Yuliya Kanygina, doctorante à la Central European University à Budapest en Hongrie et chercheure en visite au CRÉ, nous présente ses recherches à l’occasion d’un midi de l’éthique.

Titre: Duties to Oneself: the Challenge from Society-Anchored Morality

Résumé: In this presentation I will examine one of the reasons to doubt that genuine moral duties to oneself exist. The objection stems from the idea that moral duties arise as a result of social interactions and do not arise at all in the situations in which an agent’s actions do not affect, directly or indirectly, the well-being of another person. I shall consider generally Hobbesian as well as Kantian contractualisms in order to identify where the challenge comes from. I shall argue, first, that Hobbesian contractualism – the original source of the objection – does not sustain scrutiny as a moral theory in general. Second, I shall consider Kantian contractualism as a possible source of the threat and claim that, although it has resources to account for the possibility of duties to oneself, it is vulnerable to serious objections. Finally, I shall outline and criticize the only view still standing and supposedly threatening the idea of duties to oneself, i.e. the Deliberative Contractualism by Nicolas Southwood (2010).