Can You Really Owe Something to Yourself?
A promise to the person in the mirror
It’s midnight on December 31st. You raise a glass of sparkling cider and decide: I promise myself I’ll practice piano every single day this year. Weeks later, you skip a day. Did you do something wrong? After all, the promise was only to yourself. If you decide to let yourself off the hook, who exactly would you be wronging?
This question sits at the heart of a long-running debate about obligations to oneself. We often talk about duties we owe to others — returning borrowed money, telling the truth, not hurting people. But can you owe a duty to yourself? And if you break it, is that a real moral failure, or just a bad habit? Philosophers have wrestled with this for centuries, and it turns out that a simple New Year’s resolution quickly leads to a deep puzzle.
The paradox: can you lock yourself in a room and keep the key?
The classic trouble with owing something to yourself was spelled out by Marcus Singer, a 20th-century American philosopher. He argued that the very idea is self-contradictory. Here’s why. If you have a duty to someone, that person normally has a right against you — and with that right comes the power to waive the duty, to release you from it. If you owe a friend ten dollars, your friend can say “My treat” and the debt vanishes. But what if you owe a duty to yourself? Then you could waive it anytime, just by deciding to let yourself off. A duty you can escape at will doesn’t really bind you at all. It’s like a lock you can open with a thought. As Singer put it, a duty to oneself would be “self-contradictory.”
Before Singer, the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes made a similar point about laws: a sovereign who makes laws can repeal them whenever he likes, so he isn’t really bound by them. And the German thinker Immanuel Kant (18th century) worried about the same puzzle. He wrote that if the part of you that imposes a duty and the part that must obey are the same self, “he would not be bound at all to a duty he lays upon himself. This involves a contradiction.”
So the paradox is this: duties need to bind you in a way you can’t just shrug off. But if the duty is owed entirely to yourself, you can always shrug it off. Therefore, Singer concluded, there are no genuine duties to oneself — only duties regarding oneself that are ultimately owed to other people, or useful habits dressed up in moral language.
Kant’s answer: duties you can’t waive away
Singer’s argument hinges on the idea that every duty comes with a right to waive it. But what if that isn’t true? Many philosophers, led by Kant, reply that some duties are unwaivable — you cannot release yourself from them, no matter what you decide. These are not like promises or contracts that you can cancel. They are demands you owe to yourself simply because you are a person.
Kant called these non-juridical duties. Juridical duties are external and enforceable, like contracts: if I promise you money, you can release me from the debt. But non-juridical duties are about the inner attitude you must have toward yourself — respect for your own humanity, or in Kant’s words, the duty to respect humanity in one’s own person. You cannot just decide that you don’t need to respect yourself anymore, any more than you can decide that a mountain is no longer tall. That value isn’t up for grabs.
This view separates duties to oneself from the world of rights and waivers altogether. Self-respect and self-care become basic moral requirements that you owe to yourself as a person — not because you made a deal, but because you are the kind of creature who can set ends and make choices. If you harm yourself pointlessly or treat your body as a mere tool for profit, Kant says you degrade yourself, and no act of self-release can make that right.
But not everyone is satisfied. If a duty doesn’t involve any rights or any way to waive it, is it still a duty in the ordinary sense? Some worry that calling it a duty might just be a fancy way of saying “this is really important.” Others think Kant’s position still loses the battle on promises and contracts — it grants Singer’s point that you can’t have a truly binding agreement with yourself, the kind you can strike and then cancel.
Promises to yourself: resolution or real obligation?
Now back to that New Year’s resolution. Many of us self-promise — we say “I promise myself” to stop a bad habit or start a good one. Is this just a way of steeling our resolve, as Singer thought, or a genuine promise that creates a real obligation?
Connie Rosati, a contemporary philosopher, argues that a self-promise works like any other promise: the promisor is bound until the promisee releases them. The only unusual part is that you happen to be both people. But that doesn’t make it empty. Rosati insists that “so long as she does not release herself, she is indeed bound.” Until you actually go through the mental step of telling yourself “I release myself from this promise,” the obligation stands. And even if release is easy, the act of releasing can say something about you — perhaps that your moral fiber is a little flimsy.
Yuliya Kanygina adds that not just any decision counts as a valid release. To waive a duty to yourself, you must make the choice autonomously — clearly, carefully, and without fooling yourself. If you break your resolution out of laziness or self-deception, you haven’t really waived the duty; you’ve just violated it, and feeling guilty is appropriate. So a self-promise isn’t automatically hollow. Its force depends on how seriously you take yourself as someone who can make demands on your future actions.
Tattoos, bodies, and your future stranger
The puzzle of self-obligation doesn’t just hang around New Year’s Eve. It shows up when you consider changing your body. Matej Cíbik, a 21st-century philosopher, imagines an 18-year-old named Amy who gets huge tattoos of her favorite pop star all over her face and hands. Years later, Amy may well regret it, but the tattoos are painful and expensive to remove. Cíbik argues that Amy acted wrongly toward her future self — she was reckless and inconsiderate, binding her later identity without consent.
This fits with a view developed by Paul Schofield, who argues that you can owe duties to your future self from its own perspective. When you smoke heavily as a teenager, the older you in a hospital bed could legitimately demand that you stop. That demand, made from a different point in your life, creates a duty you cannot simply shrug off from your present perspective. In the same way, marking your body permanently without thinking about the person you’ll become might violate what you owe to yourself over time.
Of course, there is also a case for taking risks and expressing who you are right now. Sometimes closing off future possibilities is itself an act of self-respect — like refusing to hide your natural hair or your accent to fit in, even if it costs you a job. The line between respecting your future freedom and bravely seizing the day is fuzzy and worth arguing about.
Why any of this matters when you’re not a philosopher
So why does a dusty paradox about duties to yourself matter in real life? Because every day you make decisions that treat one version of yourself as a boss and another as an employee. You decide how to spend your time, what to promise yourself, how to talk to yourself when you fail, and whether to let others walk all over you.
Consider self-respect. The philosopher Thomas Hill (20th century) argued that being servile — letting people treat you like a doormat because you don’t value your own rights — is a failure not just toward others, but toward yourself. When you let a bully push you around without protest, you aren’t just making yourself miserable; you might be wronging the person in the mirror who deserves to be stood up for. It isn’t about being loud or aggressive. It’s about recognizing that you count, and that you owe yourself that recognition.
When you break a promise to yourself, skip the homework you swore you’d finish, or treat your body in a way you know your future self would regret, you are living out the paradox in miniature. Are you free to waive every commitment, or are there lines you can’t cross without costing you your own self-respect? Philosophers don’t agree on the answer. But next time you whisper “I promise myself,” you’ll know you’re stepping into a conversation that includes Kant, Hobbes, and every kid who ever stared at a blank resolution card and wondered if it mattered.
Think about it
- If you promise yourself to stop a bad habit, and later decide to release yourself from the promise, does it make a difference why you release yourself? Could some reasons make the release okay and others not?
- Imagine your future self could send you a message today about a permanent choice you’re about to make (like a tattoo). How much weight should their opinion carry compared to your own right now?
- Can standing up for yourself be something you literally owe to yourself, or is it always just a smart way to protect your interests? How would you tell the difference?
