved mental health and well-being
Building stronger connections and relationships with others
Reduced stress levels and improved self-esteem
Promoting a sense of purpose and meaning in life
Contributing to a more compassionate and caring society

By helping others, we not only make a positive impact on the world around us but also experience personal growth and benefits that can enhance our overall happiness and well-being.

Empathy and Connection

Empathy plays a crucial role in our ability to connect with others and understand their experiences. When we practice empathy, we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and try to see the world from their perspective. This act of compassion allows us to build a connection based on understanding and mutual respect.

By cultivating empathy, we can bridge the gap between different individuals and communities, fostering a sense of unity and solidarity. Empathy helps us recognize the humanity in others, regardless of their background or circumstances, and promotes a culture of kindness and inclusivity.

Through empathy, we not only show compassion towards those in need but also create a supportive environment where everyone feels valued and understood. It is through empathy that we can truly make a difference in the lives of others and build a more compassionate society.

Spreading Positivity Through Kindness

One of the most powerful ways to help others is by spreading positivity through acts of kindness. Kindness has the remarkable ability to brighten someone’s day, lift their spirits, and create a ripple effect of happiness in the world.

Simple gestures like giving a compliment, lending a helping hand, or sharing a smile can make a significant impact on someone’s life. These acts of kindness not only benefit the recipient but also bring a sense of fulfillment and joy to the giver.

When we choose to spread positivity through kindness, we contribute to building a more compassionate and caring society. By showing empathy and understanding towards others, we create a supportive environment where people feel valued and respected.

Kindness is contagious and has the power to inspire others to pay it forward, creating a chain reaction of goodwill and compassion. By incorporating acts of kindness into our daily lives, we can make a positive difference and help create a better world for all.

Creating a Ripple Effect

When we extend a helping hand to others, we set off a chain reaction that can have a profound impact on the world around us. Just like a stone thrown into a calm pond creates ripples that spread outward, our acts of compassion can touch the lives of many, inspiring them to do the same.

By showing kindness and empathy, we not only make a difference in the lives of those we help but also create a ripple effect that can lead to positive change in our communities and beyond. A small gesture of kindness can ignite a spark of hope in someone’s heart, motivating them to pay it forward and spread compassion to others.

Each act of generosity and care has the power to create a ripple effect that can ripple outwards, reaching far beyond our immediate circles. As more and more people join in this chain of kindness, the impact multiplies, creating a wave of positivity that can transform the world one small act of kindness at a time.

Building a Stronger Community

One of the key benefits of helping others is the positive impact it can have on building a stronger community. When individuals come together to support one another, whether it’s through acts of kindness, volunteering, or simply being there for someone in need, it fosters a sense of unity and connection. This sense of community helps to create a supportive and caring environment where people feel valued and respected.

By helping others, we also set an example for those around us, inspiring others to also lend a hand and contribute to the well-being of the community. This ripple effect can lead to a chain reaction of kindness and generosity that can ultimately make the community a better place for everyone.

Furthermore, when people feel supported and cared for by their community, they are more likely to be happier and healthier, both mentally and physically. This sense of belonging and connection can help to reduce feelings of isolation and loneliness, and can improve overall well-being.

In conclusion, building a stronger community through helping others is essential for creating a more positive and caring society. By coming together and supporting one another, we can create a community that is resilient, compassionate, and unified.

How to master the art of writing expository essays and captivate your audience, convenient and reliable source to purchase college essays online, step-by-step guide to crafting a powerful literary analysis essay, tips and techniques for crafting compelling narrative essays.

Intellectual Roundtable

Asking — and answering — life's interesting questions

What Are Our Responsibilities To Others?

In pre-flight instructions, you are always advised, in the case of emergency, to take care of yourself before assisting others. This makes sense, because you won’t be able to help another if you yourself are in jeopardy.

This reasoning could be extended, however, to never actually helping anyone other than yourself. That doesn’t seem right. Helping others can end up helping you — a rising tide lifts all boats, as the saying goes.

Related: Listen to an episode of the Intellectual Roundtable Podcast, where Lee and Michael discuss this question: ‘What are our responsibilities to others?’ We also discuss another question as well, ‘Are we too busy?’

A balance between yourself and others needs to be found. Hence the question: What are our responsibilities to others?

Related questions: What is the best way to help others? What is the best way to help yourself?

Spread the word about Intellectual Roundtable:

3 thoughts on “what are our responsibilities to others”.

In essence, is their a social contract or a moral contract that we are bound to by a religion or a society? Some religious views on the subject are very dogmatic one way or another on the subject. The legal state weighs in as well as with constitutions, statutes, and regulations. Many institutions we join (work places, community organizations, etc.) also define these obligations the way they see them. However, this question seems to be coming from a more personal and philosophical place.

I don’t want to go too far down the path of formal ethical theory with my response. While it’s interesting to debate the difference between broad ethical standards — like virtue ethics (embodying virtues of mind and character), utilitarianism (the best outcome for the most people), duty of care, pragmatism, etc. — I’m really much more interested in how the question FEELS to people. In that regard, George Lakoff in Moral Politics provides some great insight for me. He argues that we think in metaphors, develop moral judgments using metaphors, and the principle metaphor we apply is “the family,” which we project onto everything including society as a whole.

In the modern American context, Lakoff sees two competing family metaphors: Strict Father, and Nurturant Parent. These are two different competing moral views that see our responsibilities to others very differently. The Strict Father view sees a world based on competition in which the ultimate goal is self-sufficiency and the greatest capacity you can instill in others is the self-control necessary to achieve self-sufficiency that you reinforce in them through strict punishment. The Nurturant Parent view on the other hand sees the world as neither inherently hostile or friendly, but rather what we collectively make it. Therefore, the greatest capacities you can instill in others are empathy and compassion in order to be able to exercise self care and care for others in order to most fully develop.

When it comes to my personal view on our responsibilities to others, it certainly falls in line with the Nurturant Parent view. But, also the pragmatic ethics tradition, since my views were really crystalized as a young adult by some traditional community organizing concepts. In organizing, you focus on finding that middle group between selfishness (denying others) and selflessness (denying yourself) that represents enlightened self interest. You pursue your individual interests while taking the interests of others into account, and your also recognize that their are collective interests to pursue as a group. From both perspectives, Nurturant Parent and pragmatic ethics, the best way to help others is to do things with them, rather than either competing with them or doing it for them.

Practically and philosophically, I believe that there is enough bounty in the world for us all to thrive. Societally, our responsibilities to others comes in constructing systems that foster proper individual and community growth. Materially, yes. But also it’s in coming to realize the conditions that help individuals reach their full potential and build communities that foster bonds to each other so we care enough to contribute to the common good.

On the other hand, and practically, our systems (e.g. financial, municipal ordinances, agricultural, treaties, etc.) do not reinforce the building of a common good. If budgets — individual, communal, nationally, and between nations — reflect values, we value wealth accumulation and stability. Bounty for an elite (to whom some say have proven and deserve their worth) as well as national and international agreements. The latter two reflect budgets and systems that use might to ascribe right.

I could go on for a long time describing the paragraph above, but I’ll save that for questions if people want to ask specific questions. Let me just restate succinctly that we need a more perfect union … one that binds us together in a way embraces potential versus stability.

Reading history from the days of the cave men to the present makes me think that it is the human destiny to become more and more dependent on each other. This dependency on the group leads to a responsibility to the group. That seems to be the essence of civilization. Interdependency generally adds to the prosperity of a culture, but it does not automatically lead to the equality as one might wish. But, those groups that unite seems to become stronger as they grow in number. Individual tribes are no match for a nation state; they don’t have the resources. Yet, the strength and cunning of the individual is still necessary and adds to the strength, ingenuity and prosperity of the group.

Have you a moral duty to care for others?

Kant’s lesson for nursing home operators: people shouldn’t be treated simply as a means to an end.

Immanuel Kant: ‘The duty of care includes care of oneself’

The controversy surrounding the Tuam mother-and-child home has highlighted how societal values have changed in Ireland. We have a radically different concept today of what it means to treat people with dignity and respect.

The controversy also challenges us to ask questions today about the role of carers. Is caring primarily the responsibility of the state, families or individuals?

Manus Charleton, author of Ethics for Social Care in Ireland: Philosophy and Practice (Gill and Macmillan), and a lecturer in ethics and social policy at Sligo Institute of Technology, has reflected deeply on this question, drawing on philosophical thought through the ages. He provides today's very Kantian idea: People shouldn't be treated simply as a means to an end.

Is caring for people a moral option or a duty?

Manus Charleton: “There are different views. For Hobbes, our nature is to seek power to satisfy our own desires. This is facilitated through a social contract between the people and government in which caring is left as a choice. We should be fair and kind to others, but only because it helps make for a society suited to pursuing our own interests.

"Kant saw caring as a duty that arises from universal moral laws. We could not rationally will a universal law that no care be provided to others because it entails that no care should have to be given to us. He's not saying, 'I'll help you, provided you help me.' He argues we would be in breach of our nature as rational human beings if we claim we have no duty of care.

“He calls it an ‘imperfect’ duty. This is because neither we (nor the State) can possibly care for everyone in all the ways needed. So we decide the amount and kind of care we give. But we become good people by how well we live up to the duty.

“In recent decades some moral philosophers have emphasised caring as a natural human emotion and disposition. They have pointed out that we need and benefit from care throughout our lives, from parents, family, friends and the State. On this view we should nourish and practise caring in all aspects of our lives – personal, social and work-related – to reduce misery and hardship and realise our humanity.”

How does a nursing-home manager avoid treating clients as a means rather than an end?

“The manager has to respect their autonomy. This is what Kant meant when he gave as a moral law that we should always treat people never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end.

“Kant recognised we naturally treat people as a means to some need or desire of our own. The manager treats residents as a means for employment. However, the manager is wrong to treat residents simply for this means or some other.

“At the same time the manager has to regard each person as their own end, which is as a unique individual with a right to be consulted and involved in all aspects of their care.”

You have looked at how such principles might transfer to other sectors, such as financial services. So what would Aristotle make of the Irish banking crisis?

“He would see the crisis in the banks as an example of what can happen when people ignore the requirement to manage their desires for both their own good and the good of society, which are interdependent. We are naturally social creatures from the existence of family, friends and society.

“Most desires, too, are natural and good. But if we give in to them too much it can turn out to our detriment, for example, if we take risks while ignoring the need to act with prudence and consideration for the wellbeing of others. He explains how to develop character qualities by making a rational choice to act according to the midpoint between excess and deficiency of desires and feelings. For example, acting with courage is midway between the excess of recklessness and the deficiency of timidity.

“This is the idea of the golden mean. It’s the way to act with power or excellence, which he understood as virtue. Also, he was aware from Greek drama how luck or fate can up-end us when we take unjustifiable pride in our apparent success and become blind to danger signals and heedless of warnings.”

Would it be ethical to outsource caring in the future to robots?

“Caring shouldn’t be depersonalised. It’s a natural human impulse and interaction that has to be nuanced to an individual’s needs and personality. And it includes being sensitive and responsive to often complex feelings in ways which can’t be predetermined.”

Does one have a responsibility to care for oneself?

“Yes. For Kant the duty of care includes care of oneself. Respect for oneself is also a duty along with respect for others. And for Aristotle selfcare is bound up with a natural desire to realise our own potential.”

Is ‘flourishing’ only a young person’s game? What does it mean to flourish in one’s old age?

“I think Aristotle was right in identifying the core of flourishing with making our own rational decisions about how to respond to our feelings and desires towards various situations that arise for us every day. This is how we form our character.

“As for the art of living, he recognised how hard an art form it can be, especially when we have to cope with adversity. But in old age we can still practise the art. It’s important for our self-respect, self-esteem and for how we would like others to see us. And we can hope to be better at it if we’ve learnt from experience.”

Question: Is fear of Friday the 13th a harmless tradition?

David Hume replies: "Superstition is favourable to priestly power . . . The stronger mixture there is of superstition, the higher is the authority of the priesthood."

[email protected]

Twitter @JoeHumphreys42

IN THIS SECTION

The black keys in dublin: gritty show gives people what they wanted, especially towards the triumphant finish, pains and gains: paschal donohoe on three books about economic growth, bryan dobson: ‘retirement could be a terrible shock to the system – or not, who knows’, beating the drum for preserving the language and culture of canada’s indigenous nations, passion, booze, madness and comradeship: bruce springsteen’s special relationship with ireland, man jailed for ‘predatory’ attempted rape of woman in toilets in dublin city bar, brothers awarded €95,000 each over mistaken arrest for grafton street handbag theft, ‘we don’t speak, we don’t eat, we don’t do anything together’: inside an irish divorce court, in ireland today, only rich people can afford to live in houses originally built for poor labourers, uk accepted return of 201 migrants from ireland under current deal but none was sent, latest stories, at least nine killed in strike on displacement camp in eastern dr congo, we shouldn’t import broken british rhetoric about migration, a tech entrepreneur chases immortality: bryan johnson is 46. soon, he plans to turn 18, i spent my maternity leave in a chemo chair. then i got a letter telling me to go back to work, maybe now the irish government will accept that the uk and unionists had a point about open borders.

Terms & Conditions
Privacy Policy
Cookie Information
Cookie Settings
Community Standards

Individuals have a moral obligation to assist people in need

Do-Gooders, philanthropists, humanitarian people, the ones who care; gotta love ’em. But is it always good to care? I’d like to relay a story my principal related to the school long ago: Once upon a time there was a caterpillar stuck in its cocoon and a goodly well-meaning stranger grabbed his scissors and clipped the cocoon for it. Now if the caterpillar had struggled a little longer he would come out unscathed but thanks to the goodly stranger a one-winged butterfly clumsily jumped out forever crippled.

All the Yes points:

But individuals are people in need, consequentialism – we must reduce overall suffering, helping people reduces suffering in the world, virtue ethics – we become better people, all the no points:, it’s none of your business, only help those who ask for it and that too at your discretion, moral obligation, virtue ethics, yes because….

So you’re essentially saying that people should help themselves and others? In modern philosophy the stress on ‘help’ and ‘cooperation’ is very pronounced. If the goal is to optimize well-being then this should be the logical course of action. If you want the world to be a livable, better and wonderful place. Do unto others …

No because…

Hedonism, humanism and hatred are all essential parts of a healthy human psyche. There will be times that you won’t get put of bed because you don’t want to. There will be times when you will feel the urge to kill don’t act on it, there will be times that your heart will be broken and you will break other people’s hearts. There is no way around creating needs, denying needs and so on, as such you are not obligated to doing anything. You don’t owe the world or the children or humanity anything. But since we all also have the desire to help, give and be liked (as Hobbes would put it, even selfless acts are selfish) we should but there still should not be an obligation, as such. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwNFiffOKic]]

Consequentialism says that we must minimize suffering and provide the most help to the greatest number of people. Helping those in need would reduce such suffering. Moreover, $20 to an affluent person is much less valuable than $20 for an impoverished person. Thus if the affluent person donates that $20 it reduces more suffering than if they use it themselves.

I understand we may minimize suffering but we should not be morally obliged to do so. For, moral obligation does not exist. It is just the feeling of guilt that pushes us to donate, or give charity.

Although it might seem a bit vacuous, virtue ethics states that when we act righteously we become more complete persons. Thus the most moral action for ourselves, would be to help others and, in doing so, become more virtuous persons.

According to Rawls, we are selfish. Therefore, we are doing things for our own benefit. We do not become a more virtous person but we obtain something. We also tend to do things for our own fulfillment. If you are doing something for yourself, you are not being virtuous.

Empathy is the ultimate virtue. Only when acting out of empathy do we understand other people, meaning that the only way we can understand others and our obligation to them is through empathy. When we do empathize with those in need, we understand their pain and need, and so we are obligated to help them.

That aruguement makes a separation between obligations and understanding. Essentially, if one understands another and their pain, a moral obligation is thus created. This means that it is not a moral obligation that we have to help peole, but a problem of understanding. Some could then create a meaning or create an understanding that compels them to assist another. The logic then is flawed because it leaves understanding up to the individual as well as what assistence they are to act upon to fix what they understand. If that is the case, the overal goal would then never be accomplished. It thus places the power to define all relavent terms into each and every individual. This is counter productive because this would cause more harm then good. The reason for not having a moral obligation to assist a person in need would be because one can never truly understand whether or not the need is ralavent or if the assistence is even fruitful. I then ask what makes up a moral obligation?

Sure, everybody’s in need but that is no excuse to bother a homeless person sleeping in a garbage can or pooping in the park It is horrible enough that this person has to sleep there or poop there, the indignity of his/her circumstances is only worsened with your pity or your food throwing or what you call help. Every human being has the right to be left alone and not be judged or interfered with.

Sometimes people refuse help when it is good for them. For example, not wanting to swallow bitter medicine despite being very very sick. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djQdI1t9_Ag]]

Suppose someone ‘needs’ to have sex and comes up to you and asks you to do it. It is not your moral obligation to help, okay. Kids today! Just because someone has asked you do something or if someone needs something, is not obligation to go ahead and help them. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q99JgYrgzco&feature=related]] If you want to help people and they want your help then by all means do so, but otherwise there’s no ‘obligation’ per se. Free will, exercise it. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q99JgYrgzco&feature=related]]

A way to assist the person in need of sex would then be to change what it is they need. You are not obligated to have sex with them, you are however obligated to assist them in not having to have sex in the first place. This essentialy means we perscribe ourselves to knowing the best way to help a need. The way to do this would be to abide by a legitamite government which operates under the notion orf morals. It is throught these morals that we obtain an understanding of justice. Justice is thus assisting those in need. The foundation for justice is morals. Anyone living under a legitamite government not only has a moral obligation to assist a person in need, but continuosly practice this. The citation of ‘Free will’ was only understood because of a moral foundation. To exercise that right would then obligate you to abide by the laws created by the government. By obeying those laws you assist others by creating a society that minimized pain and suffering as well as maximized understanding.

A moral obligation is an imperative. As good as philanthropy is and that it improves the world, it should not be required. Morally one’s task should be to do the right thing by improving oneself rather than others first.

If one advocates for the moral advancement of obeself, then they also understand that there is a moral reason behind it. By bettering oneself they assist others. It then brings truth to the notion that “Individuals have a moral obligation to assist a person in need.”

Although helping people in need is an honorable thing to do, when we tell people that they are “obligated” to help, those on the receiving end will develop a laziness or dependence upon others. Now said person is ALWAYS in need help and ALWAYS want more. This makes them a serious drain on society and a serious drain on my wallet. <—(yes… i’m a capitalist)

they are called “tax-write offs”. Not only is it cool its saves you, ….ahem….i mean me money. <—-(yes….i’m a capitalist)

Virtue ethics states that when we act righteously we become more complete persons. Thus the most moral action for ourselves, would be to help others and, in doing so, become more virtuous persons. this is actully a yes and not a no but anyway….

I guess this will be no then. Virtue ethics is a good point in this topic but lets also think about the true outcome of helping someone. You could endanger yourself in the process. If you see a person badly beaten, are you going to stop and help? I wouldn’t. Teach people to act righteously in other ways.

We would love to hear what you think – please leave a comment!

Hey dave. Nice article!

Why Do We Help Others? The Morality Preference Hypothesis

We often help others. In most cases we help friends, family members, or colleagues. However, in some situations, we also help people with whom we have no connection whatsoever, for example, when we donate our change to a homeless person along the street, or when we give part of our salary to a humanitarian organisation. Although it is not very common, there are also well documented cases of people putting their life at risk to save strangers, or even animals, like the man in California who jumped into a wildfire to save a rabbit .

This is quite strange, right? Helping random people, or even animals, does not bring us any obvious direct or indirect benefit and thus it seems to go against the classic academic assumption that helping behaviours evolved because they provided benefits to the helper. For example, if I help my friend today they will help me tomorrow. It is not surprising, then, that understanding helping behaviour towards strangers has become one of the greatest challenges in social science research.

There can be many reasons why people help each other.

How can we explain it? The starting point is to turn to laboratory experiments using simple economic problems that are meant to model the essence of helping behaviour using a unit of measurement that is as objective as possible; most often, money. As for the decision problem, the most used one is called the ‘Dictator Game’. Here, a person, the dictator, is given a certain amount of money and is asked how to split it with an anonymous stranger, the recipient, who is given nothing. The recipient does not make any choice and only receives what the dictator decides to give them. Clearly, a purely self-interested dictator would give nothing to the recipient, because giving has neither direct nor indirect positive consequences for the dictator. However, mirroring what we see in everyday life, empirical research has repeatedly shown that a significant proportion of dictators give part of their money to the stranger. Why so?

[the_ad id=”11275″]

To explain these results, behavioural scientists have typically turned to something called ‘ social preferences ‘. In the case of giving money in the dictator game, a useful way to explain this behaviour is ‘ inequity aversion ‘, which is a type of social preference. Inequity aversion assumes that people experience psychological disutility (discomfort) from economic inequalities. To avoid this disutility, thus, some people will turn out to donate part of their money. This might explain why a significant proportion of dictators appear to give money to anonymous recipients.

Is this the whole story? Do people care only about the economic consequences of their actions? Or are there people who care also about doing the right thing, independently of the economic consequences?

In a recent series of papers, my collaborators and I have shown that, indeed, people seemed to be motivated also, and, actually, mainly, by reasons beyond the economic consequences of their actions. Specifically, dictators seem to be donating to recipients not because they are motivated by minimising the inequity between themselves and the recipient, but because they believe that sharing their money is the morally right thing to do.

This point is illustrated in a paper co-written with Dave Rand at MIT that was published in January 2018 in the academic journal Judgment and Decision Making . In that paper, we introduced a ‘trade-off game’ , a decision problem that helps distinguish people with social preferences for minimising economic inequalities from people with moral preferences for doing the right thing, beyond its economic consequences. Comparing the average amount of dictator game giving among inequity averse participants with the average amount of giving among moral participants, we found that the latter ones donate significantly more than the former ones, providing clean evidence that giving is mainly driven by moral preferences for doing the right thing.

In a subsequent work conducted with Ben Tappin at Royal Holloway University of London , published in June 2018 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , we replicated this result and extended it by showing that preferences to do the right thing are equally strong as preferences to avoid doing the wrong thing when giving money in the dictator game.

Do people care only about the economic consequences of their actions?

Together, these studies provide robust evidence that helping behaviour in the laboratory is not driven by social preferences for minimising inequities per se, but is mainly driven by moral preferences for doing the right thing.

Of course, this finding raises a number of important questions that should be explored in further research.

For example, thus far we have focused on laboratory behaviour involving relatively small amounts of money. Exploring whether morality preferences extend to real behaviour and/or situations in which stakes are much higher (think about the Californian guy who jumped into the fire to save a rabbit), is an important direction for future work. In these cases, it is difficult to make predictions. On the one hand, one might think that larger stakes will make people more caring about the economic consequences of their actions; on the other hand, one might also think that there is a subclass of subjects for which moral preferences are relatively stake-independent (perhaps among deontologists, i.e., people for whom the rightness or the wrongness of an action does not depend on the consequences of that action, but only on whether that action instantiates or violates certain moral norms and duties?).

When we are helping others, some people make us happier.

Another important question concerns the path through which people construct moral judgements in a given context. What are the cues that make people conclude that one action, among all the available ones, is the morally right one? This is likely to be a multidimensional question. In a working paper, co-written with Andrea Vanzo , a linguist at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, we have observed that one dimension is certainly important – the language used to describe the available actions.

We have shown that simply changing one word in Dictator Game-like instructions can dramatically change people’s behaviour. For example, people are less likely to steal money from another participant than to take money from another participant, although ‘stealing’ and ‘taking’, in the given contexts, have the same economic consequences. Therefore, it seems that people use the language used to describe the available actions to deduce properties about the moral qualities of the corresponding actions.

In sum, this line of research provides evidence that helping behaviour in the laboratory has not much to do with minimising economic inequalities, but it is mainly driven by moral preferences for doing the right thing. Exploring the boundary conditions of this morality preference hypothesis and studying how people build moral judgements are fundamental directions for future research.

Why do online communities become hyper-toxic, it’s all in the smile: aston university-led research finds politicians can influence voters with facial expressions, study reveals higher injury and assault rates among nyc food delivery gig workers dependent on the work, unlock the world: 5 tips for communicating abroad when you’re lost in translation, i love the west. but sometimes i hate their hypocrisy, the uplifting power of communities, the psychology of fashion – how our choice of clothing reflects and shapes our identity, new report reveals 10 most dangerous uk cities for pedestrians, new bbc documentary sheds light on violence against women and police misconduct in the sarah everard case, effort-based self-interest motivation negatively impacts altruistic donation behaviour, moral heroes and underdogs win our hearts in fiction, finds new study, study reveals lower volunteering in diverse us states – trust key factor, the type of white normativity that activists convieniently ignore, how animal cruelty images on social media affect our mental well-being, observing how repeated social injustice can significantly impact mental well-being, digital media fuels jihadist radicalisation in australia, finds study, study shows social media’s influence on islamist militancy among bangladeshi youth, new book offers in-depth exploration of forensic psychology’s role in legal systems, new study reveals how depression influences political attitudes, a guide to using the insanity defence in a criminal trial, study finds shaky connection between moral foundations and moral attitudes, study shows vaccination alters body odour and facial attractiveness, resolve to be greener: seven easy, small steps freelancers and sole traders can take to be more sustainable in 2024, “they don’t like you because you’re black” – injecting racial poison into children’s minds.

Psychreg is a digital media company and not a clinical company. Our content does not constitute a medical or psychological consultation. See a certified medical or mental health professional for diagnosis.

PSYCHREG JOURNAL
MEET OUR WRITERS
MEET THE TEAM

Table of Contents
Random Entry
Chronological
Editorial Information
About the SEP
Editorial Board
How to Cite the SEP
Special Characters
Advanced Tools
Support the SEP
PDFs for SEP Friends
Make a Donation
SEPIA for Libraries
Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

Friends PDF Preview
Author and Citation Info
Back to Top

Obligations to Oneself

Moral philosophy is often said to be about what we owe to each other. Do we owe anything to ourselves?

Philosophers are torn. On the one hand, obligations to self are a mainstay of moral theories – most famously Kant’s – as well as ordinary thinking. It is not just academic Kantians who believe in making something of our lives and standing up for ourselves. And yet, the idea of literally owing things to oneself can sound paradoxical. When I owe you $5, I am bound to pay. When you owe me $5, I can waive the debt away. Now suppose I owe myself $5. Don’t I then have the power to waive my own obligation? But then how could it bind me? An obligation I can escape at will is like a prison with an open gate, a speed limit with no penalty. Such an obligation seems powerless, toothless, imperceptible – in other words, it seems like no obligation at all.

This paradox has cast a long shadow. In the 20 th century, obligations to oneself “largely disappeared from the radar of academic philosophers” (Cholbi 2015, 852), as the traditional question of what we owe to ourselves gave way to doubts about whether such obligations are even coherent.

But in the new century, the topic has enjoyed a renaissance, with fresh theories cropping up for the first time in decades and applications arising across a range of fascinating issues: privacy and promises, self-respect and supererogation, tech-addiction and tattoos. Some have even wondered, echoing Kant, if the topic might lie at the very heart of ethics.

We begin with the question of what obligations to oneself are supposed to be (§1). From there we lay out the “paradox” and its history (§2), along with the three theories that have arisen in response (§§3–5). We conclude (§7) after a survey of applied issues (§6), focusing on topics of broad interest, but sprinkling in a few specifics – like Kant’s qualms about haircuts – for the sake of spice.

1. What is an obligation to oneself?

2. the paradox of self-release, 3. denying obligations to oneself, 4. unwaivable obligations to oneself, 5. waivable obligations to oneself, 6.1 suicide, 6.2 supererogation, 6.3 self-promises, 6.4 body modification and self-expression, 6.5 self-knowledge.

6.6 Self-respect

6.7 Privacy

7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

The traditional examples of obligations to oneself are a hodgepodge, but they basically come in two kinds: self-care and self-respect (Allen 2013, 854). Self-care is a matter of promoting our own interests – pursuing our dreams, minding our health, preserving our lives. Self-respect, meanwhile, is less about what is good for us, and more about what is proper or dignified; think of prohibitions on safe and profitable sex work, or taboos around painless suicide even in the shadow of an agonizing terminal disease. As these examples show, self-care and self-respect can be in tension. “Disrespecting” oneself might be the best way to escape a miserable death or a life in poverty.

The tension here is so deep that many philosophers claim to only believe in one of these two kinds of duty, while totally rejecting the other. At one point in his Lectures on Ethics [ LE ], Kant suggests that we only owe ourselves respect: “self-regarding duties…have nothing to do with well-being and our temporal happiness” ( LE 27:341). [ 1 ] Utilitarians, who think morality is all about well-being, are open at most to duties of self-care; they do not share the Kantians’ concerns about ending one’s life or selling access to one’s body when the result is greater well-being overall (see, e.g., Meiland 1963).

With such stark disagreement, it is natural to wonder if the debate here is really focused on a single concept of “obligations to oneself.” In fact, it is often not. The variety in the examples reflects a more basic variety in concepts. The most crucial distinction here – essential to everything ever written on duties to oneself – is between an obligation owed to oneself, and one merely regarding oneself.

Suppose you promise your friend to stop wearing tacky hats. As a result of the promise, you owe it to your friend to dress better; in this sense, the obligation is “to” your friend, not to you. But this is still an obligation regarding you, in the sense that it concerns what you do to yourself. You are the one whose headgear is at issue. (This sort of example is common in the literature; see, e.g., Mavrodes 1964, 165–66; Timmermann 2006, 506.)

It is an open question what an obligation to someone consists in, if it is something over and above mere regard (see Thompson 2004 on “bipolar normativity,” Darwall 2006 on “second-personal” address, and Schofield 2022 [Other Internet Resources]). “Interest theories” say that an obligation to you is somehow linked to what is good for you (see, e.g., Raz 1986, chap. 5). “Standing theories,” which are more popular in writings on obligations to oneself, say that obligations to you put you in control. For Gilbert (2018) and Darwall (2006, 18), the distinctive thing is that you have the standing to demand what is owed to you. For Schofield (2021, 52), the key is that you get “a rightful say.” For Steiner (2013), you have the power to waive the obligation via your powers of consent.

Suffice it to say, the exact essence of an obligation to oneself is still up for debate. By contrast, everyone knows what self-regarding obligations are, and everyone agrees that we might have them – duties to maintain one’s health so as to take care of one’s family; to wear a mask to avoid spreading contagion; and so on. Indeed, it is hard to imagine an obligation that isn’t somehow self-regarding.

It is far more controversial to say we have bona fide obligations to ourselves – that is, owed to ourselves, strictly speaking, just as you might owe it to your friend to keep your promise. The idea of literally owing something to oneself seems to imply that we have rights against ourselves, along with the power to release ourselves from duties (see §2, below). To avoid this paradox, many traditional “obligations to oneself” have been recast as, or replaced with, obligations merely regarding oneself. Aristotle argues that suicide is not an “injustice towards oneself,” but only towards the state that one is supposed to serve (1138a 4–1138b 11). Some argue that self-care is not owed to oneself, or even to others; it is obligatory only in the sense that we have to do it. (It is an “undirected” rather than a “directed” obligation.) And the duty to develop one’s talents might be seen as part of a duty to promote the good of others: think of a lifeguard swimming laps or a surgeon doing hand exercises.

Another way around the paradox is to say that obligations to oneself don’t imply any quixotic power of self-release. To make this view work, we need some way of interpreting “obligations to oneself” so that they aren’t quite like the legalistic obligations we get from promises and contracts. Some say “obligations” to oneself are in some sense non-legal; others say one can owe things “to” oneself only in an attenuated sense; and some even consider shifting the referent of “oneself” – perhaps we only owe things to our future selves, or one aspect of our psyche owes it to another.

Much as the Liar Paradox shaped modern theories of truth, the threat of paradox has profoundly shaped our theories of obligations to oneself. Let’s take a closer look at the paradox before tracing its influence on contemporary work.

What’s so weird about obligations to oneself?

One thing to note – not quite our topic, but important to clear up – is that many moral wrongs can be done only to other people. You cannot steal your own lunch money, deceive yourself with lying promises, or bop yourself on the head against your own will. Who could be duped by a promise they know to be false? (See Hill, Jr. 1991, 144.) How can one “steal” what one already owns? (See Haase 2014, 365.) How can one will things against one’s own will?

This familiar fact – that some wrongs can be done to others but not to ourselves – is called the asymmetry of possibilities (Muñoz and Baron-Schmitt 2022 [Other Internet Resources]). This asymmetry constrains the scope of self-wronging; some naughty interactions are impossible in the one-person case. But this does not rule out all possible obligations to oneself. There are still plenty of problematic things one can do to oneself: bodily harm, property damage, and so on. Could we wrong ourselves by doing such things, or is there something fishy about the very idea of an obligation to oneself?

Now the real paradox. The tension arises from the dual nature of obligations: they are supposed to be both binding and waivable. Your obligations “bind” you in the sense that you have to comply, other things equal, or else you wrong the person to whom you are obliged. But this person can, if they like, waive the obligation, releasing you from your duty. This duality is perfectly intelligible in the two-person case. If you owe your friend $5 for a fancy coffee, you are bound to pay – you cannot simply opt out, as you might opt out of a mailing list or a volunteer trip. And if your friend wants to unbind you, they can do so unmysteriously, simply by saying “My treat.”

What if you owe something to yourself? Then the “binding” seems to vanish. Since you can willy-nilly waive any obligation owed to you, you can willy-nilly waive any obligation to yourself. Any such obligation is therefore purely optional – which sounds incoherent, like an obligatory hobby or a mercenary passion project.

The modern version of the paradox is due to Marcus Singer (1959, 203), who frames it as an argument with three premises:

If A has a duty to B , then B has a right against A .
If B has a right against A , he [or she] can give it up and release A from the obligation.
No one can release himself [or herself] from an obligation.

Together, these ensure that one cannot have duties to oneself. (“Duties” are just “obligations” with fewer syllables.) It’s a punchy argument. Duties entail rights; rights entail powers of release; but one cannot release oneself from a duty. The conclusion, for Singer, is that one cannot have a duty to oneself; the very idea of such a duty is “self-contradictory” (1958, 203).

Singer’s spin on the paradox is clear and forceful. It also crucially involves the concept of a right, which is used to link duties to the power of release. But otherwise, the puzzle merely echoes several historical sources, which Singer does not cite or engage with (see Cholbi 2015). For example, here is Immanuel Kant.

If the I that imposes obligation is taken in the same sense as the I that is put under obligation , a duty to oneself is a self-contradictory concept. … [O]ne imposing obligation ( auctor obligationis ) could always release the one put under obligation ( subjectum obligationis ) from the obligation ( terminus obligationis ), so that (if both are one and the same subject) he would not be bound at all to a duty he lays upon himself. This involves a contradiction. ( Metaphysics of Morals [ MM ] 6:417) [ 2 ]

Notice the same emphasis on “self-contradiction.” And here is Thomas Hobbes, discussing legal rather than moral obligations:

The sovereign of a commonwealth, be it an assembly, or one man, is not subject to the civil laws. For having power to make, and repeal laws, he may, when he pleaseth, free himself from that subjection by repealing those laws that trouble him and making of new; and consequently he was free before. For he is free, that can be free when he will; nor is it possible for any person to be bound to himself, because he that can bind can release; and therefore, he that is bound to himself only is not bound. (1651 [1994, 174])

“He is free, that can be free when he will” is just another way of saying that one cannot release oneself from a genuine obligation. When self-release is an option, one is never really bound. [ 3 ]

What’s the solution?

We have three options. The first is to follow the argument where it leads – namely, to Singer’s nihilism, on which there is no such thing as a duty to self. The next option, which is the most popular among ethicists, is to defend unwaivable duties to oneself. Finally, some argue that self-release is not as incoherent as it sounds, and that we really do have waivable duties to, and maybe even rights against, ourselves.

The choice between these three options is a crossroads in moral philosophy; in effect, we are choosing the place of the self within moral theory. Singer says there is no place for the self in morality. The Kantians – the chief defenders of unwaivable duties to self – are more likely to place the self at the privileged center. And those who believe in self-release see the self as just one moral person among others, denying or downplay the specialness of one’s relation to oneself.

On what grounds have philosophers chosen one road over the others? Where have their choices led them?

Let’s start with Singer’s view, which is that, as shown by the paradox, there can be no obligations to oneself. There may be self-regarding obligations owed to other people; there may be decisive reasons to be prudent. But no one ever literally owes anything to oneself, morally speaking. On the extreme version of this view, no one even has a moral reason to promote their own interests as such (see, e.g., Finlay 2007).

Singer gets points for dispensing with the paradox. He doesn’t posit duties to self, and he has a principled reason for not doing so: given the possibility of self-release, a duty to oneself would not be binding – which means it would lack the core property of any duty that deserves the name.

The challenge for Singer’s view is that it is revisionary, obliterating half of the classic distinction between duties to self and duties to others – a distinction that “seems well embedded both in traditional moral philosophy and in ordinary moral thinking” (Singer 1958, 202).

Perhaps it is all right for Singer to dispute traditional wisdom. It would not be the first time a tradition got something wrong. Besides, as we have noted, there is an equally distinguished tradition of skepticism about obligations to oneself. Even Kant, the chief defender of duties to self, has wary moments (see §2, 4). Deference to the past isn’t decisive here.

What about ordinary thought? If duties to self are really “embedded” in common sense, that is certainly some reason to reject Singer’s argument, or at least to look for ways out.

Singer himself suggests that we should not take our ordinary moral discourse too seriously. When we talk of duties to oneself, our language “must be metaphorical” (1958, 203). He explains:

To say that someone has a duty to (or owes it to) himself to do something is an emphatic way of asserting that he has a right to do it – that there are no moral considerations against it – and that it would be foolish or imprudent for him not to. (1958, 203)

Similarly, Singer thinks, when you “promise yourself” to do something, you must really be expressing your resolve to do it (see also Haase 2014, 364; Hills 2003, 131–33).

There are three questions we might ask about Singer’s interpretation of ordinary talk. First, Anita Allen questions why we shouldn’t take people literally in these contexts:

Figures of speech abound in language. But in the case of statements about duties to oneself, why suppose we do not mean exactly what we say? A moral theory should explain rather than discount inconvenient moral discourse (2013, 859)

Second, and related, we could ask if Singer’s position does justice to the thoughts behind the talk. Consider a few basic questions: is it morally all right to risk dire injuries to oneself for a cheap thrill? To debase oneself for a few bucks? To accept humiliation from peers for the sake of fitting in? One might well say no , even if these actions are certain to harm nobody but oneself. This is more than a linguistic habit that philosophers should be able to explain. These are considerable – though still contestable – moral intuitions, and the appeal to metaphors may not be enough to overturn them.

Finally, Singer’s view seems to suggest that we should be happy to talk, at least metaphorically, of rights against oneself – which, in fact, we are not. For Singer, “promises to oneself” are just statements of resolve, and “duties to oneself” are exaggerated ‘oughts’. Presumably, “rights against oneself” would be understood metaphorically, as well. And yet, no one is willing to talk of rights against oneself. Why? The answer cannot just be that these rights are “surely nonsense” (Singer 1958, 202). For Singer, duties to oneself by definition entail rights against oneself, so the duties should be at least as nonsensical. This is a fact about ordinary talk that Singer seems unable to account for.

Stepping back from Singer for a moment, there does seem to be something distinctive about the realm of rights, as opposed to other parts of morality. Rights are waived by consent and created by contracts. Rights imply authority. If you rightfully own a bicycle, then when it comes to who gets to ride it, you are the boss. (This is especially clear on “standing theories.” See §1 above.)

We now turn to the most popular response to the paradox, which is to rescue obligations to oneself by airlifting them out of the realm of rights. We can owe things to ourselves precisely because owing does not imply rights or the authority to waive. Even if self-release is impossible, there could still be unwaivable obligations to oneself.

The most popular response to the paradox is to insist that duties to oneself exist while denying that they imply waivable rights against oneself. This means rejecting either the first or second premise of Singer’s argument:

Either duties don’t entail rights, or rights don’t always grant the power of release.

One of Singer’s first critics, Daniel Kading (1959), defends rights without release. Kading says we only have rights against people with whom we have struck some kind of agreement – like a promise or contract – and sometimes, these people aren’t around to release us. They might, for example, be dead. There is no hope of release in such a scenario, and yet the right remains. But even if this correct, it won’t do anything to establish duties to oneself (as Kading seems to admit). There is something fishy about the idea of “agreements” with oneself, and, as Muñoz (2020, 694) points out, the deathbed promise has no one-person analogue. (See Singer 1963, 133–35, for further objections.)

Kading next tries a different maneuver, which has become a classic. He distinguishes two kinds of “obligations-to.” One typically springs from promises and contracts (the “agreement-sense”), and the other has to do with affecting people’s interests (the “benefits-sense”). Kading agrees with Singer that we can’t have obligations to ourselves in the first way, but insists that we can in the second. We are “morally obligated” to “maximize goodness” even when that just means making ourselves happy (Kading 1959, 156).

This same move shows up all over, particularly in the work of Kantian ethicists, who draw not on Kading but on Kant’s distinction between “juridical” and “non-juridical” duties (see MM 6:383, LE 29:117, 632). Juridical duties are external , concerning acts rather than motives, and enforceable by coercion and demands. For example, if you threaten not to pay me the money you contractually owe me, I can demand that you fork over the cash, and I can sue you if you don’t. But I can’t demand that you pay me out of the love of your heart. I can demand only the external act – the forking-over. A non-juridical duty, by contrast, requires the right mindset as well as the right action. Non-juridical duty is, basically, a matter of caring about important things for the right reasons – for example, loving and respecting your neighbors because they matter. Now the key point. For Kant, only juridical duties involve powers of release. If I offer to void the contract, you can get out of your duty to pay me. But there is no way to get release from your duty to love your neighbors because they matter – it is not as if your neighbors can stop mattering at will! (See MM 6:219.)

So here is the Kantian move. We say Singer is right about juridical duties, which really do come with rights and powers of release. There is no such thing as a juridical duty to oneself. But we insist there can still be non-juridical duties to oneself, since these do not imply rights and powers of release.

This move is extremely popular, though not everyone uses the term “juridical.” Wick (1960, 1961) and Knight (1961) distinguish legal from non-legal duties (see also Mothersill’s 1960 reply to Wick, which emphasizes that Wick doesn’t defend “duties” to self in the ordinary sense). Eisenberg (1968) discusses “social contractual” duties. Paton (1990, 225–26) defends “non-contractual” duties to oneself. Hills (2005) rejects the “‘juridical’ model” of duties and defends an unwaivable, non-juridical duty to promote one’s own well-being. Kahn, in 2018, argues that Kant himself should have endorsed a duty to promote one’s own happiness, despite his arguments to the contrary. For a bit more discussion on what Kant thinks we owe to ourselves, see the supplementary document:

Kant on What We Owe to Ourselves

The result is a certain humanistic, rather than legalistic, picture of duties to oneself: they do not have to do with rights and agreements, but instead with caring and valuing; they are not under voluntary control, but instead spring from unchangeable features of our personality, like our capacity to make free choices (in Kant’s case) or our susceptibility to pain (in Hills’ and Kahn’s) – basic things about our psychology that make us human. We can waive our rights at will and go on with our day; we cannot so easily take a break from our humanity.

On this view, there is something called a “duty to oneself” that slips through the jaws of Paradox – definitely a victory. But some object that the victory is hollow: the Kantians have carved out a space for “non-juridical” duties to oneself while totally surrendering to Singer when it comes to the juridical. This objection may have bite if “duties,” as ordinarily conceived, are juridical at heart. It is worth asking: what kind of “duty” doesn’t come with any rights, waivers, or enforcement? Aren’t these the very things that make a duty distinct from a mere value or virtue? Many writers – following the legal theorist Wesley Hohfeld (1913, 1917) – would even say that A’s duty to B just is the flipside of B’s right against A (this sort of right is also called a claim; see e.g., Gilbert 2018; Johnson 2010; Muñoz 2021; Thomson 1990, chap. 1). We might hesitate to go as far as Hohfeld in equating duties with rights. Still, some might wonder what is left after we subtract from a duty its rights-related upshots (Muñoz 2020, 693). Are non-juridical duties really duties at all?

Paul Schofield (2015) defends something closer to an unwaivable juridical duty to oneself. Schofield argues that you owe it to yourself not to cause yourself harm in the future – as you might by smoking heavily in your youth and giving yourself lung cancer. You also owe it to yourself not to hamstring your future choices, as in Derek Parfit’s (1984, 327–28) example of the Russian nobleman, who arranges as a young socialist to prevent his future self from funding conservative causes. Schofield’s picture is this. You owe a certain action to someone when they can legitimately demand that you do it. But you can also imagine demands made by yourself of yourself, from different perspectives within your life. When you smoke, causing yourself to suffer in the future, you can look upon this either from the perspective of the future sufferer or the present smoker. The future smoker – that is, you from your future perspective – could justifiably demand less smoking from you in the present, generating a duty not to smoke. Moreover, you cannot presently waive this duty, since you do not now occupy the right perspective (Schofield 2015, 17; see also Schofield 2019).

This proposal is enormously creative – a leap forward in philosophical thinking about obligations to oneself. No doubt the link between duties, demands, and perspectives will play an important role in future work on the subject. That said, there have been some objections to this form of Schofield’s view. In particular, some worry that it makes our relation to our future selves too chilly and antagonistic, like our relation to a non-consenting other (Kanygina forthcoming; Muñoz 2020, 694–95). If we cannot now waive our duties not to harm ourselves in the future, it seems to follow that we may not impose costs on our future selves, even for our own greater good. This seems too stringent; there is nothing wrong with taking a medication that cures a severe ailment today while causing moderately bad side-effects in the future. Harming oneself can be justified when it makes one’s life better on the whole. In this respect, self-harm is much like doing harm to a consenting other. [ 4 ]

Our discussion so far has assumed, following Singer, Kant, and Hobbes, that self-release is fishy – that one cannot wiggle out of one’s ethical duties. That is the basic reason why Singer gives up on duties to oneself, and it is the basic reason why Kantians insist on decoupling them from waivable rights.

But what if the assumption is wrong? What if you can release yourself from obligations? This brings us to the third and final family of theories, those that allow waivable obligations to oneself. Such theories confront the Paradox of Self-Release head on. Self-release, after all, certainly seems paradoxical. How can we find a way to resist Hobbes’ dictum – “he is free, that can be free when he will” – and how might we clear the air of paradox?

The basic problem, as a reminder, is that a waivable duty to oneself would not be binding, because it would not be possible to violate. One could simply waive the duty “when one pleaseth” to avoid transgression, as Hobbes’ sovereign might suspend your property rights when he wants your stuff.

To meet this challenge, we need some way to show that such duties, despite appearances, could actually be binding.

The trailblazer here is G.A. Cohen. He imagines himself in the sovereign’s predicament, passing a law that he might later want to waive away:

Suppose…that the law is indeed universal, or that it includes me within its scope by virtue of some other semantic or pragmatic feature of it. Then, if I had the authority to legislate it, it indeed binds me, as long as I do not repeal it. (1996, 170)

In other words, even if you can be free at will, that doesn’t mean you are free already . You are free when, and only when, you go through the motions to free yourself. Until then you are bound – in this case, by virtue of your power to make laws that apply to you.

Cohen’s remarks on the subject, though valuable, are brief. Muñoz (2020, 2021) develops the idea into a bigger picture of duties, rights, and waivers. The starting point is a view known as the Self-Other Symmetry: you have the same basic rights against yourself as you have against anybody else. But it is uniquely difficult to violate your own rights, Muñoz says, because the very choice to do what they forbid doubles as an authorization to do it. By choosing to bop yourself on the head, for example, you make yourself into a willing party to the bopping, and thereby waive your right, a bit like if you had consenting to being bopped by someone else. The result is that rights against oneself are real but “finkish” – waived by the very things that normally lead to violations. (The analogy is with finkish dispositions, which are real but hidden by the very things that normally cause them to manifest; imagine a fragile glass that turns to stone whenever something is about to strike it (see Lewis 1997; Martin 1994).)

But if a right is finkish, it is hard to see why it should matter. For all intents and purposes, it is as good as absent. This challenge is pressed forcefully by Schofield:

Traditionally understood, a duty binds a person, irrespective of what she herself decides. The powerlessness to escape it through a mere act of will is, in fact, part of what it is to be duty-bound. So insofar as a person has the power to release herself, the purported duty lacks its characteristic ability to place her in the very condition that we associate with duty. (2021, 47)

And while some might say finkish rights and duties are merely “feeble,” rather than impossible, Schofield (2021, 48) replies that he can see “no reason why we cannot simply deny altogether that they are duties.” Finkish duties “bind” only in the sense that they count as duties; they do not constrain our actions. (But see §6.2 below on rights against oneself as prerogatives.)

Could a waivable duty to oneself have any normative bite, anything to constrain how we may act? For there to be a constraint here, waivers would have to be less than automatic, so that the mere choice to bop myself on the head might not waive my duty not to bop myself.

Schaab (2021) argues that a decision might fail to waive a duty to oneself if the duty and motive come from different perspectives within the agent – as when someone qua philosopher decides to skip the gym to work on a paper even though, qua athlete, they could legitimately demand more exercise. Kanygina (forthcoming) argues that self-release must be autonomous . If my decisions are “akratic, negligent, or confused,” they will not validly waive my duties to myself, and while sometimes my state of mind will double as an excuse, at other times I may be genuinely culpable. Kanygina illustrates with a case:

Linda, a diabetic craving a cake, might tell herself ‘What harm is there in my eating a piece or two?’ Linda is aware of the risks. Being both weak-willed and negligent of her health, she acts frivolously. When she later feels guilty, her guilt seems appropriate. (forthcoming, §3.1)

Indeed, any version of the Self-Other Symmetry will be committed to a version of Kanygina’s view. It is a truism that interpersonal consent can waive rights only when it is informed, voluntary, and competent. A breezy “yes” might not cut it. Given Symmetry, the same should hold in the one-person case. To authorize oneself to act in high-stakes cases – sharing private information, donating a spare kidney, devoting one’s efforts to a cause – the decision must be made carefully in light of the available facts. Even if self-release is possible, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

6. Applications

In modern moral philosophy, duties to oneself are often treated as an isolated, antiquated topic. Paul Schofield (2021, 6) remarks that “self-directed duties find themselves largely absent from the contemporary philosophical scene,” as attested by the fact that – as of the time of his writing – there was “no standalone entry for duties to self” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

As readers of this entry will note, such lacunas in the literature are filling up fast. More and more links are being uncovered between duties to self and far-flung moral questions – how we should use our smartphones (Aylsworth and Castro 2021); whether to let companies mine our data (Allen 2013); whether we should “suck it up” in the face of injustice or instead go out and protest (Boxill 1976; Hill, Jr 1991d; Straumanis 1984).

Here we will survey some particularly interesting issues that intersect with obligations to oneself.

The topic of suicide – as studied by moral and political philosophers – is complex and multifaceted. (See the entry on suicide .) People have many different things to live for, as well as tribulations to escape from. In dark moments it may well seem reasonable to wish for a release from suffering; other times, the attempt to end one’s own life may strike others – and oneself, if one survives – as rash and tragic. One extreme case would be martyrs, praised for giving their lives to a higher cause. At the other end might be those who, at least on some views, have a very clear duty to stay alive. Even in such cases, however, it may be inapt or counterproductive to castigate someone for actions taken out of distraught desperation, abandoned by their sense of self-worth; to defend a duty of self-care here is not simply to advocate blaming and shaming.

There are also many people to whom one might owe the duty not to kill oneself, as Kant observes:

[Suicide] can…be regarded as a violation of one’s duty to other people (the duty of spouses to each other, of parents to their children, of a subject to his superior or to his fellow citizens, and finally even a violation of duty to God, as his abandoning the post assigned him in the world without having been called away from it). ( MM 6:422)

Our question, however, must be separated out from that of duties to others, from blame, and from the rationality of choosing death. The question is whether we owe it to ourselves not to prematurely end our lives. To get a clear look, it helps to focus on the effects of suicide on the individual, not their spouse and dog and so on; and it may be helpful to consider both the case where one has a bright future and the case of foreseen grimness.

Since ancient Greece, philosophers have been skeptical of a duty to oneself not to commit suicide, however bright one’s future. Aristotle (1138a 4–1138b 11) argues that suicide cannot in principle be an injustice against oneself – where “injustice” roughly means a violation of rights – because the suicidal person “suffers voluntarily,” and “nobody suffers injustice voluntarily.” This last claim, clearly, is too strong. People might freely choose to suffer injustice when prevention is costly, as when someone declines to invest in an elaborate home security system. Other times the alternative involves even graver injustice; voting for “the lesser of two evils” is still voluntary even if one wishes for a better slate of candidates. Still, there is something to Aristotle’s point. He is foreshadowing the Paradox of Self-Release. If the suicidal person willingly opts to die, how could their choice possibly infringe their own duties? Wouldn’t those duties count as fully waived?

This line of thought directly leads to a libertarian view of suicide: your life, your choice – at least, when it comes to what you owe yourself. (See, e.g., Szasz 2002.) This is the sort of view that Singer and other skeptics hold across the board.

A well-known challenge to such laissez-faire views comes from David Velleman, who argues in a Kantian spirit that those who defend the “right to die” are missing something important: “the sense of a value in us that makes a claim on us – a value that we must live up to ” (1999, 612). Velleman here is referring to our value as persons, a value that should be cherished as an end in itself rather than exploited as a mere means to a good time. Frances Kamm (1997) would reply that, when people have good reasons for choosing death – as when their life is consumed by “unbearable pain” – they should be free to “decline the honor of being a person.”

More recently, Schofield (2021, 137–38) argues that Velleman does not go far enough in recognizing obligations to oneself. One’s own value is not something “that just happens to reside within a person,” but instead, one stands in a “special relationship” to any affront to that value. To put it another way, Velleman defends a self- regarding obligation not to commit suicide, but no such obligation to oneself. Hill similarly doesn’t go so far as to call suicide a violation of duty, much less of rights, though he thinks it may in some cases express a lack of proper value for one’s own humanity (Hill, Jr 1991b). (By contrast, Muñoz (2020, 695) thinks we owe it to everyone not to pointlessly, tragically kill them – self included – and that this obligation is “too important” to waive for trivial reasons; for a similar claim see Schofield 2021, 68n7.)

How should we think about the possibility of an obligation to oneself not to commit suicide? On Schofield’s framework, the key question is that of what we can legitimately demand of ourselves from different possible perspectives. From the perspective of yourself in the future, when you will be feeling the brunt of your decisions in the present, you may find yourself with good reasons for resenting your past choices – frittered savings, thoughtless smoking, and so on. From that perspective you could legitimately demand of yourself, in your present perspective, that you take care better care of your future interests. If so, Schofield thinks, you owe that care to yourself.

It is not altogether obvious, however, how this is supposed to work when the harm involves death. If you end your life, your future perspective never exists. There will be no actual perspective from which you can imagine issuing a legitimate demand. (You can conjure up the perspective in your imagination, but that is not the same thing.) For this reason, it may be misleading to say, as Cíbik (2020, 196) does, that “the victim” of a suicide is one’s “future self.” The future self is not adversely affected; they are never even effected . (For a highly original and illuminating discussion, see Kanygina forthcoming, §2.)

So much for the case of missing out on a valuable future. What if your future looks bleak, and there’s no way to fix it – only to avoid it? Schofield considers such cases in an open-minded way.

Imagine a person who knows she will soon lose control of her rational capacities, her ability to reason, her ability to understand things as they are, and so on. Imagine that this is because her capacities degrade, or because her pain will be so overwhelming that reason is impossible. In such a case, we might wonder whether the rational standpoint demands at all that one refrain from self-termination. And if it does, one might wonder why one would not be able to waive the demand. (2021, 138)

Here Schofield’s emphasis is on the individual’s interests and standing, not the raw moral value of her rationality. The image is not that of a guardian assigned to a post, but of a person with some authority to make decisions about her own life.

A supererogatory action is a “good deed beyond the call of duty” (see the entry on supererogation ). More precisely, it is a permissible action that is better than a permissible alternative. Think of friendly favors, saintly sacrifices, and heroic rescues.

Nowadays, there is not much work on the link between supererogation and duties to self. The standard view since the late 1970s is that supererogation emerges from a clash between the greater good of others and raw self-interest – where self-interest is seen as a reasonable thing to pursue, but not as a moral obligation to oneself (Archer 2016a; Hurka and Shubert 2012; Parfit 1978; Scheffler 1994; Slote 1984). [ 5 ]

But in earlier work, many writers see obligations to self as fundamental to understanding supererogation – especially self-sacrifice. Jack Meiland argues that one doesn’t have to heroically dive into the choppy waters to save others from drowning, thanks to a duty to oneself not to do harm; he later remarks that this paradox – a duty not to be a hero? – calls for a “thorough reexamination” of our views of supererogation (Meiland 1964, 171). In response to Pybus (1982, 199), who argues for a moral requirement to “be heroic,” McGoldrick objects that

such a requirement would come into conflict with our obvious duty to recognize our own intrinsic worth, and judge our own aspirations, goals, and interests as no less endowed with value than the aspirations and interests of others. (1984, 527)

“The heart of the matter,” as she puts it, “is the Kantian argument that we have duties to ourselves as well as others” (McGoldrick 1984, 527). Kant himself says “our esteem” for daring acts – like trying to “rescue people from a shipwreck” – will be “greatly weakened by the concept of duty to himself ” ( CPrR 5:158). The problem for Kant’s view, as well as Meiland’s, is that it seems to underrate self-sacrifice. If we owe it to ourselves not to be the hero, won’t heroism be morally wrong? This is an instance of the “Wrongness Problem” for theories of supererogation – the problem of showing why deeds that seem “beyond the call” aren’t wrong. This is the shadowy twin of the familiar “Obligation Problem,” which is to explain why they aren’t obligatory. (For early versions of the Wrongness Problem, see Mavrodes 1964 and Narveson 1964; see also Postow 2005).

In light of the Wrongness Problem – and with Singer’s paradox still looming overhead – it is no surprise that some philosophers began searching for something new, beyond obligations to oneself, to be the source of the limits on moral obligations. Others would give up the hunt altogether, as does Bernard Williams, a famous skeptic about “the morality system” in general. Williams calls duties to self “fraudulent items,” conjured up by philosophers suckered in by the belief that “only an obligation can beat an obligation” (Williams 1985, 182).

Not everyone has been deterred. Some heterodox writers, working outside of the Kantian tradition, continue searching for a way to ground supererogation in obligations to oneself. A notable example is Shelly Kagan (1989, 206–16) and his pioneering “Self-Constraint Argument.” Suppose – a big “suppose” – that you have the same waivable obligations to yourself as you do to others. Let’s consider one such right; the right against yourself not to do yourself harm. From this, we try to show that harming yourself for the greater good of others – for example, by giving a spare kidney – will be purely optional. It is permissible to make the sacrifice because you can just waive your obligation; the act would then be like performing a kidney transplant on a willing donor. It is permissible not to self-sacrifice because you can just refuse to waive your obligation, which makes it wrong to self-harm; the act would then be like stealing a kidney from an unwilling “donor.” The result is that giving your spare kidney is optional even if it’s for the greater good: you can give yourself consent to do it, or refuse consent and rightfully keep the kidney. Kagan ultimately rejects this argument for a panoply of reasons. The other key proposal is due to Paul Hurley (1995), who derives the optionality of self-harm from “patient-protecting reasons,” which are like unwaivable obligations – in this case, obligations to oneself. These reasons open a “protected sphere” of actions. Muñoz (2021) objects that Hurley’s and Kagan’s arguments both struggle with the Wrongness Problem. For Hurley, the problem is that a patient-protecting reason not to harm yourself would make it wrong to give your kidney. For Kagan, the same appears to follow if you decline to “self-consent.”

Despite these challenges, philosophers are still searching for links between duties to self and supererogation. Muñoz (2021), for example, tries to revive Kagan’s argument, arguing that a waivable duty to oneself is a prerogative: it can be cited in defense of one’s actions, but since it can be waived at will, it isn’t a “binding” reason to comply. On this view, duties to self help to unify the two main concepts in deontological ethics: restrictions, which make it wrong to harm non-consenting others even for the greater good, and prerogatives, which permit us not to self-harm. Restrictions come from what we owe to others, and prerogatives come from what we owe to ourselves.

Suppose it’s New Year’s Day, and you – sick of your own bad habits – decide to make a change. You say to yourself: “I promise to cut down on screen time this year.” Do you now owe it to yourself to follow through? Does your resolution even count as a bona fide promise?

The possibility of self-promises – and their possible import – has drawn the attention a number of philosophers. Some are skeptical (e.g., Downie 1985); others, less so (Fruh 2014; Habib 2009; Hill, Jr 1991a; Raz 1972, 97; Rosati 2011).

On the one hand, promises to oneself can seem not just possible but downright useful. When we struggle to commit our wills in the ordinary ways – focusing on attractive aspects, “psyching ourselves up” – we often reach for other devices of commitment (Schelling 1985). A promise to oneself may be just such a device. By saying things like “I promise to cut down on screen time,” we are not saying, “Boy, I’d better cut down,” or “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if I cut down?” We are moralizing. We are staking our self-respect on a decision in order to get ourselves to carry it out (see Hill, Jr 1991a), or as Rosati (2011, 143–44) puts it, we try to “maintain our self-governance…by putting our authority on the line” – that is, our authority over ourselves, our authority to “effectively determine what we shall do, and to command respect in virtue of that very authority.” It is like vowing “on my honor.” It is a distinctive means of self-motivation.

On the other hand, promises to oneself do have a funny smell. If you promise me something, I have the power to release you. If you promise yourself , then it seems you can release yourself at will, which sounds paradoxical – and familiar. In Singer’s view, this is just a special instance of the Paradox of Self-Release, which afflicts any kind of duty to oneself. He asks:

Can one promise oneself to do something? Such language is frequently used. People say “I have promised myself to…” But a promise to oneself would be a promise from which one could release oneself at will, and thus not a genuine promise at all. (1958, 203)

Others have raised similar worries. Atiyah writes:

It is very odd to regard a secret vow to oneself as creating an obligation of any kind. If it does, [it] is one without a corresponding right … [and] which can be violated without risk of legal, moral or social censure. (1981, 54)

Here Atiyah echoes Singer’s skepticism about duties without rights, as well as raising other worries.

A “promise to oneself,” Singer concludes, can only be a resolution in disguise. A genuine promise generates a duty, owed by the promisor to the promisee. A self-promise, however, just expresses a “settled determination” to act. It is a figurative use of moral language, or else it is nonsense.

But as we have seen, there are replies to the Paradox of Self-Release, and so it should come as no surprise that there are arguments in favor of genuine self-promises – which may not be as funny as they seemed at first whiff.

To start, self-promising is not some strange contortion only performed by characters in thought experiments. As Rosati (2011, 124–25) observes, we at least seem to make self-promises about a “broad array” of things – self-care, self-respect, moral rectitude, choice of lifestyle – and in a wide variety of ways, from silent vows to showy announcements. Self-promising is, in a word, normal . But this by itself is not a decisive point, as Rosati herself would agree, since Singer could reinterpret our ordinary talk of self-promises as merely figurative, a way of steeling one’s will rather than conjuring a moral obligation.

Second, we might return to Allen’s reply to Singer: we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss ordinary talk. Why think that self-promises must be figures of speech?

Third, we could try to find special cases where Singer’s skepticism is harder to believe. Allen Habib (2009) gives the example of a contest in which a sales manager promises her team – self included – that she will give $100 to next week’s top seller; another of his examples is a drinker who backslides on a self-promise to go sober. Hill (1991a, 147) explores cases where a promise to oneself must be reconsidered “in the light of unanticipated new information” that tells in favor of annulment – on Hill’s view, this kind of release is not problematic, because it is not done willy-nilly. Janis Schaab presents a similar case:

Suppose that I want to buy a new laptop, and so I promise myself to save some money. A few days later, I am informed that my salary will be raised. I can now afford to buy the new laptop rightaway [ sic ]. It seems that now, if not before, I can release myself from my promise to save money. It is not obvious that the mere possibility of self-release nullifies my obligation to save money. (2021, 177)

Finally, we might defend the coherence of willy-nilly waivers. Certainly this is a bit easier if we already believe in the possibility of releasing oneself from other duties to self, like the duty not to harm (see §5, above). The trick is the same either way: we say that the person is bound until the moment of release. The pioneer of this move in the promising literature is Connie Rosati, who writes:

We would not be tempted to say that because the promisee can release the promisor at will, the promisor is not really obligated. So long as the promisee has not released the promisor, she is indeed bound. But then we should say the same thing about self-promises: although an agent, as promisee, can release herself, as promisor, at will, so long as she does not release herself, she is indeed bound . (2011, 134–35; see also Muñoz 2020, 697)

This view raises its own puzzle, analogous to Schofield’s challenge to Muñoz (see again §5). If a self-promise can be waived at will, so that there is no real danger of violating it, why should it matter?

One possible answer is the one we started with: self-promising is a way of staking our respect to add some moral oomph to an intention. This still leaves us wondering where the oomph comes from, if not the threat of a broken promise. Here the friends of self-promising need to find some way that release might be non-trivial even if it is possible – just as Kanygina (forthcoming) argues that self-release requires us to make decisions autonomously, and Schaab (2021) argues that the power of self-release does not fully protect us against the possibility of violation. Fruh (2014, 170) goes some way towards an answer; he argues that, just because one can dissolve an obligation easily, that doesn’t make the act morally meaningless ; the dissolution might express something undesirable, such as a deficiency of “moral fiber.” A lack of fiber probably won’t strike fear into evildoers’ hearts. But it is a defect nonetheless.

“Your body is a temple,” the saying goes. A temple to whom? If it’s yours , then clearly you should get to decide the rules – haircuts, tattoos, piercings, sex hormones, giving and taking blood. All else equal, no one can tell you what to do with your body. But if it’s a temple to someone else – say, God – then the choice is not really yours to make. You’re the custodian, not the caller of shots, and you should treat your body with the same kind of gingerly respect that you would show as a guest in someone else’s home. Their temple, their rules.

Nowadays, few Western ethicists would argue that you should treat your body in such-and-such a way purely because of divine authority (“God abhors tattoos!”) or natural teleology (“Your blood belongs in your own body!”). But the history of philosophy teems with prim pronouncements on the proper way to treat one’s body, and philosophers continue to debate whether certain kinds of bodily modification are immoral as a matter of duty to oneself, as well as whether certain kinds of self-enhancement are permissible or even obligatory.

“Body modification,” in this context, means a change to one’s body that needn’t be intrinsically harmful, all things considered. We are interested in the modifying itself, not just in the obvious harms it might involve. Decapitation “modifies” the body, but has little in common, morally speaking, with nail-clipping, haircuts, pierced ears, and the removal of teeth.

On Kant’s view, however, decapitation and tooth-removal seem to differ only by a matter of degree. He writes:

To deprive oneself of an integral part or organ (to maim oneself) – for example, to give away or sell a tooth to be transplanted into another’s mouth, or to have oneself castrated in order to get an easier livelihood as a singer, and so forth – are ways of partially murdering oneself. ( MM 6:423)

Clearly, Kant has in mind an unwaivable duty not to take out one’s body parts. Donating or selling a tooth is immoral – even, apparently, when the transaction is consensual and mutually beneficial. Kant then qualifies:

But to have a dead or diseased organ amputated when it endangers one’s life, or to have something cut off that is a part but not an organ of the body, for example, one’s hair, cannot be counted as a crime against one’s own person – although cutting one’s hair in order to sell it is not altogether free from blame. ( MM 6:423)

For Kant, an appendectomy isn’t partial murder, but there is something wrong with haircuts for paychecks. It is hard to see this as anything but natural teleology: it is not up to you what your organs are meant to do, and you may not make unnatural changes to your body except to correct for defects – a version of “your body is a temple,” where the holiness comes from the value of being a person: “disposing of oneself as a mere means to some discretionary end is debasing humanity in one’s person ( homo noumenon ), to which the human being ( homo phaenomenon ) was nevertheless entrusted for preservation” ( MM 6:423). Here Kant sounds less like an Enlightenment thinker and more like a natural lawyer (see, e.g., the discussion of self-love and suicide in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica , part II, Q64, A5, as cited in Cholbi 2017, sec. 2.2).

Suffice it to say, Kant’s view has problems. First, it doesn’t take bodily autonomy seriously. If you like spa days more than long hair, why shouldn’t you get to sell your hair and treat yourself to a getaway? Second, the view doesn’t generalize very well. If it’s wrong to sell one’s body parts, shouldn’t it also be wrong to sell one’s labor, since labor involves moving and using one’s body, sometimes in unnatural ways? (Think of the nurse who takes caffeine pills to work the night shift in a pandemic.) Finally, we might wonder why the profit motive should be uniquely dubious. It’s fine to cut one’s hair because one likes the look – why is this any nobler than trying to make a buck?

A more promising prohibition can be found in Matej Cíbik’s (2020) recent work on tattoos. A tattoo typically expresses something about the bearer’s personality. That’s fine, Cíbik thinks, if the tattoo is discreet and the risk of regret is negligible, as when the tattoo represents an enduring aspect of the bearer’s identity. The problem is that tattoos may outlive their inspiration, staying frozen even as identities evolve. Removing tattoos can be painful, expensive, or impossible.

Consider Cíbik’s example of Amy, an 18-year-old girl who “desperately falls in love” with a trendy musician named Justin:

Amy listens to his music all the time, he is all that she ever reads about, and his face is the main decoration of her room. Now she decides to go further and get a series of tattoos with his image and his name on the most prominent parts of her body including her face, shoulders, neck and hands. With these tattoos, she will be instantly recognizable as his biggest fan, signaling her deep affection towards her idol – something that her (present) identity is build upon [ sic ]. (2020, 202)

Cíbik thinks Amy acts wrongly. Her tattoos are “inconsiderate” towards her future self and “a definition of recklessness,” since she is “binding [herself] forever to publicly exhibit devotion to a fleeting pop-culture phenomenon” (2020, 204).

This diagnosis dovetails with Schofield on obligations to oneself in the future. Schofield thinks there is something dangerous about actions that “jeopardize a person’s ability to make use of her practical powers later in life by harming or altering her body in the present” (2021, 167), since it one can reasonably demand from their own future perspective that such harms not be inflicted. Schofield illustrates with an analogy:

Just as Beast, through his superior strength, can impose his will on Belle by picking her up and locking her in the tower, a person is able to impose her present will on herself in the future by affecting her own body – only in this latter case, it is the way she is temporally situated, and not her superior strength, that explains her power and her dominance. (2021, 168)

The thing about tattoos, and body modification in general, is that the act itself is not particularly harmful; what matters is the restriction on future freedom. A Justin Bieber face tattoo might not hurt much, but it makes it a lot harder to work in sales or run for public office.

We should also note some of the points that could be made in defense of tattoo art, and self-expression more generally. First, whenever one “seizes the day” – putting down the books to go to a party, moving countries to pursue a romance – one is sacrificing future options for the sake of savoring the present. Such trade-offs are part of any human life worth living. Second, even if you sometimes owe it to yourself to keep your options open, it might matter how they are closed. Consider the gay man who refuses to hide his sexuality to get ahead in the office, or the black woman who wears her curly natural hair in interviews even though some potential employers see it as “unprofessional.” Here self-respect seems to tell in favor of acting in ways that foreclose one’s options, because the closing is achieved not by one’s choice, but through others’ bigoted reactions. This may be closer to how some people (especially those from cultures with traditional tattoos, as in Samoan culture) think of being denied a job on the basis of body art: the problem isn’t teenage recklessness, but arbitrary discrimination.

Still, when it comes to thoughtless, permanent changes to one’s own appearance, Cíbik and Schofield are definitely on to something. What remains to be seen is how we might reconcile the value of spontaneous expression with a chilly concern for future freedom. A blanket ban on body modification is surely too strict – but that doesn’t mean anything goes.

Next is a topic that Kant calls “the first command of all duties to oneself” – namely, self-knowledge. Kant is concerned here not with knowing one’s personality type, personal history, or potential talents. His concern is moral purity:

This command is know (scrutinize, fathom) yourself , not in terms of your natural perfection (your fitness or unfitness for all sorts of discretionary or even commanded ends) but rather in terms of your moral perfection in relation to your duty. That is, know your heart – whether it is good or evil, whether the source of your actions is pure or impure, and what can be imputed to you as belonging originally to the substance of a human being or as derived (acquired or developed) and belonging to your moral condition ( MM 6:441; see also LE 27:42, 348)

Owen Ware detects a puzzle here. How could Kant see self-knowledge as obligatory given his “opacity thesis,” according to which our own moral perfection is unknowable to us? “I cannot know, for example, whether my particular actions arise from conformity with the moral law or from some hidden self-interest” (Ware 2009, 673) (For a more sanguine take on the conditions for self-knowledge, see Bransen 2015 on self-love.)

Jordan MacKenzie (2018) explores the duty to know oneself outside of the Kantian framework, decoupling self-knowledge from moral progress, and singling out two separate reasons for seeking self-knowledge. Since you owe yourself respect, you need to know yourself – you can’t respect a complete unknown. And since you are a valuable entity – respectability aside – that by itself makes you worth getting to know. These points are notably not tailored to the case of self -knowledge; they just take basic facts about respect and value and turn them inward. (Readers interested in the duty of self-knowledge may also be interested in the duty not to self-deceive; see, e.g., MacKenzie forthcoming.)

6 Self-respect

The classic treatment of self-respect is Thomas Hill’s “Servility and Self-Respect,” first published in 1971. Hill argues that there is a moral problem with servile people – by which he means those who are overly deferential, self-loathing, or self-abnegating. He gives three case studies: the Uncle Tom, a Black man who “displays the symbols of deference to whites, and of contempt to blacks;” the Self-Deprecator, whose “sense of shame and self-contempt make him content to be the instrument of others;” and the Deferential Wife, who is “utterly devoted to serving her husband” because of her belief that “the proper role for a woman is to serve her family” (1991c, 4–5). The problem, Hill thinks, is not that these people are making anyone miserable. They might be “Wise enough to Love their Chains,” to borrow Mary Astell’s description of the dutiful wife (1996, 29), and those around them might enjoy the benefits of their eager self-denial. For Hill, the problem is more intrinsic. The servile agent does not appreciate their own rights, either because they misunderstand them – like the wife who is brainwashed into thinking that she isn’t really allowed to say “no” – or else they just don’t value their own rights as much as others’ whims.

Hill’s paper has sparked, or at least foreshadowed, several interesting discussions. One concerns whether Hill got the cases right – particularly the Deferential Wife (see, e.g., Baron 1985; Friedman 1985; Superson 2010). Another debate centers on the duty to resist one’s own oppression; Carol Hay (2011) argues that this is a duty to oneself, whereas Straumanis (1984) argues that a woman owes it to other women, not oneself, to enhance herself and resist her own oppression. Bernard Boxill (1976) asks what should happen after one’s rights are violated, when there is no hope of rectification. Should one protest, as W.E.B. Dubois (1966, 48) advocates, as an expression of self-respect? Or would it be servile, as Booker T. Washington (1966, 514) argues, to make pleas for the “sympathy” of others rather than waiting until one can fix the problem by oneself? Boxill ultimately sides with Dubois, insisting, like Hill, on the need to value one’s own rights.

Finally, Anita Allen (2013) argues that one’s digital privacy is not just a personal good but a duty to oneself. She gives examples what of this duty might entail: securing information about one’s bank account and genome, not constantly broadcasting one’s location and beliefs, not aiming “sexy pictures” of oneself “at minors or the general public” (2013, 850). Allen then draws implications for reform: we should not just judge companies and governments by how much they invade our privacy, but also by how well they help us protect ourselves from invasive third parties (2013, 851).

On this basis, Allen advocates paternalistic privacy laws in certain cases, foreshadowing Schofield’s case for liberal paternalism (2018, 2021, chaps. 5 & 6). If Allen and Schofield are right, obligations to oneself are not just relevant to how we treat ourselves, but to how we should treat each other (see also Kanygina 2020), and how we ought to live together in civil and political society.

The question of what we owe to ourselves has, after decades in the doldrums, surged back to life. So what’s next? We now have a sense of where the action has been – the spectre of paradox, the search for unwaivable duties, the clash between self-concern and the needs of others. What open questions might be the focus of the next big insight, the next chapter in the story?

One question is whether duties to self are in any sense “foundational” – either as much as or more so than duties to other people. The idea is associated with Kant’s ethics (see Reath 2002, sec. II). The basic idea is a moralized version of RuPaul’s “If you can’t love yourself / How in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” The question, Kantified, is that of how you could owe anything to other people if you can’t owe things to yourself. Margaret Gilbert’s (2018) theory of rights also brings in rights against oneself at the ground floor. For Gilbert, rights are the product of joint decisions, and they give each party to the decision a right against each that the decision be carried through. That includes the right of each against himself or herself. This view has the amazing consequence that, whenever I violate your right against me, I also violate a right against myself – a consequence that Gilbert doesn’t stress, but which she does accept. She even gives a partial defense at one point, arguing that we can sensibly demand of ourselves that we carry out our joint decisions with other people (2018, 177–78).

Another issue is that of the “Self-Other Symmetry.” If we do have duties to ourselves, are they essentially similar to duties to others, or fundamentally different? Most writers who take up the topic argue against Symmetry (Slote 1984; Stocker 1976), but some are sympathetic (Muñoz 2020, 2021; Schaab 2021).

A final question, shared by many writers, is whether “obligation” is the only concept that we need here. No doubt, it’s useful. But there is a vast and variegated range of things that we do with other people that we also turn inwards in an intriguing way. Consider the virtues of patience, forgiveness, compassion, kindness, and appreciation. It is not so obvious that the right theory of “obligations” is going to tell us how these things work in general, much less in the solo case.

The deeper reason for wanting to understand self-obligation is to make sense of the seemingly special character of how we relate to ourselves. To focus only on the bossiest aspects of self-relation – duties and demands, claims and commands – is to risk missing out on the full moral richness of our inner lives.

Allen, Anita L., 2013. “An Ethical Duty to Protect One’s Own Information Privacy?” Alabama Law Review , 64(4): 845–66.
Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa Theologica , in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas , Anton Pegis (ed.), New York: Random House, 1945.
Archer, Alfred, 2016a. “Moral Obligation, Self-Interest and The Transitivity Problem,” Utilitas , 28(4): 441–64.
–––, 2016b. “Supererogation, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Duty,” Southern Journal of Philosophy , 54(3): 333–54.
Astell, Mary, 1996. “Some Reflections Upon Marriage,” In Astell: Political Writings , Patricia Springborg (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aylsworth, Timothy, and Clinton Castro, 2021. “Is There a Duty to Be a Digital Minimalist?” Journal of Applied Philosophy , 38(4): 663–73.
Bacin, Stefano, 2013. “The Perfect Duty to Oneself Merely as a Moral Being,” in Kant’s “Tugendlehre”: A Comprehensive Commentary , Andreas Tampota, Oliver Sensen, and Jens Timmermann (eds.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 245–68.
Baron, Marcia, 1985. “Servility, Critical Deference and the Deferential Wife,” Philosophical Studies , 48(3): 393–400.
Benn, Claire, 2017. “Supererogatory Spandrels,” Etica & Politica / Ethics and Politics , 19(1): 269–90.
Boxill, Bernard R., 1976. “Self-Respect and Protest,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 6(1): 58–69.
Bransen, Jan, 2015. “Self-Knowledge and Self-Love,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 18(2): 309–21.
Cholbi, Michael, 2015. “On Marcus Singer’s ‘On Duties to Oneself’,” Ethics , 125(3): 851–53.
–––, 2017. “Suicide,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/suicide/ >.
Cíbik, Matej, 2020. “On the Immorality of Tattoos,” The Journal of Ethics , 24(2): 193–206.
Cohen, G. A., 1996. “Reason, Humanity, and the Moral Law,” in The Sources of Normativity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darwall, Stephen, 2006. The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dorsey, Dale, 2013. “The Supererogatory, and How to Accommodate It,” Utilitas , 25(3): 355–82.
Downie, R. S., 1985. “Three Accounts of Promising,” Philosophical Quarterly , 35(140): 259–71.
Dubois, W.E.B., 1966. “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” in Negro Social and Political Thought 1850–1920 , Howard Brotz (ed.), New York: Basic Books.
Eisenberg, Paul D., 1968. “Duties to Oneself and the Concept of Morality,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy , 11(1–4): 129–54.
Esser, Andrea M., 2013. “The Inner Court of Conscience, Moral Self-Knowledge, and the Proper Object of Duty (TL 6:437 – 444),” in Kant’s “Tugendlehre”: A Comprehensive Commentary , Andreas Tampota, Oliver Sensen, and Jens Timmermann (eds.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 269–91.
Finlay, Stephen, 2007. “Too Much Morality,” in Morality and Self-Interest , Paul Bloomfield (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Friedman, Marilyn A., 1985. “Moral Integrity and the Deferential Wife,” Philosophical Studies , 47(1): 141–50.
Fruh, Kyle, 2014. “The Power to Promise Oneself,” Southern Journal of Philosophy , 52(1): 61–85.
Gilbert, Margaret, 2018. Rights and Demands: A Foundational Inquiry , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Guyer, Paul, 2002. “The Derivation of the Categorical Imperative: Kant’s Correction for a Fatal Flaw,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy , 10(1): 64–80.
Haase, Matthias, 2014. “Am I You?” Philosophical Explorations , 17(3): 358–71.
Habib, Allen, 2009. “Promises to the Self,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 39(4): 537–57.
Hay, Carol, 2011. “The Obligation to Resist Oppression,” Journal of Social Philosophy , 42(1): 21–45.
Hill, Jr., Thomas E., 1991a. “Promises to Oneself,” in Autonomy and Self-Respect , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 138–54.
–––, 1991b. “Self-Regarding Suicide: A Modified Kantian View,” in Autonomy and Self-Respect , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 85–103.
–––, 1991c. “Servility and Self-Respect,” in Autonomy and Self-Respect , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 4–18.
–––, 1991d. “Symbolic Protest and Calculated Silence,” in Autonomy and Self-Respect , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 52–66.
–––, 2013. “Imperfect Duties to Oneself (TL 6:444 – 447),” in Kant’s “Tugendlehre”: A Comprehensive Commentary , Andreas Tampota, Oliver Sensen, and Jens Timmermann (eds.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 293–308.
Hills, Alison, 2003. “Duties and Duties to the Self,” American Philosophical Quarterly , 40(2): 131–42.
Hobbes, Thomas, 1651 [1994]. “Leviathan,” in Leviathan, with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668 , Edwin Curley (ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.
Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb, 1913. “Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning,” The Yale Law Journal , 23(1): 16–59.
–––, 1917. “Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning,” The Yale Law Journal , 26(8): 710–70.
Horgan, Terry, and Mark Timmons, 2010. “Untying a Knot from the inside out: Reflections on the ‘Paradox’ of Supererogation,” Social Philosophy and Policy , 27(2): 29–63.
Hurka, Thomas, and Esther Shubert, 2012. “Permissions to Do Less Than Best: A Moving Band,” in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (Volume 2), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–27.
Hurley, Paul, 1995. “Getting Our Options Clear: A Closer Look at Agent-Centered Options,” Philosophical Studies , 78(2): 163–88.
Johnson, Robert N., 2010. “Duties to and Regarding Others,” in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide , Lara Denis (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kading, Daniel, 1959. “Are There Really ‘No Duties to Oneself’?” Ethics , 70(2): 155–57.
Kagan, Shelly, 1989. The Limits of Morality , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kahn, Samuel, 2018. “Kant and the Duty to Promote One’s Own Happiness,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy , 6: 1–12.
Kamm, Frances M., 2007. Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm , New York: Oxford University Press.
–––, 1997. “A Right to Choose Death?” Boston Review , published 01 June 1997 [ Kamm 1997 available online ].
Kant, Immanuel, Practical Philosophy , Mary Gregor (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Includes [ G ] 1785, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral s ; [ CPrR ] 1788, The Critique of Practical Reason ; and [ MM ] 1797, The Metaphysics of Morals .
–––, [ LE ] 1775–1780. Lectures on Ethics , Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Kanygina, Yuliya, 2020. “Duties to Oneself and Third-Party Blame,” Public Affairs Quarterly , 34(2): 185–203.
–––, forthcoming. “Duties to Oneself and Their Alleged Incoherence,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy .
Korsgaard, Christine M., 1996. The Sources of Normativity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, David K., 1997. “Finkish Dispositions,” Philosophical Quarterly , 47(187): 143–58.
Lo Re, Stefano, forthcoming. “The Glowing Screen Before Me and the Moral Law Within Me: A Kantian Duty Against Screen Overexposure,” Res Publica .
Mackenzie, Jordan, 2018. “Knowing Yourself and Being Worth Knowing,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association , 4(2): 243–61.
–––, forthcoming. “Self-Deception as a Moral Failure,” Philosophical Quarterly .
Martin, C. B., 1994. “Dispositions and Conditionals,” Philosophical Quarterly , 44(174): 1–8.
Mavrodes, George, 1964. “Duties to Oneself I,” Analysis , 24(5): 165–67.
McGoldrick, Patricia M., 1984. “Saints and Heroes: A Plea for the Supererogatory: Discussion,” Philosophy , 59(230): 523–28.
Meiland, Jack W., 1963. “Duty and Interest,” Analysis , 23(5): 106–10.
–––, 1964. “Duties to Oneself III,” Analysis , 24(5): 168–71.
Mothersill, Mary, 1960. “Professor Wick on Duties to Oneself,” Ethics , 71(3): 205–8.
Muñoz, Daniel, 2020. “The Paradox of Duties to Oneself,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 98(4): 691–702.
–––, 2021. “From Rights to Prerogatives,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 102(3): 608–23.
Narveson, Jan, and Alonso Church, 1964. “Duties to Oneself II,” Analysis , 24(5): 167–68.
Parfit, Derek, 1978. “Innumerate Ethics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 7(4): 285–301.
–––, 1984. Reasons and Persons , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pogge, Thomas, 2008. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms , 2nd edition, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Portmore, Douglas W., 2019. Opting for the Best: Oughts and Options , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Postow, B. C., 2005. “Supererogation Again,” Journal of Value Inquiry , 39(2): 245–53.
Pybus, Elizabeth M., 1982. “Saints and Heroes,” Philosophy , 57(220): 193–99.
Raz, Joseph, 1972. “Reply to MacCormick,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volumes), 46: 80–103.
–––, 1986. The Morality of Freedom , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reath, Andrews, 2002. “Self-Legislation and Duties to Oneself,” in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays , Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rosati, Connie S., 2011. “The Importance of Self-Promises,” in Promises and Agreements: Philosophical Essays , Hanoch Sheinman (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 124–55.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 2014. “On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right,” in The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Two “Discourses” and the “Social Contract,” , John T. Scott (ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schaab, Janis David, 2021. “On the Supposed Incoherence of Obligations to Oneself,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 99(1): 175–89.
Scheffler, Samuel, 1994. The Rejection of Consequentialism: A Philosophical Investigation of the Considerations Underlying Rival Moral Conceptions , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schelling, Thomas, 1985. Choice and Consequence: Perspectives of an Errant Economist , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schofield, Paul, 2015. “On the Existence of Duties to the Self (and Their Significance for Moral Philosophy),” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 90(3): 505–28.
–––, 2018. “Paternalism and Right,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 26(1): 65–83.
–––, 2019. “Practical Identity and Duties to the Self,” American Philosophical Quarterly , 56(3): 219–32.
–––, 2021. Duty to Self: Moral, Political, and Legal Self-Relation , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singer, Marcus G., 1958. “On Duties to Oneself,” Ethics , 69(3): 202–5.
–––, 1963. “Duties and Duties to Oneself,” Ethics , 73(2): 133–42.
Slote, Michael, 1984. “Morality and Self-Other Asymmetry,” Journal of Philosophy , 81(4): 179–92.
Steiner, Hillel, 2013. “Directed Duties and Inalienable Rights,” Ethics , 123(2): 230–44.
Stocker, Michael, 1976. “Agent and Other: Against Ethical Universalism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 54(3): 206–20.
Straumanis, Joan, 1984. “Duties to Oneself: An Ethical Basis for Self-Liberation?” Journal of Social Philosophy , 15(2): 1–13.
Superson, Anita, 2010. “The Deferential Wife Revisited: Agency and Moral Responsibility,” Hypatia , 25(2): 253–75.
Szasz, Thomas, 2002. Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide , Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Thompson, Michael, 2004. “What Is It to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice,” in Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz , R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 333–84.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 1990. The Realm of Rights , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Timmermann, Jens, 2006. “Kantian Duties to the Self, Explained and Defended,” Philosophy , 81(3): 505–30.
–––, 2013. “Duties to Oneself as Such (TL 6:417 – 420),” in Kant’s “Tugendlehre”: A Comprehensive Commentary , Andreas Tampota, Oliver Sensen, and Jens Timmermann (eds.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 207–19.
Timmons, Mark, 2013. “The Perfect Duty to Oneself as an Animal Being (TL 6:421 – 428),” in Kant’s “Tugendlehre”: A Comprehensive Commentary , Andreas Tampota, Oliver Sensen, and Jens Timmermann (eds.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 221–43.
Velleman, J. David, 1999. “A Right of Self-Termination?” Ethics , 109(3): 606–28.
Ware, Owen, 2009. “The Duty of Self-Knowledge,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 79(3): 671–98.
Washington, Booker T., 1966. “Democracy and Education,” in Negro Social and Political Thought 1850–1920 , Howard Brotz (ed.), New York: Basic Books.
Williams, Bernard, 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Muñoz, Daniel, and Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt, 2022, “ Wronging Oneself ,” unpublished manuscript, dated January 23, 2022.
Schofield, Paul, 2022, Duty to Other, Part I: Second-Personal Reason , unpublished manuscript, dated January 9, 2022.

Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

Info about mirror sites

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

The Power of Serving Others: How Empathy and Learning Can Create a Positive Impact

Serving others is one of the most important things you can do as a human being . it involves putting the needs and well-being of others ahead of your own. and making a positive impact on the world. i’ll explore what it means to serve, why it is important, and how you incorporate this mindset into your life., recently i read a book about how someone sold over 100,000 copies of a book because of three words. the three words he was referring to were to serve the reader. that really got to me, and i’ve been thinking about service, and in what ways i can serve others. when i read the book, i was in the middle of writing leadership reading: spilling the tea on how top leaders read..

I took the author’s message to heart. When I was titling the chapters, I constantly asked myself how I was serving my readers. Would they know what to expect from the chapter based on the title? I’ve also been thinking about how you can serve others and serve yourself. I think that’s important as well.

The Definition of Serving Others

Serving others can be defined as taking action to help others expecting nothing in return. This involves a wide range of activities, from volunteering at a local charity to helping a neighbor with their groceries. Serving others is about being compassionate, and selfless, and doing what you can to make a positive impact on the world.

My Experience with Serving Others

I have always felt a strong sense of purpose when I am serving others. Whether it's helping a friend in need or creating a product or service to help others. I have found that serving others is one of the most rewarding things I can do. It has helped me to build stronger relationships, develop new skills, and make a positive impact.

Why Serving Others is Important

There are many reasons serving others is important. It helps to make the world a better place. By taking action to help others, you create a ripple effect of positivity and kindness that inspire others to do the same. Serving others helps you develop new skills, build stronger relationships, and improve your overall well-being.

The Role of Empathy in Serving Others

Empathy is a key component of serving others. By putting yourself in someone else's shoes, you better understand their needs and how you can help them. Empathy allows you to connect with others on a deeper level, creating a sense of compassion and understanding that makes a huge difference in someone's life.

The Power of a Positive Attitude

Maintaining a positive attitude is also important when serving others. By staying optimistic and hopeful, you inspire others and create a more positive and supportive environment. A positive attitude helps you stay motivated and overcome any obstacles or challenges that may arise.

How to Incorporate Serving into Your Daily Life

Incorporating a serving mindset into your daily life is easier than you may think. Start by looking for small ways to help others, such as holding the door open for someone or offering to carry their groceries. Look for opportunities to volunteer in your community or donate to a local charity. By making serving others a habit, you create a positive impact on the world around you.

The Ripple Effect of Serving Others

One of the most powerful aspects of serving others is the ripple effect it creates. When you take action to help others, you inspire them to do the same. This creates a chain reaction of positivity and kindness that spreads far beyond your initial actions. By serving others, you create a better world for everyone.

Serving Others as Planting Seeds

Serving others is like planting seeds. When you take action to help others, you’re planting seeds of kindness and compassion that grow and spread. These seeds inspire others to do the same, creating a beautiful garden of positivity and kindness.

Serving others is about putting the needs and well-being of others ahead of your own. And creating a positive impact on the world. By developing empathy, maintaining a positive attitude, and looking for ways to help others, you create a ripple effect of positivity and kindness that changes the world. Whether through volunteering, donating, or simply being kind to those around you, you have the power to make a difference.

Wondering what to do next, you can do all of:

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel

Join the art of learning membership site, download unlock your genius power reading tips sheet, buy me a cup of coffee, if you want access to my bookish notes, please consider joining my membership site, the art of learning ., about the author avil beckford.

Hello there! I am Avil Beckford, the founder of The Invisible Mentor. I am also a published author, writer, expert interviewer host of The One Problem Podcast and MoreReads Success Blueprint, a movement to help participants learn in-demand skills for future jobs. Sign-up for MoreReads: Blueprint to Change the World today! In the meantime, Please support me by buying my e-books Visit My Shop , and thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn , Facebook , Twitter and Pinterest !

Enjoyed this article?

Find more great content here:

Interview with My Future Self: Unveiling Wisdom and Growth

What the documentary boxed in by nicole chrysostom-murray can teach us, 11 key benefits of implementing employee book clubs in your organization.

Social Responsibility to Others Essay

Introduction.

Social responsibilities are vital and play an enormous role in every aspect of human life. Consequently, individuals must live in a wealthy and expanding society, and they must be mindful of both domestic and international responsibilities (“Roles and Actions”). “Millions” by Sonja Larsen, “Cranes Fly South” by Edward McCourt and “How to live in history” by Yvonne Blomer describes the various ways in which individuals should be responsible to others. Social responsibility allows a person to understand the interconnectedness of causes and effects that form the fabric of life.

The Power and Responsibility of the Adults’ Influence on Children

The interest of adults in children’s lives is significant in developing a child’s social skills. For instance, in “Millions” by Sonja Larsen, the child is obsessed by thoughts of buying guns (Larsen). However, upon being engaged by the school counselor, the child turns his attention to catapults and medieval weapons because they less harmful as the guns.

Parents face challenges in understanding children’s problems. For instance, despite being asked about the million-dollar question, the child’s interests comprised the anti-social activities (Larsen). As a result, the adult school counselor is forced to institute an assessment program to help the child change his thought processes.

Teaching children morality and sensitivity is one of the key responsibilities of parents. For example, through the school counselor’s continuous interest of the child, the narrator states, “sometime I’m a hero, and sometimes I’m the first victim” (Larsen). In this case, the narrator is capable of understanding the consequences of the adults influence on children by instilling social skills.

From the above analysis, responsibility and understanding of the consequences of the adults influence on children. Therefore, through adult’s social responsibility, children are able to understand the interconnectedness of causes and effects of certain life mistakes. The result is a change of behavior to the better.

Intergenerational Communication for Enriching Human Life Experiences

Through social responsibility, the conditionality of children’s love for the older generation improves. For instance, in “Cranes Fly South” by Edward McCourt, Lee’s love for his grandfather makes him take him to witness the flight of the crane because he knows it would be exciting to his grandfather. Lee does this despite the day being cold and bleak.

The probable extinction of the whooping crane, which is stated at the beginning of the narrative, links to the notion of mutual respect as the most important prerequisite for intergenerational communication. Grandfather is aware that his time on earth is limited and that he must see the majestic grandeur of the crane one more time before dying. This is realized through the help of his grandchild, Lee.

The story uses the symbolism of the whooping crane to mean a change of life. For example, his grandfather’s health begins to improve, which makes Lee pleased, as seen by his last words, “He’s gone south.” Grandfather will finally have a chance to see the sea (McCourt 143). It points towards the distinctive abilities and skills of children in adult’s life.

It is important to equal value the contributions of both parties through intergenerational communication. For instance, when the grandfather finally dies, Lee’s parents blame it on him. This makes Lee so depressed and anguished over his grandfather’s death. Therefore, grandfather’s delirious raving and the parent’s reactions demonstrate that children have insight into life and death, hence, the need for equal value contributions.

Listening As the Main Way of Knowing the World by a Child

Communication is one method of passing on a parent’s worldview to a child. According to Lee and Sandra, children develop self-concepts and beliefs depending on how their parents interact with them (48). Lack of communication between the child and the mother is clear when the narrator say, “he begrudgingly helps out his mom” (Larsen). Therefore, communication should be used to transfer the worldview of parents to a child.

Listening is also a way for a child to learn about the world by hearing both expressed and unspoken feelings and thoughts. For instance, according to Blomer, language is “the way your mother may have told you—her forehead pressed to yours, saying: Listen, dear, listen .” (Blomer. para. 3) As such, despite not loudly speaking, the child understands the mother’s communication through pressing of the foreheads alone.

Communication forms a new fabric of reality due to the perception of a child. In “How to live in history” Blomer relates language as both being a family and having the feeling of a child (Blomer). Furthermore, Blomer states that, “They forget that part of language is listening “(Blomer, para. 4). Therefore, language, which is communication, can be understood by children by visualizing the world through listening.

Listening is one of the primary ways a child learns about the world because it connects generations as well as the past and the future. For instance, in “Cranes Fly South,” Lee listens to his grandfather’s story about never having seen a whopping crane before (McCourt 143). The narrative points towards the child’s capacity to link the two generations using the symbolism of the whooping crane.

The Importance of the History of Intergenerational Relations

The importance of responsibility to others as a foundation of nation history is significant for intergenerational relations. Lee, a child, is closely related with his grandfather because of the social responsibility he feels for the old man (McCourt 143). This indicates the importance of history in relating the two diverse generations.

As a society and as a community, individuals should embrace the historical perspective of social aspects of life in order to establish social responsibilities within a society. Lee embraces the generational past aspects of the grandfather (McCourt 143). The effect is the unlocking of his grandfather’s happiness because throughout his life, he has been envying seeing whooping cranes go south.

Importance of the history of intergenerational relations is established by the interconnectedness of causes and effects in life. For instance, in Larsen’s narrative, the effect of obsession of guns by the child has a familial cause, and the effect could be life damaging to the child. Therefore, the narrative uses the interconnectedness of causes and effects in life in helping the child understand other important life perspectives.

Social responsibility is a key to comprehending the fabric of life. In Larsen’s story, without the school counselor and Lee, intergenerational relations are challenging. Therefore, social responsibility makes both the child and the narrator to establish the prerequisite of all the fabrics of life: the child’s viewpoint of life and the narrator’s perspective.

In conclusion, as indicated in “Millions” by Sonja Larsen, “Cranes Fly South” by Edward McCourt and “How to live in history” by Yvonne Blomer, Social responsibility enables an individual to comprehend the interdependence of causes and consequences that comprise the fabric of life. As such, listening facilitates connection with others and a sense of responsibility.

Works Cited

Blomer, Yvonne. “How to Live in History.” Create Victoria-Cultural Plan , Web.

“ Importance of Parents in Life: Roles and Actions .” Cuemath , Web.

Larsen, Sonja. “ Millions .” Little Fiction Big Truths , Web.

Lee, Glona, and Sandra D. Simpkins. “ Ability self-concepts and parental support may protect adolescents when they experience low support from their math teachers .” Journal of Adolescence , vol. 88, no. 1, 2021, pp. 48-57. Web.

McCourt, Edward. “ Cranes Fly South .” Web.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, January 28). Social Responsibility to Others. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-responsibility-to-others/

"Social Responsibility to Others." IvyPanda , 28 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/social-responsibility-to-others/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Social Responsibility to Others'. 28 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Social Responsibility to Others." January 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-responsibility-to-others/.

1. IvyPanda . "Social Responsibility to Others." January 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-responsibility-to-others/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Social Responsibility to Others." January 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-responsibility-to-others/.

"Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt: Rhetorical Devices
“Our Journey to Repowered Feminism” by Sonja K. Foss
Family Dynamics in "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt
Whooping Cough: Review
Nella Larsen's "Passing" in Context
Passing' by Nella Larsen Literature Analysis
Nella Larsen's “Passing”: Character Comparison
Pertussis Outbreak and Vaccination Against It
Journey to Self in "Quicksand" by Nella Larsen
Domains of Knowledge about Human Nature by Larsen and Buss
Swift's and Conrad's Critiques of Imperialism
Giftedness and Socio-Emotional Issues
Public Service Announcement and Distracted Driving
Interviewing a Culturally Different Person
Impact of Free Childcare on Working Parents

Is Serving Others the Key to Meaning and Purpose?

Recent findings show the role of serving others in finding meaning and purpose.

Posted July 14, 2016

What Is the Meaning of Life for You? By Gleb Tsipursky Ph.D.

I remember how in November 2013 my wife (and fellow Intentional Insights co-founder) and I, together with a great bunch of people, organized a spaghetti dinner fundraiser at our Unitarian Universalist church in Columbus, OH. The event was a big success, with more than 120 attendees, a music program, a raffle and silent auction. We raised over $2000 for the Mid-Ohio Food Bank . It might surprise you that the dinner organizers and volunteers came from Columbus secular humanist, atheist, and skeptic groups, including the UU secular group , as this religious denomination embraces believers and non-believers alike . The dinner honored the Flying Spaghetti Monster , a light satire meant to promote reason-based scientific education in biology classes. No belief in a deity was required to participate in community-oriented civic engagement at this dinner – in fact, the event was explicitly oriented toward secular-minded folks.

Studies indicate that opportunities to serve others , whether in civic, private , or professional settings, as well as charitable giving , result in a stronger sense of purpose and meaning in life, leading to better mental and physical well-being . This does not mean that serving others is necessary for a strong sense of meaning and purpose, but such civic engagement generally helps contribute to gaining this sense. Volunteering together with others in your community enables the creation of strong social bonds , which adds further to a sense of meaningfulness. In the United States, religion offers the main venue for community belonging, and also for working with others to pursue civic engagement. Civic engagement ranges from donating one’s time to bring about a better world such as through the spaghetti dinner fundraiser described above, to pursuing social justice through advocacy and lobbying, as exemplified by BREAD , the main interfaith social justice organization in Central Ohio. No wonder that the majority of the research indicates that church-going believers in the US generally have a stronger sense of life meaning . However, as my research illustrates, other societies create many alternative venues besides religious ones that provided similar opportunities and the benefits that can result (check out this brief video based on my research to learn more).

So is there something similar happening in North America? Here’s the thing: there are more and more secular communities around, and they are actively participating in social justice activities. Just here in Columbus, besides the FSM dinner, the Humanist Community of Central Ohio does regular blood donations , which were featured in the main newspaper in Central Ohio , participates in LGBTQ activism , and promotes other forms of social and economic civic engagement . The local chapter of the United Coalition of Reason hosted a walk-a-thon to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, part of a broader national effort by the Foundation Beyond Belief . And COUNT, a Columbus secular group, is explicitly dedicated to volunteering. My wife and I have also led a year-long effort to get BREAD to open up its doors to secular folks , and then successfully mobilized a large contingent of non-believers to attend this event. National secular organizations, such as the Secular Student Alliance and the Secular Coalition for America , increasingly promote civic engagement. More and more opportunities are emerging for nonbelievers who want to volunteer together with others who share their value system, whether for more secular-themed causes such as Camp Quest, reason-based summer camps for children and youth , or social justice in general.

A particularly promising new trend in civic engagement is Effective Altruism . This movement is devoted to using well-reasoned, evidence-based approaches to find the most effective ways to improve the world, especially through charitable giving. Prominent secular notables are turning to Effective Altruism as the most reason-based, rational strategy of giving. Effective Altruism is endorsed by prominent secular philosophers such as Peter Singer . It includes organizations such as Giving What We Can , GiveWell , and 80,000 Hours . Your dollars will do the most good for the world through Effective Altruism!

What are the practical takeaways here? Whether you are a believer or secular, to gain a greater sense of purpose and meaning in life it helps to participate in civic engagement with others from your community. It might be more challenging if you are a non-believer, but there are plenty of local secular groups around the United States that offer opportunities to contribute to social justice on a local level. Take the initiative to push your local communities to do service for the social good. You will likely help yourself and others find a more powerful perception of life meaning, increase mental and physical well-being for yourself and others, and you can gain greater agency through achieving your personal and social goals . Here, altruism and self-orientation combine for the win!

_____________

P.S. For additional resources, check out this workbook with exercises on finding meaning and purpose using science-based strategies; this free science-based web app to evaluate your current sense of meaning and purpose; this free online class on finding meaning and purpose using science; and the wide variety of other resources on meaning and purpose available at Intentional Insights.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky runs a nonprofit that helps you reach your goals using science to build an altruistic and flourishing world, Intentional Insights , authored Find Your Purpose Using Science among other books, and regular contributes to prominent venues; and is a tenure-track professor at Ohio State. Consider signing up to the Intentional Insights newsletter ; volunteering ; donating ; buying merchandise . You can support him personally on Patreon . Get in touch with him at [email protected] .

Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D. , is on the editorial board of the journal Behavior and Social Issues. He is in private practice.

Find a Therapist
Find a Treatment Center
Find a Psychiatrist
Find a Support Group
Find Online Therapy
United States
Brooklyn, NY
Chicago, IL
Houston, TX
Los Angeles, CA
New York, NY
Portland, OR
San Diego, CA
San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA
Washington, DC
Asperger's
Bipolar Disorder
Chronic Pain
Eating Disorders
Passive Aggression
Personality
Goal Setting
Positive Psychology
Stopping Smoking
Low Sexual Desire
Relationships
Child Development
Therapy Center NEW
Diagnosis Dictionary
Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

Emotional Intelligence
Gaslighting
Affective Forecasting
Neuroscience

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Home ›
Reviews ›

Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue

Steup, Matthias (ed.), Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue , Oxford University Press, 2001, 272 pp, $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 0-195-12892-3.

Reviewed by Thomas D. Senor, The University of Arkansas

Knowledge, Truth, and Duty is a collection of fourteen essays by fourteen different authors. As the title indicates, the central topic is epistemic normativity and its relationship to the concepts of knowledge and justification, and to the twin goals of truth-seeking and error avoidance. The contributors are (in order of appearance): Susan Haack, Bruce Russell, Richard Fumerton, Carl Ginet, Richard Feldman, Robert Audi, Alvin Goldman, Matthias Steup, Marian David, Michael DePaul, Ernest Sosa, Noah Lemos, Vrinda Dalmiya, and Linda Zagzebski. With the exception of the papers of Haack, Goldman, and Sosa, these essays are making their print debut here. There is not space to adequately discuss each essay, so we will have to content ourselves with a quick description of each. After that I’ll take a closer look at one of the book’s central essays.

In her paper, “’The Ethics of Belief’ Reconsidered,” Susan Haack considers the relationship between epistemic and moral appraisal. After distinguishing five possible relationships between the two, Haack argues that the view that epistemic appraisal is but a subspecies of moral appraisal is false. For, Haack claims, if one’s evidence for p isn’t good enough, then one will be unjustified in believing that p. But a person “can’t be morally at fault in believing that p unless his belief is willfully induced” (p. 23). Yet that might not be the case; perhaps the person is intellectually deficient and cannot help but believe p even though his evidence does not support it—then his belief is epistemically unjustified but not morally permissible. Haack’s perspective on the relationship between epistemic and moral justification is captured in what she calls the “overlap thesis,” which says that there is a “partial overlap” and that “positive/negative epistemic appraisal is associated with positive/negative ethical appraisal” (p. 21). Her idea is that there are certain ways of being unjustified that bring along with them moral unjustifiedness. So a belief about, say, the current safety of my children that is formed on the basis of hasty generalization might well be both epistemically and morally unjustified. Believing in this way is a form of culpable ignorance.

Bruce Russell’s paper, “Epistemic and Moral Duty,” explores the same topic in a different way. Russell is concerned with the distinction between subjective and objective duty—moral and epistemic. Russell argues that knowledge requires the completion of both one’s objective and subjective epistemic duties. Borrowing from the work of Richard Feldman, Russell takes objective justification to require that the subject have good reason to believe the proposition in question; a subjectively justified belief is a belief that the person is blameless in holding. Russell uses this distinction to reply to examples of Alvin Plantinga’s in which a person has epistemically blameless true belief that is nevertheless not knowledge. These examples crucially involve a person’s holding a belief for which the subject lacks good reason. Russell takes these examples to show that objective justification is also necessary for knowledge. It is similar for beliefs for which the person allegedly has objective justification but lacks subjective justification.

Both Haack’s and Russell’s papers assume that epistemic appraisals are in some sense “normative.” But what is it for an appraisal to merit this appellation? This is the topic of Richard Fumerton’s paper, “Epistemic Justification and Normativity.” In the end, Fumerton can find no good sense of the term according to which epistemic judgments are normative. What’s the result of this? Fumerton claims that one potential implication is that epistemic internalists who criticize externalists for failing to fully appreciate epistemic normativity are off the mark (although Fumerton is sympathetic to other criticisms of internalists).

Part II of the book is entitled “Epistemic Deontology and Doxastic Voluntarism.” Carl Ginet’s fascinating paper, “Deciding to Believe,” kicks off this section. Ginet argues that while we lack direct control over a great many of our beliefs (i.e., that doxastic voluntarism is false regarding much of what we believe), there is a class of propositions that we can, in the right circumstances, come to believe “just by deciding to believe” them. The kind of case Ginet has in mind occurs when some doubt with respect to p comes up and one considers whether to believe that p, thinks that it would be better to believe p in these circumstances than to withhold p, and so decides to believe that p. To illustrate, Ginet offers the example of leaving home for vacation and then wondering whether the front door has been locked at the house. One might seem to remember doing it but not being completely sure. Nevertheless, given the hassle of driving the 50 miles back to one’s house, the good reason to think the door is locked, and the undesirability of worrying about it for the rest of the trip, one simply decides to believe the door is locked. Simultaneous with the decision is the forming of a disposition to “count on” p in deciding how to act in relevantly similar situations. Ginet recognizes that our having direct voluntary control in cases of this sort does little to motivate a general voluntarism of the sort that, for example, William Alston has argued against. Nevertheless, his article is noteworthy as a defense of even a rather restricted version of doxastic voluntarism.

No one has done more to defend the significance of epistemic deontologism against recent attacks than Richard Feldman. Here, in his paper, “Voluntary Belief and Epistemic Evaluation,” Feldman argues that a recent defense of doxastic voluntarism is flawed and that we lack the kind of control over our beliefs that we have over our actions, control that arguably is necessary for our actions to admit of deontological evaluation. However, Feldman argues that, as in the financial and legal domains, the “ought” of epistemology does not entail “can.” Just was we ought to repay our debt even if we are broke when the payment is due, so we ought to believe according to our evidence.

In “Doxastic Voluntarism and the Ethics of belief,” Robert Audi considers and then rejects arguments for two versions of doxastic voluntarism. Audi then considers the place for the ethics of belief in light of the failure of voluntarism. It turns out that there is a place for such an ethic but that the beliefs themselves are not the targets.

Alvin Goldman’s reprinted essay, “Internalism Exposed,” is the first paper of Part III, “Epistemic Deontology and the Internality of Justification.” Goldman is here interested in the motivation of internalism. The first rationale for internalism Goldman considers comes from what he calls the “guidance deontology” conception of justification. This is a long and rich essay that resists quick summarization. The bottom line is that Goldman finds internalism problematic because any way of construing “internal” that is sufficiently robust to guarantee that reliabilism is “external” has problems accounting for the justification of a whole range of beliefs—from stored beliefs, to beliefs originally justified by now-forgotten evidence, to beliefs about logical and probabilistic relations.

Editor Matthias Steup’s paper, “Epistemic Duty, Evidence, and Internality,” is a response to Goldman’s essay. Steup grants that the accessibility motivation for internalism leads to difficulties but argues one can motivate internalism by appeal to evidentialist principles. I shall have more to say about Steup’s defense of internalism at the end of this review.

Marian David’s paper, “Truth as the Epistemic Goal,” kicks off the fourth section, “Justification and Truth.” David’s paper is a thorough discussion of the relationship between justification and truth. In particular, David considers many possible variations on how to make explicit the “truth goal” (the goal of believing truth while avoiding error) spoken of by epistemologists of all stripes. In the end, David suggests a version of reliabilism that employs a subjunctive truth-goal (for every p, if S were to believe p, then p would be true, and if p were true, S would believe p) as the leading contender.

In “Value Monism in Epistemology,” Michael DePaul argues against the monism of his essay’s title. While some have claimed that truth is the only epistemic goal, DePaul claims that this can be seen to be wrong by considering that knowledge is better than mere true belief; true belief is be valued but not as much as knowledge is. There are, according to DePaul, a number of epistemic values—knowledge, truth, and justification to name a few.

Section V is “Epistemic Virtue and Criteria of Justified Belief.” These two papers seem somewhat thematically distant from their comrades. The first, Ernest Sosa’s reprinted “Reflective Knowledge in the Best Circles,” is concerned with, for example, how Descartes can noncircularly use what he clearly and distinctly perceives to show that God exists and thereby legitimize what is clearly and distinctly perceived. Sosa’s answer is the answer of the externalist: as long as the beliefs used in the proof arise from reliable (or “apt”) faculties they provide Descartes with non-reflective, animal knowledge. By using what we learn from our apt or virtuous faculties, we can achieve reflective knowledge by using our animal knowledge to construct explanations of how we know.

In “Commonsensism in Ethics and Epistemology,” Noah Lemos defends so-called “common sense” in both domains. He argues that beginning the epistemological enterprise with Moorean beliefs such as “I have two hands” is not objectionably parochial; furthermore, Lemos follows Sosa’s lead and argues that as long as these starter beliefs indeed have a positive epistemic status, they can ground our further beliefs—including our beliefs in epistemic principles.

The book’s final section focuses on virtue epistemology. Vrinda Dalmiya’s paper, “Knowing People,” takes its cue from virtue ethics and the method of care. While the notion of epistemic responsibility has a role to play, it is not simply the responsibility of standard deontological theories of justification. Rather the method of care centers the epistemic discussion on cultivating and reinforcing attitudes that are regarded as positive in the wider epistemic community.

Linda Zagzebski’s essay, “Recovering Understanding,” is an example of the way a virtue epistemologist evaluates and analyses an epistemic virtue. Citing the work of Plato and Aristotle on understanding, Zagzebski offers an account that takes understanding’s object to be structures of reality—that is, objects like pieces of art or buildings—rather than propositions that are the objects of knowledge. To understand is to comprehend these structures. Virtue epistemology, Zagzebski argues, is in a better position than non-virtue epistemology to give us workable accounts of subjects like understanding because the former but not the latter is able to accommodate both proposition and nonpropositional subjects.

If one is going to critically discuss a collection of essays in a short review, one will have to do so either by talking only abstractly about the collection as a whole or else by focusing on one particular essay. I shall do the latter. The remainder of this essay is a raises an objection to Steup’s reply to Goldman.

As mentioned above, Steup believes that one aspect of Goldman’s critique of internalism is correct: if the internalist starts with the accessibility constraint, she’ll run into problems. However, not all is lost for the internalist. She can instead motivate her view by adopting an evidentialist account of justification. Moreover, Steup argues, she can motivate her evidentialism by deontology. Steup notes that the relationship between the two is “complex” (p. 137) and that an adequate defense of it would be beyond the scope of his essay. He then gives a sketch of an argument that is prima facie problematic, but since Steup recognizes the sketchiness of his remarks on this score, I’ll not stop here to comment further.

What do we know about the sort of evidentialism that Steup prefers? Although he says rather little about the details, he makes two important theoretical points and then tells us a bit more when he responds to Goldman. Let’s look at these in turn.

Steup tells us that deontology leads to evidentialism. This is because no item can be that in virtue of which S is justified in holding a belief unless S is in “cognitive possession” of that item (p. 137), and the kinds of states that S possesses in the relevant sense are evidential states. So nothing is evidence for S that S does not possess.

The second theoretical point is that one need not have beliefs about what one’s duties are, still less beliefs about how one determines what one’s duty is. Saying he is taking a page from the externalist’s book, Steup maintains that justification requires only that a person has done her duty, not that she know she has done her duty or even be in a position to know it. “[A]ccording to evidentialism, having (undefeated) evidence for p is sufficient for being justified in believing that p. No further condition must be met” (p. 138). Now as it stands, this version of evidentialism would seem to have little to do with deontology. For as we learn a page later, Steup is willing to allow both stored and conscious beliefs to count as evidence. But then it looks as though if I have fifty beliefs that together entail p (and no set of 49 does), and I never put these beliefs together to see the entailment and am not being derelict in my failing to do this, I am nevertheless justified in believing p because I have undefeated (let us suppose) evidence for it. And this might be true even if my reason for believing p has nothing to do with my good evidence.

Let’s now take a look at how Steup’s internalism handles the problems that Goldman raises. The first Steup discusses is the problem of forgotten evidence. Suppose that Sally, an epistemically responsible person, believes that broccoli is good for her by reading it in the New York Times Science section. However, she later forgets where she read it and now only knows she believes it. Goldman claims that the person lacks an internal justification for her belief even though the belief is clearly justified and, if true, even counts as knowledge.

Steup replies that the evidentialist will argue that Sally does have evidence in this case: a memorial seeming. She seems to remember that broccoli is healthy; she also has a background belief that what she seems to remember is usually true. These comprise, Steup assures us, a good evidentialist justification for her broccoli belief. One point to raise here, it seems to me, concerns the epistemic status of stored beliefs. Steup allows these beliefs to play an evidentiary role in the justification of other beliefs. But in order for those beliefs to be justifiers, one would suppose, they must be justified themselves. So that should mean that stored beliefs, even when stored, are justified or unjustified. But then consider Sally’s broccoli belief before she remembers it, when there is no memorial seeming associated with it. One would suppose that if this belief will be justified when it becomes occurrent, it must be justified just before then. But then the justification of the belief doesn’t depend on the memorial seeming.

Be this as it may, Goldman foresees the move Steup makes and says that what this shows is that the kind of justification the internalist can get is not the sort that is crucial for knowledge. To see this, we should reconfigure the Sally case so that she initially forms the belief on the basis of what is known to be a bad source. So suppose also that she acquired this belief in a very unreliable way (and in a way she would take to be unreliable) and that she has not had the belief corroborated in the meantime by trustworthy sources. As with the original case, she doesn’t now remember where she came by the belief; she’s forgotten her source. Yet she has a memorial seeming and knows that she is a responsible believer who generally comes to her beliefs via reliable sources. Goldman claims that Sally is unjustified in her belief in the sense of justification that “carries a true belief a good distance toward knowledge” (Goldman, p 121). Steup rightly takes Goldman’s point here to signal a significant theoretical divide between them. Indeed, I think that this gulf generally exists between internalists and externalists about justification. The externalist and internalist will agree that knowledge requires justified true belief that also satisfies a fourth anti-Gettier condition. They will disagree, however, about how much work the fourth condition does. Traditionally, it has been the condition called on to show why Gettier cases are not instances of knowledge. Consider the following: suppose this were a world in which the demon is very effective at leading you into falsity but in which he screws up once and, quite fortuitously, you believe something true. Let this be a belief that we would typically count as justified—perhaps it is a standard perceptual belief. Is this a Gettier case? If you think it is, then you are likely an internalist who thinks that the fourth condition of knowledge has a lot of work to do. On the other hand, the externalist will typically say that there are no Gettier cases at demon worlds. Getting back to Sally, Goldman believes that the kind of justification that “carries true belief a good distance toward knowledge” is not had in a demon world; Steup and other internalists deny this. Is there any way of adjudicating this dispute without undertaking a general evaluation of the internalism/externalism controversy?

I believe there is. I think there is a rather sizable problem for Steup here; a problem that indicates that deontology and his brand of evidentialism might not rest together as well as he thinks. First, let’s consider the second Sally case from the perspective of deontology; and to do this, let’s consider a point in moral theory. As St. Anselm showed in Cur Deus Homo , the “ought implies can” principle fails when one is culpable for one’s inability to do what one ought. I promise to pay you back tomorrow the $100 I borrowed last week. In the meantime I’ve spent my entire paycheck on CDs, books, and beer; I have only $10 until my next paycheck in two weeks. I now cannot pay you tomorrow. Does that mean that I’m no longer have an obligation and hence will not be culpable for failing to pay? Of course not. My inability to pay today is explained by my earlier misdeed. There may a synchronic notion of doing one’s duty according to which as long as I’m doing the best I can now I am justified in acting as I do, but this is surely not the currency that standard moral evaluations trade in. We expect better of each other. Now I think that the epistemic deontologist should say the same regarding Sally. Sure, given that she believed irresponsibly in the first place and has since forgotten the ground of her belief, there is a synchronic sense of doing one’s epistemic duty in which her current believing is nonculpable. Yet since were it not for her earlier misdeed (believing irresponsibly) Sally wouldn’t now have the broccoli belief, and since all that has happened in the meantime is that Sally has forgotten the source of her belief (hardly an off-setting epistemic virtue), Sally must be judged to not have done her (diachronic) duty in believing as she does.

This result is doubly problematic for Steup. First, these considerations suggest that even if we are thinking of a deontological, internalist sense of justification, we should side with Goldman and say that Sally is unjustified. Second, and more significantly, the above considerations suggest that deontological considerations get on rather poorly with evidentialism. For what I’ve been arguing about the deontological evaluation of Sally’s belief is independent of considerations of the quality of her evidence. What seems clear from Steup’s sketch of evidentialism is that it is a synchronic theory: whether or not one is justified at t depends upon one’s evidence at t; and one’s evidence at t depends only on what’s happening at t. Here then is the big problem: deontological considerations generate a diachronic concept of justification but evidentialist considerations of the sort highlighted by Steup lead to a synchronic notion.

Despite its problems, Steup’s paper is a good read; it advances the internalism/externalism debate by showing that there are conceptual resources for resisting at least some of Goldman’s conclusions. (If evidentialism is unshackled from deontology there might well be sufficient resources for responding to Goldman). In addition to the Steup essay, of the previously unpublished essays, I found those of Ginet, David, Fumerton, and Feldman to be particularly thought provoking and insightful; but the overall quality of the papers is high. Knowledge, Truth, and Duty is well worth the time of any epistemologist.

Phone: (855) BR4-LAWS (274-5297) | Email: [email protected]

Practice Areas

Is There a Legal Obligation to Assist Others in Emergency Situations?

One area where moral and legal obligations may contradict one another, is with respect to the duty for a bystander to intervene when witnessing someone who needs help, is injured, or is a victim.

Moral vs Legal Obligations

Morally, many would argue that watching someone who is in need of help and refraining from providing it is wrong. Many would argue that it is our ethical obligation to render whatever help we can, even if it is just picking up a phone and calling 911. The idea that someone could legally see another in distress, perhaps even someone who is dying, and simply watch, doing nothing, conflicts with common notions of morality.

The issue is getting publicity after a law professor whose family were victims of the Holocaust published a book , arguing that not only do all people have an obligation to step up and help others in need, but that it should be a crime not to do so.

The author argues that the Holocaust may not have happened or would have been mitigated had those people who stood by and did nothing took some action to stop it from happening, or at least, tried to protect Holocaust victims. In the book, the author supports his belief that watching a rape or a crime is the same as being complicit to that crime.

The book details instances of sexual assaults that took place before bystanders who stood by and did little or nothing to prevent the attacks or render aid or assistance. The author does not suggest that everybody should jump into every dangerous situation like a comic book superhero, or put themselves in danger, but suggests that even the act of calling the police can help, and that it should be a legal obligation to do so.

Florida’s Good Samaritan Law

The closest that Florida law comes to any kind of duty like this is Florida’s Good Samaritan Law . That law does not require that any bystander do something, it merely provides some immunity for those who do choose to act to assist another.

The Good Samaritan law provides legal protection for those who render medical care or treatment to someone in need in an emergency, so long as the care is rendered in good faith, and so long as there is no objection by the victim or the family.

The person rendering the aid must act as a reasonably prudent person would. This means that the law will not protect anybody who does not have a medical license that performs an emergency surgery at the roadside.

It would, however, protect someone who sees a pedestrian who was hit by a car and tries to move the pedestrian out of the road to avoid being hit again, or who may wrap the pedestrian’s injury, or someone who drags a passenger out of a sinking vehicle.

The law also protects medical providers who render emergency care to a victim, so long as the care is not rendered recklessly. That normally means that the medical provider can not render any treatment that would be more dangerous than the harm, the victim may suffer with no treatment at all.

The immunities provided by the Good Samaritan law end when the emergency situation is over. That means that the victim is stabilized, or not in any risk of further injury if no care is rendered.

Although the law is intended to encourage people to help others, and avoid doing nothing when people need help, noticeably absent from the law is the obligation for anybody to actually do anything, from rendering care to calling 911.

Other Factors Can Create Obligations and Liability

As a general rule, there is no negligence or civil liability for failing to intervene and assist someone in need. However, that general rule has numerous exceptions, when there is a special relationship between two people.

For example, a teacher or counselor who supervises children in school or camp must intervene where possible to protect children or students from injury. Business establishments could not sit back and fail to help people in need on their premises. Some establishments have the obligation to provide sufficient security to intervene when people need help.

Many laws, such as those imposed by OSHA, may make it illegal for an employer to refrain from aiding or assisting injured employees. And, of course, responders bound by their job, such as police officers or EMS employees, must actively intervene to provide assistance to those in need.

Other States Have Bystander Laws

There are states that do impose a legal obligation on bystanders to intervene on a victim’s behalf. Those laws usually provide that assistance must be given to those in risk of grave harm, and so long as those helping are not at risk themselves by offering to help.

Proponents of these laws say that the likelihood of crime or negligence is reduced when people know that others will render aid, come to someone’s assistance, or call first responders. They also cite the moral duty to come to another’s aid. Others, however, are reluctant to pass laws that compel people to get involved in something they otherwise may have nothing to do with, and have concern that such laws may spur additional litigation.

If you or a loved one are injured because of the negligence of another, there may be many parties with potential liability. Contact Brill & Rinaldi today about a free consultation to discuss your case and to determine who may be responsible.

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, getting college essay help: important do's and don’ts.

College Essays

If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?

If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.

What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.

Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.

Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."

Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.

Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.

Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.

Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?

Help Brainstorm Topics

Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.

If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .

Help Revise Your Drafts

Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .

Revision questions should point out:

Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear

But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.

Want to write the perfect college application essay? We can help. Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will help you craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay to proudly submit to colleges. Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now:

Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
Tell you what to say and how to say it
Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager

Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.

An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.

Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.

Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.

Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.

Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).

Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.

A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.

Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:

If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.

On the Importance of Editing

Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )

Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )

On the Value of Proofreading

Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )

Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )

Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )

Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.

Parents or Close Relatives

Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.

A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?

One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.

Teachers or Tutors

A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.

Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."

If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.

At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.

Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .

Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.

You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.

If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.

First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .

Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.

Introduction Questions

Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.

Essay Body Questions

Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?

Reader Response Questions

Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.

My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.

When to Consider a Paid Editor

In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.

If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)

If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.

If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.

If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .

If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.

But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.

If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.

On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.

Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!

For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:

I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )

For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.

Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.

You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.

Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .

Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .

Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download them for free now:

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

Student and Parent Forum

Our new student and parent forum, at ExpertHub.PrepScholar.com , allow you to interact with your peers and the PrepScholar staff. See how other students and parents are navigating high school, college, and the college admissions process. Ask questions; get answers.

Ask a Question Below

Have any questions about this article or other topics? Ask below and we'll reply!

Improve With Our Famous Guides

For All Students

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 160+ SAT Points

How to Get a Perfect 1600, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 800 on Each SAT Section:

Score 800 on SAT Math

Score 800 on SAT Reading

Score 800 on SAT Writing

Series: How to Get to 600 on Each SAT Section:

Score 600 on SAT Math

Score 600 on SAT Reading

Score 600 on SAT Writing

Free Complete Official SAT Practice Tests

What SAT Target Score Should You Be Aiming For?

15 Strategies to Improve Your SAT Essay

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 4+ ACT Points

How to Get a Perfect 36 ACT, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 36 on Each ACT Section:

36 on ACT English

36 on ACT Math

36 on ACT Reading

36 on ACT Science

Series: How to Get to 24 on Each ACT Section:

24 on ACT English

24 on ACT Math

24 on ACT Reading

24 on ACT Science

What ACT target score should you be aiming for?

ACT Vocabulary You Must Know

ACT Writing: 15 Tips to Raise Your Essay Score

How to Get Into Harvard and the Ivy League

How to Get a Perfect 4.0 GPA

How to Write an Amazing College Essay

What Exactly Are Colleges Looking For?

Is the ACT easier than the SAT? A Comprehensive Guide

Should you retake your SAT or ACT?

When should you take the SAT or ACT?

Stay Informed

Get the latest articles and test prep tips!

Looking for Graduate School Test Prep?

Check out our top-rated graduate blogs here:

GRE Online Prep Blog

GMAT Online Prep Blog

TOEFL Online Prep Blog

Holly R. "I am absolutely overjoyed and cannot thank you enough for helping me!”

Essay About Helping Others. Always Do Good

Our company is like the other academic paper writing services can help you with writing tasks. Ordering the paper, you can safe your time and use it for personal purposes. We work honestly and conscientiously and we guarantee the high quality of the paper. Visit the website if you want to learn more about us . The services are also described there. Managers are always ready to answer your questions . For many years students are satisfied with the work of this online essay grammar editor .

Also in this section:

Is It Difficult To Write My Research Paper?
Essay Proofread Online: Check Your Grammar And Spelling Here
Custom Essay Writing Services: What Service to Choose
Pay For Papers
Using Online Essay Checker Services
Essay Grammar Check: Pros and Cons
Academic Writing Service
Essay Rewriter

Two Secrets

There are two simple secrets about which people always forget or don’t know them at all. The first is: when you are giving something, you will most likely get something back! People will notice your generosity and maybe the will be also generous according to you. It is like a pleasant bonus, but you don’t need to do good things just hoping to get something back. Only kindness with the true motives are describes in this secret. In the Bible we can read the next statement: practice giving and people will give to you. And the next one is: for with the measure that you are measuring out, they will measure out to you in return.

And the second secret is that helping others, you help yourself. Remember that it is much better to give than to get. It is simple law but it gives people the great satisfaction and feeling of happiness. It would be wonderful if you will find the person for the example. You can take the Jesus Christ life for the great example, or the mother Teresa or somebody who you know personally. You are wrong if you think that there are no kindness and good people in the modern world. Of course, they are, maybe in minority, but they still are. I wish you be always above all the circumstances and always do the right things.

Trifles are very important

Listening to the problems of other people without making judgments is one of the best deeds that you can do. Most people know the answers on the questions they have encountered. They just did not realize it yet. Allowing them to talk about their problems, you help them find their way and understand what they should do. Sometimes they may need support and help to start a new life. You can help them avoid the mistakes you made yourself, and also help them to start learning from the mistakes that they will inevitably do in the future. In your life, you will often see that with someone has acted unfairly. Be ready to help such people. In this cruel modern world it I really very difficult to find the justice and don’t try to find it. Just do not despair and do not let others do it. If something can save this world it will be the unselfish kindness.

And always bring the matter to the end. If you have started helping someone, as a mentor or defending the rights of others and do not stop halfway. Never, after all, you will surrender yourself and at the same time disappoint those, who wanted to help.

From the personal experience

Sometimes when I tired or just want to have a rest, sitting in front of the TV or computer, I think that soon my mom will come back from her job and she will be more tired than I am. At such moments I stand up and go to the kitchen to prepare the hot supper for my mom and something she can take for the dinner at work. I also tried to control that the flat should be clean at the evening. It seems such a trifle, but my mom will be really happy and satisfied after the difficult busy day to sit at the warm kitchen and drink a hot cup of tea. No matter how tired my mother was, she will always notice what I did for her and she will smile and say thanks my dear. And for the sake of her smile, for the sake of the expressing joy in her eyes, I am ready to do this every evening, even if my own day was not very easy. Mother’s happiness always motivates me to do something good. And I think that the same should be in everyone’s life. We always get satisfaction if we helped someone to be a little happier. Let's do good everywhere and always and this world will change for the better!

I also think that if children grow up and have the well-paid job they can support their parents financially. Is this not showing kindness? You can buy your mother a new phone, and maybe the computer of your father is rather old? Always remember that time, when your parents were young they did everything for you and maybe it is the high time to answer them in the same way?

5 reasons why to help others

We help different people for different reasons. There is some category of people who can’t live if they don’t help others. Others can help just to be thankful for something. Mostly it all depends on the person and her/his wishes ( https://livecustomwriting.com/blog/habits-that-will-be-useful-in-your-life ). Sometimes we help other people as we want to think that we are a kind person. Sometimes we need to improve our mood, to feel ourselves nobler, be sure that somebody needs us. But the interesting fact is that helping others, we can improve our health.

1) Helping others? You will live longer. Different scientists from different countries made special researches and in 2013 they came to the same conclusion: we can really live longer if we start to help other disinterestedly. According to this statistical data, we can reduce mortality by 22%. Many people ask how many we should help others. According to the researches 100 hours will be enough, but it is not the standard, you can help just 50-75 hours and it also will be useful for you. But you need remember about the main thing, your helping should be regularly and systematic.

2) Improving mood and well-being. Helping others, we improve our mood. The scientists are sure that it’s enough five little acts of kindness during the week (do it for 6 weeks) and you will notice that your well-being is much better. It is very important to know that one-off help doesn’t matter. And the positive results after helping can quickly disappear. That’s why it is important often to help and gladly and derive benefit from it. If you like to help others it seems to me that you will never suffer from depression.

3) More communication. When you help other people you need to communicate with them. Who knows, maybe you will find new friend or the twin soul. Loneliness can badly influence on your health. Those, who are surrounded with kind people, have a long and happy life.

4) You will have lower blood pressure. In 1998 were organized interesting scientist researches. As a result, older people (over 50 years old), who decided to spend about 4 hours per week helping others, had a 40% less chance of developing hypertension in the next four years. The scientists consider that the positive effect of helping can be connected with stress reduction. Volunteering can motivate you to become better and better, positively adjusts and gives support to cope with daily troubles.

5) Less pain. If you are suffering from the chronic illness, you feel the discomfort from time to time but you can avoid this feeling. Just start to help those people, who have the same disease as you have. Even in a hospital, if you’ll help others, you will feel much better, become more confidence, receive positive energy and be able to control the situation.

It is also very interesting that all the described advantages for your health are impossible if you help by the way or just give money to beggars. The main thing is your personal participation and systematic.

How can I help other people

In our helping others essay we want to give you some simple ideas. After reading them, you can start making kind acts right now. You can help your family:

vacuuming the apartment, wash dishes, clean the floor if nobody asks you to do it;
cook something for dinner;
give your parents a card with the words how you love and appreciate them;
help your brother or sister to cope with the home tasks.

You can also help others:

visit somebody in the hospital;
help your old neighbor to do something about the house;
give present to those persons, who has great difficulties now.

In this help others essay we just gave you some simple examples ( https://livecustomwriting.com/blog/avoid-doing-this-thing-to-become-confident ), and I am sure that if you stop and think a little, you will create the dozens way to help others. Set the goal to help one person this week and be ready to see the miracles. Remember, that we can also help you. The company can write essay for you but for the nominal fee, of course. In fact, we can all help each other, we can be part of a mechanism that promotes cooperation and, finally, we ourselves can create better conditions for our lives.

COMMENTS

Do we have a moral obligation to help others?
According to Chappell, besides the religious, "here is a moral principle that states that if you are in a position to prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything comparably significant, then you should do it.". This rule can also extend to helping others financially, if one has the means to do so, Chappell added.
The Importance of Helping Others: An Essay on the Power of Compassion
Benefits of Helping Others. There are numerous benefits to helping others, both for the recipient and for the giver. Here are some of the key advantages: Increased feelings of happiness and fulfilment. Improved mental health and well-being. Building stronger connections and relationships with others. Reduced stress levels and improved self ...
What Are Our Responsibilities To Others?
In pre-flight instructions, you are always advised, in the case of emergency, to take care of yourself before assisting others. This makes sense, because you won't be able to help another if you yourself are in jeopardy. This reasoning could be extended, however, to never actually helping anyone other than yourself. That doesn't seem right.
Have you a moral duty to care for others?
Immanuel Kant: 'The duty of care includes care of oneself'. Joe Humphreys. Fri Jun 13 2014 - 01:00. The controversy surrounding the Tuam mother-and-child home has highlighted how societal ...
Individuals have a moral obligation to assist people in need
You are not obligated to have sex with them, you are however obligated to assist them in not having to have sex in the first place. This essentialy means we perscribe ourselves to knowing the best way to help a need. The way to do this would be to abide by a legitamite government which operates under the notion orf morals.
Kant's Moral Philosophy
Hence, we have a duty to sometimes and to some extent aid and assist others. Kant held that ordinary moral thought recognized moral duties toward ourselves as well as toward others. Hence, together with the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, Kant recognized four categories of duties: perfect duties toward ourselves, perfect ...
Essay about Moral obligation to help
Essay about Moral obligation to help. Peter Singer said; "If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it" (Famine, Affluence, and Morality). As human beings, we have a moral compulsion to help other people, despite the verity ...
Why Do We Help Others? The Morality Preference Hypothesis
The Morality Preference Hypothesis. We often help others. In most cases we help friends, family members, or colleagues. However, in some situations, we also help people with whom we have no connection whatsoever, for example, when we donate our change to a homeless person along the street, or when we give part of our salary to a humanitarian ...
Obligations to Oneself
The tension here is so deep that many philosophers claim to only believe in one of these two kinds of duty, while totally rejecting the other. At one point in his Lectures on Ethics [LE], Kant suggests that we only owe ourselves respect: "self-regarding duties…have nothing to do with well-being and our temporal happiness" (LE 27:341).
Helping Others: Definition, Benefits, & Examples
There are many benefits to helping others beyond the good we put into the world. For example, helping others is associated with greater health, well-being, and longevity (Post, 2014). Research has also shown that helping others can improve self-confidence, self-awareness, self-esteem, and reduced symptoms of depression (Schwartz & Sendor, 1999).
Do humans have the obligation to help others?
Essay on Do humans have the obligation to help others? It can also be a response to those who are in need or just a moral issue that we as humans try to make whenever we can. One of the reasons is that we help ... it is our responsibility to help others in need. It is our duty to contribute to the betterment of our community and to support ...
The Power of Serving Others: How Empathy and Learning Can Create a
One of the most powerful aspects of serving others is the ripple effect it creates. When you take action to help others, you inspire them to do the same. This creates a chain reaction of positivity and kindness that spreads far beyond your initial actions. By serving others, you create a better world for everyone.
Social Responsibility to Others
Social responsibilities are vital and play an enormous role in every aspect of human life. Consequently, individuals must live in a wealthy and expanding society, and they must be mindful of both domestic and international responsibilities ("Roles and Actions"). "Millions" by Sonja Larsen, "Cranes Fly South" by Edward McCourt and ...
Kant: The Ethics Of Duty And Reason
Similarly, all people have a duty to help others in distress, yet many people may help others not out of a sense of duty, but rather because it gives them pleasure to spread happiness to other people. A person who feels no philanthropic inclination, but who nonetheless works to help others because he or she recognizes that it is a duty to do so.
Is Serving Others the Key to Meaning and Purpose?
This does not mean that serving others is necessary for a strong sense of meaning and purpose, but such civic engagement generally helps contribute to gaining this sense. Volunteering together ...
What it Means to Serve Others
We have to "make it" first and do things our way — which usually means "getting ours" and not caring for what others get. We take advantage of the generous help of others without giving ...
Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification
If one is going to critically discuss a collection of essays in a short review, one will have to do so either by talking only abstractly about the collection as a whole or else by focusing on one particular essay. I shall do the latter. The remainder of this essay is a raises an objection to Steup's reply to Goldman.
The Obligation to Help Others and the Bystander Effect
The bystander effect has been described in Psychology Today as when "the presence of others discourages an individual from intervening in an emergency situation.". Throughout history there have been many examples of humans choosing not to help others who are in danger. In fact, many people even find it troublesome to help those in danger.
Is There a Legal Obligation to Assist Others in Emergency Situations?
Other States Have Bystander Laws. There are states that do impose a legal obligation on bystanders to intervene on a victim's behalf. Those laws usually provide that assistance must be given to those in risk of grave harm, and so long as those helping are not at risk themselves by offering to help.
Getting College Essay Help: Important Do's and Don'ts
Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College) Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head.
All People Should Help Others
All people should help each other without expecting any reward because it would help make this world way better, there would be peace and no war, and it helps decrease stress. Helping people can make this world way better. For example, helping your neighbors rake the leaves that fell off in fall.
Essay About Helping Others. Always Do Good
Many people ask how many we should help others. According to the researches 100 hours will be enough, but it is not the standard, you can help just 50-75 hours and it also will be useful for you. But you need remember about the main thing, your helping should be regularly and systematic. 2) Improving mood and well-being.
Commentary: Christians have duty towards others
Third, we have a Christian duty to help carry burdens for others. Galatians 6:2 says, "Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." Nobody should have to walk ...

University of Miami

Explore Topics

Related Links

Do we have a moral obligation to help others?

Tools and Resources

Essay Papers Writing Online

The Significance of Compassionate Acts

Understanding the Impact

Benefits of Helping Others

Empathy and Connection

Spreading Positivity Through Kindness

Creating a Ripple Effect

Building a Stronger Community

Related Post

What Are Our Responsibilities To Others?

Spread the word about Intellectual Roundtable:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Have you a moral duty to care for others?

Is caring for people a moral option or a duty?

How does a nursing-home manager avoid treating clients as a means rather than an end?

You have looked at how such principles might transfer to other sectors, such as financial services. So what would Aristotle make of the Irish banking crisis?

Would it be ethical to outsource caring in the future to robots?

Does one have a responsibility to care for oneself?

Is ‘flourishing’ only a young person’s game? What does it mean to flourish in one’s old age?

IN THIS SECTION

Individuals have a moral obligation to assist people in need

All the Yes points:

No because…

Why Do We Help Others? The Morality Preference Hypothesis

Related Articles

Bibliography

Obligations to Oneself

1. What is an obligation to oneself?

6.7 Privacy

6. Applications

6 Self-respect

Support SEP

The Power of Serving Others: How Empathy and Learning Can Create a Positive Impact

The Definition of Serving Others

My Experience with Serving Others

Why Serving Others is Important

The Role of Empathy in Serving Others

The Power of a Positive Attitude

How to Incorporate Serving into Your Daily Life

The Ripple Effect of Serving Others

Serving Others as Planting Seeds

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel

Enjoyed this article?

Interview with My Future Self: Unveiling Wisdom and Growth

Social Responsibility to Others Essay

The Power and Responsibility of the Adults’ Influence on Children

Intergenerational Communication for Enriching Human Life Experiences

Listening As the Main Way of Knowing the World by a Child

The Importance of the History of Intergenerational Relations

Works Cited

Is Serving Others the Key to Meaning and Purpose?

Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue

Is There a Legal Obligation to Assist Others in Emergency Situations?

Moral vs Legal Obligations

Florida’s Good Samaritan Law

Other Factors Can Create Obligations and Liability

Other States Have Bystander Laws

Choose Your Test

Table of Contents

What's Good Editing?

Who Can/Should Help You?

The Bottom Line

Help Brainstorm Topics

Help Revise Your Drafts

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

On the Importance of Editing

On the Value of Proofreading

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Parents or Close Relatives

Teachers or Tutors

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Introduction Questions

Essay Body Questions