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ABSTRACT
In some cases, you may release someone from some obligation they have to you. For instance, you may release them from a promise they made to you, or an obligation to repay money they have borrowed from you. But most take it as clear that, if you have an obligation to someone else, you cannot in any way release yourself from that obligation. I shall argue the contrary. The issue is important because one standard problem for the idea of having duties to oneself relies on the impossibility of self-release. The argument (the ‘Release Argument’) is that a duty to oneself would be a duty from which one could release oneself, but that this is an absurdity, and so there can be no duties to oneself. This argument is to be rejected because a duty from which one can release oneself is perfectly possible, and such release occurs quite properly from time to time.
Notes
1 Kant expressly considered the Release Argument and attempted to reply to it, saying that duties to oneself are not really cases of A's having a duty to A, but are instead cases in which there is a duality within the self: there is the phenomenal self and the noumenal self. Denis [Citation1997], Reath [Citation1997], and Timmermann [Citation2006] all respond to the Release Argument, essentially from within a Kantian perspective. Although departing from Kantian theory, Schofield [Citation2013] attempts a rather similar move, responding to the Release Argument by suggesting that duties to oneself should be conceived as duties of a present self to a future self. A vigorous re-statement of the Release Argument was presented by Marcus Singer [Citation1959], although he used it only against duties to oneself considered in a narrow sense. In this paper, I develop a response to the Release Argument that avoids construing duties to oneself as duties of one entity to another.
2 Hill [Citation1983] gives cases of ‘self-regarding suicides’ motivated in ways that would provide examples for the current discussion. Note, however, that Hill is dealing with suicides, while our present concern is with the motives of someone requesting that they be killed.
3 For a thoroughgoing account and defence of the self-direction right, see Feinberg [Citation1986]. Feinberg uses the term ‘self-sovereignty’. Discussion of the right often takes place in the context of debates on libertarianism and paternalism. See Cohen [Citation1995] and Bird [Citation1999], especially chapter 5.
4 Perhaps it should be emphasized that most of the time when people deliberately choose not to do their duty, their choice so to act is an exercise of the self-direction right that fails to trump the pro tanto duty. In these cases, the all-things-considered duty remains just that, and no self-release occurs. The case of James releasing himself from a duty required a scenario in which the pro tanto duty from which he released himself had very little stringency.
5 Thanks to Janna Thompson, Greg Bognar, and Igor Primoratz for helpful comments and criticism. Thanks also to participants at colloquia, in particular in the University of Hong Kong in April 2014, and at the New Zealand Philosophy Conference at The University of Canterbury, Christchurch, in December 2014. I am grateful also for comments from referees and editorial staff of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy that resulted in considerable improvements to this paper.