E.G.

I'm a fan of the idea that we have moral obligations to ourselves, for two main reasons:

Feelings of guilt: I feel guilty when I let myself down, and I feel guilty when I let others down. The feelings do not seem dramatically different to me. And in general, when I let someone down and feel guilty about that, I take this as a sign that I've violated an obligation of some sort.

Consistency: I am similar in all sorts of morally relevant respects to others. And I can have moral obligations to others. So, it stands to reason that I can have moral obligations to myself, too. 

I am aware that many people believe that morality is always and only other-directed and thus doubt that we can have moral obligations to ourselves. I suspect that this type of view at least sometimes rests on an argument like the following:

(1) If someone has a moral obligation to do something, then it is always appropriate for others to blame and/or punish them if they fail to do it.
(2) It is rarely appropriate for others to blame and/or punish someone for failing to fulfill any purported moral obligation to themself.
Therefore, we do not have any moral obligations to ourselves.

However, I think we should reject the first premise of this argument. When you let yourself down, I agree that it is usually (and perhaps always) inappropriate for others to blame and/or punish you for that. But I don't see that this means you have not violated any obligation to yourself in letting yourself down.

***

Although I think it is true that we have moral obligations to ourselves, it seems to me that the sorts of obligations that I have to myself are very different from the obligations that I have to most other people.

In some ways, the obligations that I have to myself seem more demanding than the obligations that I have to others. For example, it seems to me that I have an obligation to myself to provide myself with the things I need in order to be creative and productive. I do not think I have such an obligation to a stranger sitting next to me on the bus.

Yet it also seems to me that I might have certain moral liberties with myself that I do not have in relation to others. For example, if I want to take an uncomfortable seat on the bus in order to let the stranger have the better seat, this seems fine. But it seems wrong, in at least some versions of this scenario, for me to grab the better seat and thus force the stranger to have the worse seat.

Those of us who think we have obligations to ourselves need to either (i) explain why our obligations to ourselves seem different in various ways from our obligations to others, or (ii) explain away the sense that that difference exists. I think (i) is the better option.

***

It seems to me that we might be able to make significant progress on (i) by getting clear about the nature of one's relationship to oneself.

In general, our obligations seem to be affected by our relationships. Your obligations to your friends differ from your obligations to strangers, for example. So, maybe we can say that your obligations to yourself differ from your obligations to others because your relationship with yourself is different from your relationship to others.

***

What sort of relationship do you have with yourself? It's possible that this relationship is fundamentally different from any relationship that you have to anyone else. But I am somewhat attracted to the idea that the relationship you have to yourself is highly similar in many respects to the relationship of a parent to a child.

You aren't literally your own parent, of course, but it seems to me that the role that you ought to play in your own life is similar to the role that your parents would normally have played in your life when you were younger. As an adult, you've got the job of making yourself into what you'll become next, and this, it seems to me, is also the job of a parent in relation to her child, at least when the child is young.

I have recently heard people talk about "self re-parenting," an idea that seems to have originated in the world of psychotherapy and then seeped out into the general culture. I think that what I'm talking about here is similar, although I get the impression that people who talk about "self re-parenting" often take it to be about repairing damage done by mistakes their parents made. The idea I'm floating here by contrast is that everyone, even people who had perfect childhoods, should think of their relationship with themselves as similar to the relationship of a parent to a child.

***

This idea might help us to understand some of the intuitions that I mentioned above. I have an obligation to myself to enable myself to be creative and productive, because I am like a parent to myself, and parents in general owe such things to their children. I have no such obligation to the stranger on the bus, because I don't have anything like a parent-child relationship with her. It's OK for me to take the uncomfortable seat so that the stranger can have the comfy seat, because an uncomfortable seat is the sort of burden that a parent would typically be able to justifiably foist on her child. It's at least sometimes not OK for me to take the comfy seat and thus deprive the stranger of comfort, because it's also at least sometimes wrong to provide those sorts of benefits to one's child at strangers' expense. And so on.