Speaker: Daniel Muñoz

Duties to oneself have a distinguished history in moral philosophy. They can also smell a bit fishy. To some extent, the defenders of duties to oneself have cleared the air in recent years by developing solutions to the 'paradox of self-release'. But there remains another, more normative problem. Many traditional duties to oneself -- like Kant's ban on 'unnatural' sex -- involve a dubious kind of teleology. And while modern theories are less priggish, it is not clear that they are any more principled. In this talk, I argue that we can give principled and plausible accounts of a range of classic duties to self, such as the duty to develop one's talents, by basing our theory on the Self-Other Symmetry, the view that we owe the same basic duties to ourselves as to anybody else.

Please note that these seminars are open to the public and in person only.