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Duty to Self
Duty to Self
Moral, Political, and Legal Self-​Relation

PAU L S C HO F I E L D

1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data


Names: Schofield, Paul (Assistant Professor of Philosophy), author.
Title: Duty to self : moral, political, and legal self-relation / Paul Schofield.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020036344 (print) | LCCN 2020036345 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190941758 (hb) | ISBN 9780190941772 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Conduct of life. | Self. | Duty. |
Responsibility. | Supererogation.
Classification: LCC BJ1531 .S36 2021 (print) | LCC BJ1531 (ebook) |
DDC 179/.9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036344
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036345

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190941758.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
For Maureen, Penelope, and Truman
Acknowledgments

For helpful discussion about duties to the self over the years,
I thank Lauren Ashwell, Mike Dacey, E. Sonny Elizondo, Jeremy
Fix, Ned Hall, Yuliya Kanygina, Michael Kessler, David Langlois,
Douglas Lavin, Daniel Muñoz, Mark Okrent, Derek Parfit, T. M.
Scanlon, Susanna Siegel, Jiewuh Song, Rohan Sud, Susan Stark, and
Thomas Tracy. In the fall of 2019, I discussed some of the material
in this book with students in my seminar at Bates College, who pro-
vided characteristically trenchant feedback. They were a wonderful
group and I learned a lot from talking with them. I want to thank
two anonymous referees who provided helpful feedback at both
the early and late stages of the process. I am grateful to Nina Hagel,
Rafeeq Hasan, Erich Hatala-​Matthes, and Katie Heard, who visited
Maine to participate in a manuscript workshop, which was easily
the highlight of the book-​writing experience and which improved
the final product immensely. My good friend Bill Porter provided
extensive substantive and editorial comments on an entire draft
of the book, which I loved working through and which affected
nearly every page. I thank Richard Moran for reading drafts of sev-
eral chapters, and for giving detailed suggestions for improving the
account, despite disagreeing almost entirely with the line of argu-
ment pursued here. My colleague David Cummiskey read multiple
drafts of every chapter, and encouraged me both to start the book
and to keep going when things were difficult. I wouldn’t have fin-
ished without him. My dissertation advisor, Christine Korsgaard,
supported this project from the very beginning, when I took her
seminar in 2006 and first thought about the possibility of duties to
the self. She has been a tremendous influence as I developed these
ideas, and on me as a philosopher over the past fifteen years. I’m so
x Acknowledgments

fortunate to have had her as a teacher. My parents have supported


my education and intellectual pursuits throughout my life, for
which I will always be grateful. Finally, I want to thank my family—​
my children, Penelope and Truman, and my spouse, Maureen—​for
all their support and love. This book is dedicated to them.

This book elaborates on ideas first discussed in three previously


published papers:

“On the Existence of Duties to the Self.” (2015). Philosophy and


Phenomenological Research 90, no. 3: 505–​528.

“Paternalism and Right.” (2018). Journal of Political Philosophy 26,


no. 1: 65–​83.

“Practical Identity and Duties to the Self.” (2019). American


Philosophical Quarterly 56, no. 3: 219–​232.
Introduction

[N]‌o part of morals has been more defectively treated than


this of the duties to oneself. Nobody has framed a correct
concept of such duties; it has been considered a trifling
matter, and mentioned only at the end, as a supplement
to morality, in the belief that once a man has fulfilled all
his duties, he may finally also think about himself. In this
portion, therefore, all philosophical systems of morality
are false.
—​Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics1

§1. A Moral Philosophy with Duties to Self?

To say of someone that she has a duty to herself, or that she owes
it to herself to do this or that, isn’t likely to raise the eyebrow of
the proverbial person on the street. These forms of words often
find their way into everyday talk without bringing the proceed-
ings to a pause for clarification. With these phrases, we frequently
urge others to take care of themselves, or reassure ourselves about
the propriety of “looking out for number one.” Popular R&B and
dance songs have titles like “Owe It to Yourself ” and “I Owe It to
Myself.”2 The bookstore’s self-​help shelves display volumes such as

1Kant 1997a, 122.


2These titles were released by the R&B funk band The Gap Band and by the electronic
dance music producer Grades, respectively.

Duty to Self. Paul Schofield, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190941758.003.0001
2 Introduction

You Owe It to Yourself: Effective Keys to a Happier Marriage and You


Owe It to Yourself: Divorce and Relationships.3 A recent TED Talk
tells us: “You owe it to yourself to experience a total solar eclipse.”4
Columnists recommend to advice-​seekers not simply that they dis-
charge their duties to others, but that they also mind their duties to
themselves.5 The language of self-​directed duty, it seems, is not just
familiar, but pervasive.
Beyond everyday language, the concept of duty to self seems often
to undergird our thought and feelings, if only implicitly. Many nar-
rative works, for instance, rely on it. Consider the science-​fiction
film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In it, a heartbroken
man desperate to forget a recent breakup appeals to “Lacuna,
Inc.,” a company whose futuristic technology allows clients to re-
move painful memories. The attractions of this technology are un-
equivocal at first, with moral troubles emerging only as the story
unfolds. Attempting to tease out the philosophy informing the film,
Christopher Grau locates our increasing distress in a Kantian con-
cern for duties to the self:

In cases of . . . memory removal, we see agents treating themselves


solely as a means to an end rather than as ends in themselves.
This is a failure of self-​respect, and this imparts the tragic sense
that someone has, out of desperation, failed to recognize his or
her own worth. This harmonizes well with the mood of Eternal

3Malach 1999 and Cooper 2014, respectively.


4The talk is by author David Baron, available at: https://​www.ted.com/​talks/​david_​
baron_​you_​owe_​it_​to_​yourself_​to_​experience_​a_​total_​solar_​eclipse (retrieved online
7/​25/​2018).
5 When advising a woman whose father requested that she destroy, after his death, the

contents of a certain box he’d stashed away, Slate.com’s Dear Prudence counsels, “You
owe it to your father to put his mind at ease, and you owe it to yourself to find out just
what’s in the box.” http://​www.slate.com/​articles/​life/​dear_​prudence/​2009/​06/​daddy_​
issues.html (retrieved online 6/​15/​2017). Sex advice columnist Dan Savage, along
similar lines, informs a reader that he not only owes it to his boyfriend to tell him that
the reason he’s breaking up with him is that he finds him annoying, but that he “owes
it to himself ” as well. http://​www.thestranger.com/​columns/​savage-​love/​2016/​02/​10/​
23548259/​savage-​love (retrieved online 6/​15/​2017).
Introduction 3

Sunshine, as the film offers up exactly this sort of tragic situation


in which individuals are blind to their own worth. . . . The film
suggests that what [the characters] have done is both sad and
wrong; Kant’s moral theory [of duties to oneself] helps make this
suggestion comprehensible. (2006, 125)

It doesn’t seem to me that Grau is advocating a reading of the film


on which the very concept of a self-​directed duty is at issue—​that a
person does bear a moral relationship to herself is taken for granted,
baked into the premise. The film’s preoccupation, according to
Grau, is with whether acts performed by the principal characters
are among those forbidden by the morality of what one owes to
oneself—​whether they violate a kind of duty that audiences can be
assumed already to believe in when they enter the theater.
Outside of commonplace thought and talk, duties to the self have
been a frequent subject of investigation throughout the history of
philosophy. Indeed, writers in the early modern period typically
approached the topic not with a cautious willingness to entertain
the notion, but with something like an unhesitating assumption
that there was a topic to be remarked upon. Thomas Reid, for one,
exhibits no unease when opining about a moral relation to oneself:

It is true, indeed, that men’s passions and appetites too often draw
them to act contrary to their cool judgment and opinion of what
is best for them. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor [I see
and approve of the better, but follow the worse] is the case in every
willful deviation from our true interest and our duty. When this
is the case, the man is self-​condemned; he sees that he acted the
part of a brute when he ought to have acted the part of a man. . . .
When he feels the bad effects of his conduct, he imputes them to
himself, and would be stung with remorse for his folly, though
he had no account to make to a superior being. He has sinned
against himself, and brought upon his own head the punishment
which his folly deserved. (1872, 582, spelling altered)
4 Introduction

Talk of self-​directed duty isn’t, for Reid, merely rhetorical flourish.


In the passage, duty to self is placed into contact with a range of
other inter-​connected moral concepts—​in a short passage, we
see connections drawn to condemnation, remorse, sin, desert, and
punishment. Duties to self thus find themselves embedded within
an intricate web of moral practices pertaining to self-​treatment,
suggesting that in dealing with herself, a person is navigating
terrain that is decidedly moral. In other words, the dangers in
navigating such terrain involve not merely the possibility of being
foolish, imprudent, or insufficiently rational, but involve the more
harrowing possibility of moral trespass—​of sinning—​against one’s
own self.6
Bishop Butler approaches the topic of self-​directed duty with
similar seriousness, writing in his Dissertation Upon the Nature of
Virtue:

[I]‌t deserves to be considered whether men are more at liberty,


in point of morals, to make themselves miserable without reason
than to make other people so, or dissolutely to neglect their own
greater good, for the sake of a present lesser gratification, than
they are to neglect the good of others whom nature has com-
mitted to their care. It should seem that a due concern about our
own interest or happiness, and a reasonable endeavor to secure
and promote it . . . is virtue, and the contrary behavior faulty and
blamable, since, in the calmest way of reflection, we approve of
the first, and condemn the other conduct, both in ourselves and
others. (1983, 72)

6 Much philosophy from the modern period is ambiguous as to whether there exist

genuine duties owed to the self, or whether instead certain self-​treatment is simply owed
to God—​for instance, Locke’s famous treatment of the duty against suicide is, I think,
most naturally read as a duty owed to a deity (1988, 270–​271). The Reid quotation here
contains no such ambiguity, however, even as he deploys theologically tinged language.
A person might sin against herself, according to him, leaving little doubt about whom the
violated duty is owed to when the wrongful deed is committed.
Introduction 5

Placing the idea of duty to self within the broader context of moral
practice, Butler here insists that self-​regarding considerations fre-
quently carry with them morality’s distinctive normative force. For
since it is characteristic of morality that it prescribes certain treat-
ment for persons generally, and since one of the persons subjected
to an individual’s treatment is that individual herself, we should ex-
pect morality’s prescriptions to apply to her treatment of herself. To
repurpose Thomas Nagel’s formulation from the twentieth century,
each individual is “a person among others equally real” (1970, 14).7
But whereas this Nagelian formulation is most apt to highlight that
a person is just one among others, Butler draws attention to the fact
that each person is indeed one among others. Whatever orientation
we are bound, by our acknowledgment of their reality, to have to-
ward others, we’re bound to have toward ourselves as well. We our-
selves are “equally real.”
Once we appreciate Butler’s point, it should seem only natural
that Kant became the modern era’s most forceful defender of duties
to the self. For Kant, wrongful action most often stems from an im-
pulse to make an exception of oneself. And what is the denial of
duties to self, other than an attempt to excuse oneself from giving
one person the treatment that she owes to all? When introducing
his study of morality’s foundations in the Groundwork, Kant
writes: “We shall now enumerate a few duties in accordance with
the usual division of them into duties to ourselves and to other
human beings and into perfect and imperfect duties” (1997b, 31).
What’s striking here is that duties to the self are not simply admitted
to exist or begrudgingly countenanced, but are said to constitute
a principal obligation-​type around which the Kantian system will

7 While the formulation is Nagel’s, he never in The Possibility of Altruism (1970)

emphasizes that a person must recognize herself to be in possession of moral standing,


as one among the many. A lengthy discussion of the normative relationship a person
bears to herself over time does occupy a significant portion of that monograph (29–​76),
and that discussion does take up the Butlerian concern about “dissolutely [neglecting
one’s] own greater good, for the sake of a present lesser gratification.” But curiously,
Nagel treats the issue under the umbrella of mere prudence as opposed to morality.
6 Introduction

be constructed. Such duties are placed on a footing with other-​


directed obligations, rather than being a mere afterthought. In fact,
it is most accurate to say that they’re given a position of privilege:

So far from these duties being the lowest, they actually take first
place, and are the most important of all. . . . He who violates duties
toward himself, throws away his humanity, and is no longer in a
position to perform duties to others. (1997a, 122–​123)

In order to apprehend another as an object of moral concern, says


this passage, a person must acknowledge the humanity in herself.
Self-​directed duties possess a sort of logical priority—​a proper ac-
count of duty owed to others is not possible until the concept of
duty to self is already on the table. Thus, the notion of self-​directed
duty was, for the eighteenth century’s greatest moralist, not merely
a respectable object of intellectual curiosity, but a notion of funda-
mental moral importance.
That self-​directed duties find themselves largely absent from
the contemporary philosophical scene, then, ought to strike the
reader as mysterious. Widespread use of the notion in everyday
talk and thought, to say nothing of its prominence in great works
of moral philosophy, ought to pique philosophical curiosities—​
yet it doesn’t seem to be happening. The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, typically comprehensive in its coverage, includes no
stand-​alone entry for duties to self, while also leaving the topic
unaddressed within seemingly relevant entries—​“Deontological
Ethics” (Alexander & Moore 2016) to give a glaring example, makes
no mention of it. Few syllabi for ethics courses offered in anglo-
phone philosophy departments reserve any space for the study of
these duties, much less devote to them sustained attention. But all
of this, one supposes, is only to be expected, given that of the tens
of thousands of philosophy articles published in journals over the
last half-​century, only a small number give mention to the topic at
all. Even sprawling books on moral theory, which otherwise evince
Introduction 7

no scruples about excessive scope, tend to proceed with scant men-


tion of what a person owes to herself.8 And on the rare occasions
when contemporary philosophers (setting aside a few admirable
exceptions9) do mention self-​directed duties, they tend to do so in
reference to debates of the distant past—​debates about what Kant
was up to, in the majority of instances—​without showing much in-
terest in bringing those debates into conversation with philosophy
of the present day.10
The simple explanation for this neglect may be that the majority
of today’s professional philosophers believe that self-​directed duties
do not exist. Many seem simply to default to the position that mo-
rality is for others—​its subject matter is “what we owe to each other,”
to coin a phrase. Consider a passage from Bernard Williams’s Ethics
and the Limits of Philosophy:

[I]‌f we have accepted general and indeterminate obligations to


further various moral objectives, as [modern moral philosophy]
encourages us to do, they will be waiting to provide work for idle
hands, and the thought can gain a footing . . . that I could be better
employed than in doing something I am under no obligation to
do, and, if I could be, then I ought to be: I am under an obligation
not to waste time in doing things I am under no obligation to do.
At this stage, certainly, only an obligation can beat an obligation,
and in order to do what I wanted to do, I shall need one of those
fraudulent items, a duty to myself. (1985, 201–​202, my emphasis)

8 For instance, in the first two volumes of Derek Parfit’s On What Matters (2011)—​a

massive tome concerned with all things moral and normative—​I find only two passing
mentions of self-​directed duties (see Vol. 1, 141 and 325).
9 For instance, Carol Hay’s Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting

Oppression (2013).
10 For examples of scholarly articles that take this topic seriously, see Hill 1973, Paton

1990, Reath 1997, and Timmermann 2006. For a book-​length treatment of the issue, see
Denis 2001. All of these are written from a Kantian point of view, and most are primarily
interested in Kant exegesis, or at the very least in reconstructing Kant in such a way as to
render his position plausible. The character of the literature thus encourages, or perhaps
simply reflects, the widespread belief that the topic of duties to the self is mostly a histor-
ical curiosity associated exclusively with the Kantian project.
8 Introduction

The supposed fraudulence of duties to the self isn’t Williams’s


primary focus here—​but that is precisely what makes the pas-
sage remarkable. In context, Williams is attempting an assault
on the whole of modern morality. The non-​existence of self-​
directed duties serves, here, as an unsupported premise in that
argument. Insofar as modern morality depends for its plausi-
bility upon the existence of self-​directed duties, this calls into
question the entire institution—​at least according to Williams.
That this argument could be offered in one of the most cel-
ebrated works of moral philosophy in the past half-​century
speaks to the extent to which opinion has coalesced around the
non-​existence of these duties.
If contemporary philosophers are indeed skeptical of duties to
the self, then it’s to be expected that they’d dedicate little space to
discussing them. Nevertheless, in the interest of good philosoph-
ical practice, we might heed Aristotle’s dictum to take seriously the
endoxa—​that is, to adopt a posture of the mind open to hearing out
the opinions of the majority and the wise (1984a, 167). There is,
after all, something unsavory about the present-​day philosophical
elite dismissing out of hand a concept that seems to serve reliably
the population at large and has been treated as a legitimate object
of inquiry by our intellectual forebears.11 Thus, I propose we should
welcome a philosophical investigation of the possibility of duties to
the self.
The thesis of this book is that duties to the self comprise a
genuine moral category, and that we have every reason to think
that there exist such duties. To ignore this topic, as has been
common practice over the past century or more, is to shutter
our view of a vast region of the normative domain, skewing and
undermining our philosophical understanding of morality.

11 A willingness to challenge common opinion is, of course, unproblematic for a phi-

losopher generally, and for Aristotle in particular. The point is simply that it is imperative
to take seriously the common view as a starting point for inquiry.
Introduction 9

I believe steps ought be taken to reintroduce self-​directed duty


into mainstream practical philosophy, and intend this book as
one such step.

§2. Appeals to Self-​Duty


by Contemporary Kantians

Those familiar with the literature might, however, charge the pre-
vious section with misrepresenting the state of the field, noting
the considerable frequency with which present-​day Kantians avail
themselves of self-​directed moral concepts. Most famously, per-
haps, Christine Korsgaard constructs her neo-​Kantian account
atop a conception of the person as a self-​legislator:

The source of obligation is a legislator . . . [T]‌his is a legislator


whose authority is beyond question and does not need to be es-
tablished. It is the authority of your own mind and will. So [the
voluntarists] were right. It is not the bare fact that it would be a
good idea to perform a certain action that obligates us to perform
it. It is the fact that we command ourselves to do what we find it
would be a good idea to do. (1996a, 104–​105)

Through this act of authoritative self-​targeted command, a person


comes to owe the performance of particular actions to herself.
A similar appeal to self-​directed morals is found in the work of
Stephen Darwall. According to him:

To intelligibly hold someone responsible, we must assume that


she can hold herself responsible in her own reasoning and thought.
And to do that she must be able to take up a second-​person stand-
point on herself and make and acknowledge demands of herself
from that point of view. (2006, 23, my emphasis)
10 Introduction

It is a condition of being a moral agent at all, thinks Darwall,


that a person possesses a particular sort of practical competence,
whereby she is able to move herself to action through the repre-
sentation of these “internally addressed demands” (2006, 23).
A person’s relation to her own self is thus deeply entangled with
morality.
Despite its place of prominence in the writings of these two em-
inent Kantians, the notion of self-​duty arguably remains under-​
defended and under-​theorized. The Kantians mentioned earlier
help themselves to it with characteristic boldness, but neither
Korsgaard nor Darwall gives much indication that there is much
to puzzle over in the very idea of duty to self. Korsgaard talks of
legislating for oneself, as a sovereign might for her citizens. But
is such talk coherent? A person who legislates for herself must, it
would seem, address herself. Must she then acknowledge the ad-
dress, as a person might when spoken to by a superior? Or might
she ignore the address—​or push back, even? In this decidedly
peculiar set of questions, some will find nothing but a nonsen-
sical attempt to apply inherently social phenomena to an indi-
vidual person (Lavin 2014; Haase 2014a; Moran 2018, 190–​220).
But Korsgaard does not seem particularly alive to the worries of
those who recoil from talk of an individual enacting law to which
she herself is subject, as her mentions of self-​legislation are made
without apology or embarrassment. Much the same can be said of
Darwall, who makes free use of the idea of a person’s addressing a
demand to herself. And so there’s real danger that these accounts
will simply alienate many readers at their outset. This is, of course,
not to suggest that Korsgaard and Darwall are in the wrong, nor to
imply that the accounts they go on to develop lack materials with
which to answer the worries gestured at here. The considerations
mooted earlier amount to suspicions or concerns, rather than de-
cisive refutations. But if the suspicions and concerns are left un-
remarked upon, it becomes easy to see self-​duty talk as a quirk of
Introduction 11

the Kantian literature, rather than a subject worthy of broad philo-


sophical attention.12
Beyond Korsgaard and Darwall, scattered texts in contempo-
rary applied ethics, authored almost exclusively by philosophers of
Kantian temperament, make appeal to self-​directed duty. Discussions
of suicide (Velleman 1999), mental health (Hoffman 2013), cogni-
tive enhancement (Bauer 2018), and resistance to oppression (Hay
2013) have been presented with a focus on what a person owes to
herself. While the authors of these pieces are keen to argue for the ex-
istence of particular duties to the self, they tend to leave unaddressed
questions about the moral category per se. That is, it is uncommon
for these authors to address doubts about whether a person can in-
deed relate to herself morally, or wrong herself, or legislate for herself,
and it is also uncommon for them to address at any length the sig-
nificance of having a duty to oneself, as opposed to, say, a prudential
reason to treat oneself in a certain way.13 So here too, in the Kantian
quarters where self-​duty is mostly likely to make an appearance, the
notion of a duty to self goes unscrutinized. And because of wide-
spread skepticism about it, the insights contained in these pieces of
applied ethics are, I fear, too easily dismissed.
My conjecture, then, is that the prevailing view that duties to self
don’t exist, combined with the Kantian tendency to find the notion
entirely unproblematic, has given rise to a milieu in which the very
idea of duty to the self isn’t treated as a proper philosophical topic
by the discipline. This is the background against which the present
project is offered.

12 In private conversation, it was suggested to me that appeals to a person’s owing her-

self something are merely habitual to “a Kantian way of talking,” and so can be confi-
dently dismissed.
13 Even in Carol Hay’s book-​length argument that the oppressed owe it to themselves

to resist their oppressors, discussion of such issues is relatively cursory and confined—​
the section of the book entitled “Are Obligations to the Self Possible?” constitutes only
two pages of the whole (2013, 66–​68). This isn’t to criticize the book, which is insightful
and important. It is to say, however, that Hay’s argument and others like it would benefit
from a more thorough vindication of duty to the self as a category.
12 Introduction

§3. A Kantian Architectonic: On the Division


of Our Topic Into the Moral and the Political

A philosophical treatment of duties to the self has potential to


bear on both moral theory and political philosophy. Prohibitions
on and requirements to treat oneself in particular ways would, of
course, bring with them broad implications for our thinking on
how an individual ought to live as a private person. And although
duties to the self needn’t be politically relevant, they certainly might
be—​anyone who countenances their existence ought at least to be
open to the possibility that some self-​directed duties concern polit-
ical right, licensing the state to coercively ensure their discharge.14
Both the moral and the political facets of this topic will be taken
up in the ensuing investigation. But rather than treating politics as
a special domain within which principles from the broader moral
domain are to be applied, I’ve organized the book so as to treat
moral and political topics separately. The reasons for this choice
might not be immediately obvious, so I’ll devote some space here
to articulating them.
That moral and political philosophy demand independent
treatments is today a philosophical commonplace, even if it’s not
a proposition embraced universally.15 The primary historical ante-
cedent of this commitment is The Metaphysics of Morals, wherein
Kant writes:

14 To my knowledge, this isn’t a possibility that has been considered elsewhere. Why

it has not is a bit of a mystery, though perhaps the association of duties to the self with
Kantianism, coupled with the strong anti-​paternalist sentiments prevalent among
Kantians, explains this. More on this issue later.
15 The view that these topics should be so divided becomes especially popular in the

wake of the later Rawls, particularly with his clarification in Political Liberalism (1993)
that he intends justice as fairness not to be a comprehensive ethical doctrine. While
much twentieth-​century political philosophy seems to assume that moral principles
could be applied to politics, the worry eventually arose that coercive institutions that
citizens are unable to opt out of cannot impose a controversial morality without danger
of wronging some members. This is the insight underlying political liberalism, the dom-
inant school of political thought over the past quarter century.
Introduction 13

In contrast to laws of nature, these laws of freedom are called


moral laws. As directed merely to external actions and their con-
formity to law they are called juridical laws; but if they also re-
quire that they (the laws) themselves be the determining grounds
of actions, they are ethical laws, and then one says that conformity
with juridical laws is the legality of an action and conformity with
ethical laws is its morality. The freedom to which the former laws
refer can be only freedom in the external use of choice, but the
freedom to which the latter refer is freedom in both the external
and the internal use of choice, insofar as it is determined by laws
of reason. (1996, 16)

This passage brings to the fore a distinction that structures the


whole of Kant’s practical philosophy, which is the distinction be-
tween an act’s conforming to the requirements of politically enacted
law and a person’s conforming her will to the dictates of the moral
law. Moral philosophy concerns itself with the latter—​its focus is
not just what a person does, but also her grounds.16 Consider Kant’s
case of the shopkeeper, deciding whether to make correct change
for a vulnerable customer (1997b, 11). The specifically moral matter
at issue, for Kant, is what’s ultimately behind the shopkeeper’s
decision—​whether recognition of the customer as deserving of
respect explains his honesty, for instance, or whether he’s instead
motivated by concern for his reputation. Moral philosophy’s pri-
mary business thus consists in discerning which are the proper
principles of action for an individual to deploy when deciding what
to do, explaining why those principles are indeed the proper ones,
demonstrating how these sorts of principles of the will are possible,
and so on.
Political philosophy, in contrast, concerns principles gov-
erning the interactions between persons qua embodied

16 See Kant 1996, 10–​14.


14 Introduction

physical objects, or as Arthur Ripstein puts it, “[P]‌rinciples of


right [govern] persons represented as occupying space” (2009,
12). Its focus, then, is not on the will’s determining ground, but
on the normative principles regulating interactions between
physically embodied beings.17 Returning to the shopkeeper,
the specifically legal matters in the case pertain to whether the
change belongs in the hands of the customer, whether the cus-
tomer has the right to take it back if the store owner withholds
it, and whether a third party is entitled to forcibly redistribute
the change to the proper owner—​regardless of what anyone’s
ultimate motivations are for acting as they do. Thus, polit-
ical philosophy’s primary business consists in discerning the
conditions under which a person may touch another’s body, de-
termining who is entitled to claim particular physical objects as
their own, identifying which individuals are entitled to enforce
rules about touching and about property, and so on.
To clarify, now, my reasons for treating these two topics sep-
arately, consider that it’s uncertain whether conclusions arrived
at within the domain of moral philosophy will carry over into
politics. Let’s grant, returning to our example, that the ques-
tion of whether the shopkeeper is motivated by recognition of
the moral law is a matter of legitimate ethical concern—​that this
question bears decisively, in some absolute sense, on whether
the shopkeeper’s action was right or wrong. Even so, could the
state concern itself with this question? Evidently not. The state
isn’t, after all, in any way equipped to identify instances of im-
proper inner determinations of a person’s will. More to the point,

17 Kant writes: “Duties in accordance with rightful lawgiving can only be external

duties, since this lawgiving does not require that the idea of this duty, which is internal,
itself be the determining ground of the agent’s choice” (1996, 21). This issue about
morality’s concern with the will’s determining ground, and the absence of such a con-
cern within the domain of politics, has received a fair amount of treatment in the sec-
ondary literature. See Ebels-​Duggan 2009 and Pogge 2002.
Introduction 15

it simply does not follow from the fact that principles of morality
require a person to act a particular way that she may be made
to perform the act by her government. A duty to aid a family
member, grounded either in reciprocity or in the familial rela-
tion itself, doesn’t seem to license any sort of action on the part
of the state. The salience of this point becomes especially pro-
nounced when we reflect on the law’s connection to the use of
force.18 That a person has a moral right to demand of another
that she fulfill the terms of an agreement doesn’t indicate one way
or the other whether coercion may be exercised to compel per-
formance.19 From the fact that an act is required by moral duty, it
simply does not follow that there exists any person or institution
with a right to compel someone else to perform it.
I appeal to this Kantian architectonic not to signal a general em-
brace of Kant’s philosophy, but simply to clarify my reasons for
structuring the book as I have. Applied to our topic, the idea is that
investigation into the moral issues surrounding duties to the self
will involve thinking about whether there exist moral principles
that an individual is required to deploy when deliberating about
how to treat herself, discerning which principles there are, consid-
ering why those principles are the correct ones, and so on. But even
if we conclude that a person indeed has self-​directed duties, no po-
litical implications will follow, absent further argument. Whether
a person has self-​directed duties of right—​duties that the state may
force her to discharge—​answers to a different set of questions and
concerns, which will be addressed in a different part of the book
(Chapters 5 and 6).

18 This connection is a commonly acknowledged one, though Kant offers a (some-

what compressed) argument for it in §D and §E of The Doctrine of Right within The
Metaphysics of Morals (1996, 25–​26). For a contemporary Kantian defense of this idea,
see Ripstein 2004.
19 See Kant 1996, 21.
16 Introduction

§4. Duties to the Self: Potential Grounds


for State Paternalism

The portion of this project falling under the umbrella of core moral
philosophy, being fairly straightforward in its focus and aims,
requires little in the way of further elaboration. It will address itself
to questions about whether the concept of duty may be properly
applied in one’s dealings with oneself, and about the implications of
accepting or denying that they may. The political portion requires
more elaboration, however, for as will become plain, I’ve linked my
study of self-​directed duties to the topic of paternalism, and the rel-
evance of these two issues to one another might not be immediately
apparent.
In politics, “paternalism” refers to coercion of a person, by the
state, for her own sake—​it refers to enactment of laws that are justi-
fied by their propensity to protect a person from her own decisions.
That paternalism is prima facie troubling is the default position of
many, requiring those who see a place in the state’s role for pater-
nalism to offer special justification. Attempts to supply such jus-
tification are now a standard part of the philosophical literature,
with a few well-​known types of argument giving the debate about
paternalism its shape. Consequentialists, for instance, often argue
that when a paternalistic policy protects a person from bad overall
outcomes, this is sufficient to justify it (Conly 2012), whereas
liberals have frequently argued that paternalism, while illicit as a
general matter, is permissible in cases where a person would choose
to protect her own interests more carefully were she to make her
choice under ideal conditions (Rawls 1999, 219; Dworkin 1972).
However, a genuinely novel argument for paternalistic law is, I be-
lieve, suggested by the possibility of self-​directed duties. What
I have in mind is that the state could have permission to protect
a person from herself not on grounds that doing so would bring
about the best overall outcome, or that it would satisfy her deepest
preferences, or that it would evince a kind of parently care for her,
Introduction 17

but instead on grounds that she is bound by a duty to herself. Of


course, the fact that a person has a duty is never itself sufficient
to license state action, as was emphasized in the previous section.
Demonstrating that the state is so licensed requires additional dis-
cussion of what makes for genuine political duties that a person
may be coerced to discharge. This is a topic to which I will turn in
later chapters (Chapters 5 and 6).
This argumentative strategy will inevitably inspire some measure
of surprise. Those most welcoming to the notion of duties to the
self, characteristically Kantian in disposition, are typically those
most strongly opposed to using the law for paternalistic purposes.
Kant himself, of course, championed duties to the self while con-
sistently expressing hostility toward paternalism,20 denying
throughout his mature work the existence of self-​directed duties of
right. So the line I propose to pursue here can be seen as a sort of
provocation to this particular camp. But beyond its running afoul
of Kantian orthodoxies, the view serves to challenge mainstream
liberal dogma. The default posture among liberals is broadly anti-​
paternalistic, as their commitment to freedom militates strongly,
they think, against the enactment of paternalistic policy.21 Of
course, all admit that coercion is permitted when necessary to en-
sure that a person discharges her duties to promote freedom and to
realize justice—​it’s for this reason that liberals believe the state to be
necessary in the first place. But the startling feature of the view I’ll
eventually advocate is its appeal to liberal commitments in order to
defend paternalistic policies generally thought to be antithetical to
them. The appeal of the view, however, will be that it does not pre-
sume a blanket license to meddle in people’s lives out of concern for
aggregate utility or out of a presumption that the state may play the

20 For an example of his anti-​paternalism, see Kant 1991, 74.


21 Indeed, those working within these traditions often use paternalism to illustrate
how the state might bestow benefits on the populace while nevertheless using its power
illicitly. See Neuhouser 2014, 127–​131; Hodgson 2010, 899; Pallikkathayil 2016, 20–​22.
18 Introduction

role of care-​giver, but nevertheless makes room for a state to protect


an individual from herself.

§5. Ambitions of the Project

Vindicating the category of duties to self, both moral and polit-


ical, is the primary ambition of this book. Though I will discuss the
possibility of duties grounded in concern for wellbeing, autonomy,
flourishing, dignity, freedom, and justice, it isn’t my intention to
establish any particular duties to self as the ones by which we are
gripped, or to advocate for a list of acts and attitudes that a person
owes herself. The project is most concerned with the metaphysics of
morals, rather than the content of morality. Though it will be clear
that I find some duties to self to be more plausible candidates than
others, the hope is to create space within which to argue about the
content of these duties, rather than to settle such debates.
The book, however, should not leave the reader at a complete
loss when thinking about which duties one owes to oneself. For it
is reasonable, I think, to take the moral considerations one already
believes to be relevant within the realm of the interpersonal and
to attempt to apply them intrapersonally. So if one believes there
to be interpersonal moral norms related to wellbeing, autonomy,
or individual flourishing, a natural first step will be to provision-
ally assume that those norms govern a person’s moral relation-
ship to herself as well. Then one might begin to ask whether there
is reason to amend and to alter those norms in cases where they
are intrapersonally applied. Undoubtedly, discussion of this point
will eventually be necessary. If the book inspires it, then it will have
succeeded.
1
On the Significance of Duties
to the Self

To claim that persons have moral duties to themselves is to court


controversy, for it’s a thesis widely rejected in the present milieu.
Yet, the stakes of this controversy can seem obscure. The issue
could, after all, be cast as merely semantic. Everyone admits of self-​
regarding reasons to treat oneself in particular ways—​reasons to
promote one’s own wellbeing, to protect one’s own liberty, to de-
velop one’s own talents. It thus might appear as if all that’s at issue is
whether to permit the application of the term “moral duty” to such
reasons. This does seem to be what’s at issue in some remarks made
by Stephen Finlay, for instance. While attempting to define the term
“morality,” Finlay avers: “[I]‌t is widely believed that reason [does
enjoin] us to a healthy concern for our own interests,” but, “self-​
regarding considerations do not belong in what is ordinarily meant
by ‘morality’ ” (2007, 141). He secures this conclusion through ap-
peal to linguistic intuition—​he reports on how things sound “to his
ear”—​thereby excluding self-​directed reasons from what is meant
when the term “moral duty” is invoked (140).
To characterize the significance of this issue as primarily se-
mantic is natural insofar as one operates with an understanding of
morality that is substantive—​that is, an understanding on which
the moral domain, or the domain of moral obligation, is marked
off by the contents of the considerations the moral agent deals in.
On such a view, one might think it partially definitive of a reason’s
being a “moral duty” that its content makes reference to promoting
wellbeing, preventing harm, telling the truth, respecting someone’s

Duty to Self. Paul Schofield, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190941758.003.0002
20 Duty to Self

autonomy—​or to some disjunction of these. Then, one might ask


the further question about whether all reasons with these kinds
of contents should bear the “morality” label, or whether common
usage excludes reasons whose contents contain only prescriptions
for self-​treatment.1 Questions about the existence of self-​directed
duties, then, would center on whether a self-​regarding reason
ought be referred to as potentially a “moral obligation” given the
absence of an other in its content—​calling, it would seem, for lin-
guistic judgment, or perhaps linguistic legislation.
My intention here isn’t to dismiss efforts to provide a semantics
of moral obligation, but to point out that if semantics is all that’s at
stake in the dispute over the existence of self-​directed duties, the
topic wouldn’t warrant a book-​length treatment.2 Nevertheless,
there exists an alternative to delineating the moral realm substan-
tively in the way recommended by this semantic approach. To
deem a reason to be a moral duty, according to this alternative, is
to recognize it as the bearer of certain formal features. So, when

1 If we took this approach, we might turn our attention to the Cambridge Dictionary of

Philosophy, which defines morality as “an informal public system applying to all rational
persons, governing behavior that affects others, having the lessening of evil or harm as its
goal, and including what are commonly known as moral rules, moral ideals, and moral
virtues” (Gert 1999, 586, emphasis mine). Here the definition simply stipulates that
when we speak of morality, what is meant is a system regulating the treatment of others.
Then, perhaps, the dispute could proceed with an appeal to conflicting definitions from
other dictionaries, such as The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, which allows that mo-
rality can be equated with “ethics”—​a concept concerned broadly with how best to live a
life, which historically speaking has never been exclusively other-​related. And insofar as
the word “morality” refers to a more restricted concept, the Oxford dictionary defines it
as “systems such as that of Kant, based on notions such as duty, obligation, and principles
of conduct” (Blackburn 2008, 315). Nothing here would rule out the notion of duties to
self. Obviously this way of proceeding would involve linguistic dispute, but would not be
deeply philosophical, or rewarding.
2 Hume notices that our way of speaking respects a distinction between personal

virtues that tend toward self-​flourishing on the one hand, and social virtues that are
other-​directed on the other. In Appendix IV to An Enquiry Into the Principles of Morals,
which he entitles “Of Some Verbal Disputes,” Hume dismisses the distinction as a mere
matter of semantics, tracking no interesting natural or practical distinction (1975,
312–​321). As such, he shows no interest in demonstrating that the personal virtues are
genuinely moral ones. One might worry that the present project could be dismissed for
reasons similar to this. This chapter is offered with hopes of assuaging such fears.
On the Significance of Duties to the Self 21

deciding to refrain from action, whether “it would do harm to an-


other person” qualifies as a reason of moral duty is determined not
by the appearance of “harm” or “another person” in its content.
Rather, it is determined by the particular role it plays in practical
reasoning and in agential operation generally. Korsgaard attributes
a view like this to Kant:

Morality [for a Kantian] is not a certain set of considerations,


identified by their content, but a way of deliberating. . . . [W]‌hat
distinguishes the moral agent . . . is not first and foremost what he
thinks about when he decides, but rather the way he deliberates
when he makes his decisions. (2009, 48)

Thus, to ask whether a person owes moral duties to herself is to ask


whether self-​regarding considerations can play the role in delibera-
tion and in agency that is characteristic of moral duty. This chapter
seeks to clarify this difficult thought, in hopes of establishing the
importance of the question whether there exist self-​directed duties.

§1. Second-​Personality as the Form


of Moral Duty

It is characteristic of moral duty that it places individuals into re-


lations of accountability with respect to one another. The agent
who acknowledges duty as binding must view her relationships
with others in a particular light, as under morality’s rule “the
other” possesses a status that compels specific sorts of treatment.
This basic thought underlies much of the moral philosophy since
the early modern period, if not before,3 but has become the subject

3 It’s common to think of person-​ to-​person morality, with its focus on individual
rights, as a modern invention. It is most readily associated, after all, with thinkers like
Rousseau, Fichte, and Hegel. But as I will mention later, Aristotle seemed also to grasp
this notion of injustice as involving person-​to-​person wronging.
22 Duty to Self

of direct study in recent years under the label “second-​personal


morality.” In this section, I shall clarify this suggestion that moral
duty bears a second-​personal form, preparing the reader for the
next section, where I will demonstrate the practical significance of
treating some self-​regarding reasons as reasons of duty.
In the course of arguing that self-​consciousness must origi-
nate with recognition from an external other, Johann Gottlieb
Fichte introduces into his theory the notion of a summons. In his
Foundations of Natural Right, he writes:

[This] influence upon the subject was understood as a summons


to the subject to exercise its free efficacy. . . . The content of this
influence upon the subject is the summons, and its ultimate end
is [to bring about] the free efficacy of the rational being to whom
the summons is addressed. The rational being’s activity is by no
means to be determined and necessitated by the summons in
the way that—​under the concept of causality—​an effect is deter-
mined and necessitated by its cause; rather, the rational being is to
determine itself in consequence of the summons. (2000, 34–​35)

Fichte, here, highlights a specifically second-​personal mode of rea-


soning. When a person shifts into this gear, normative pressure
emanates not merely from norms of rationality or from the moral
law, but from a person addressing demands to her. Whether our
lives as moral agents are carried out mostly or entirely in this nor-
mative gear is the subject of much contemporary debate.
That moral duty is indeed second-​personal is a doctrine given
its most comprehensive contemporary defense by Stephen Darwall
in his book The Second-​Person Standpoint. Darwall’s point of de-
parture is a scenario like this: One person steps on another’s foot,
causing her pain. The person doing the stepping has reason to re-
move her foot—​indeed, a moral reason. One might, perhaps, char-
acterize this reason as connected to the betterment of the world.
G. E. Moore, for instance, holds that one has moral reason to φ
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Century,” November, 1891). It was suggested by “The Luck of
Roaring Camp.” The question was raised in conversation whether a
limp and molluscous baby, unable so much as to hold up its head on
its helpless little neck, could do anything so positive as to “rastle
with” Kentuck’s finger; and the more knowing persons present
insisted that a young baby does, as a matter of fact, have a good
firm hand-clasp. It occurred to Dr. Robinson that if this was true it
was a beautiful Darwinian point, for clinging and swinging by the
arms would naturally have been a specialty with our ancestors if they
ever lived a monkey-like life in the trees. The baby that could cling
best to its mother as she used hands, feet, and tail to flee in the best
time over the trees, or to get at the more inaccessible fruits and eggs
in time of scarcity, would be the baby that lived to bequeath his traits
to his descendants; so that to this day our housed and cradled
human babies would keep in their clinging powers a reminiscence of
our wild treetop days.
Dr. Robinson was fortunate enough to be able to test his theory on
some sixty babies in the first hours of their life, and was triumphantly
successful. He clasped their hands about a slender rod, and they
swung from it like athletes, without apparent discomfort, by the half
minute; many of us grown people could not do as well. Such a
remarkable power of hands and arms has for ages been of no
especial use to the human race, and it fades out in a few weeks, but
for many months the arms keep ahead of the legs in development.
Here was not only strength of arms, but the ability to perform quite
skillfully an action, that required the working together of a number of
muscles to a definite end,—the action namely, of clasping an object
with the hand. This is one of several actions that come ready-made
to the baby at birth, before he can possibly have had any chance to
learn them, or any idea of what they are for. Babies sneeze, swallow,
and cry on the first day; they shut their eyes at a bright light, or at a
touch. On the first day, moreover, they have been seen to start at a
sound or a jar; Preyer observed hiccoughing, choking, coughing, and
spreading the toes when the soles were tickled; and Darwin saw
yawning and stretching within the first week, though I do not know
that any one has seen it on the first day.
These movements are all of the class called reflex,—movements,
that is, in which the bodily mechanism is set off by some outside
action on the senses, as a gun is set off by a touch on the trigger.
Thus, when a tickling affects the mucous membrane, a sneeze
executes itself without any will of ours; when our sense of sight
perceives a swift missile coming, the neck muscles mechanically jerk
the head to one side.
We grown people have, however, a good deal of power of holding in
our reflexes,—“inhibiting” them, as the technical expression is,—but
the baby has none at all. If they had a highly developed reflex
activity, babies would be in real danger from the unrestrained acts of
their own muscles, as we see in the case of convulsions, which show
reflex action at its extreme. But the actions I have mentioned are
about all the reflex movements that have been noted in new-born
babies, except what are called the periodic reflexes, such as
breathing, the heartbeat, the contractions of the arteries, and all the
regular muscular actions of organic life.
That so complex a system of movement as these periodic reflexes
should be so readily touched into motion upon contact with air and
food, to maintain itself afterward by the interplay of the bodily
mechanism and external forces, shows a ready-made hereditary
activity far more than the sudden reflexes do. It does not work quite
smoothly at first, however: the establishment of breathing, for
instance, is irregular, and often difficult. Even the sudden reflexes
are slower and less perfect than with older people.
There is another class of movements, often confused with the reflex
—that is, instinctive movements. Real grasping (as distinguished
from reflex grasping), biting, standing, walking, are examples of this
class. They are race movements, the habits of the species to which
the animal belongs, and every normal member of the species is
bound to come to them; yet they are not so fixed in the bodily
mechanism as the reflex movements. The stimulus to them seems to
come more from within than from without—yet not from reason and
will, but from some blind impulse. This impulse is usually imperfect,
and the child has to work his own way to the mastery of the
movements. Yet though certain reflex activities are inherited in a
more highly developed condition than any human instincts, the
instincts are at bottom always hereditary, which is not the case with
the reflexes—any one may teach his muscles new reflex
movements, unknown to his ancestors. A musician does it every time
that he practices new music till his hands will run it off of their own
accord, while he is thinking of something else. But instinct cannot be
thus acquired.
The amazing instincts of the lower animals; the imperfect and broken
condition of the instincts in man, yet the deep hold that they have on
him; the mingling of inherited necessity and individual freedom in the
way in which they are worked out; the mystery of the physiological
method by which they act (while that of reflex movement is fairly well
understood, up to a certain point); the light they seem always about
to shed for the biologist on the profoundest problems of heredity, and
for the philosopher on those of free will and personality,—these
things make instinct one of the great fields of present research, and I
must not venture into it, though it is of importance in trying to
understand a baby.
I shall say only that while instinct does not appear in the lowest
animals (whose action is all of the reflex type), and is for a time a
sign of rising rank in the scale of life, it reaches its culmination with
the insects, and as we approach man it is the breaking up of the
instincts that is in its turn a sign of advancement to higher life. The
little chicken runs about as soon as it is out of its shell, and even the
monkey baby is able to take care of itself in a few months. Nothing is
so helpless as the human baby, and in that helplessness is our glory,
for it means that the activities of the race (as John Fiske has so
clearly shown) have become too many, too complex, too infrequently
repeated, to become fixed in the nervous structure before birth;
hence the long period after birth before the child comes to full human
powers. It is a maxim of biology (as well as the frequent lesson of
common observation) that while an organism is thus immature and
plastic, it may learn, it may change, it may rise to higher
development; and thus to infancy we owe the rank of the human
race.
The one instinct the human baby always brings into the world
already developed is half a mere reflex act—that of sucking. It is
started as a reflex would be, by the touch of some object, pencil,
finger, or nipple, it may be, between the lips; but it does not act like a
reflex after that. It continues and ceases without reference to this
external stimulus, and a little later often begins without it, or fails to
begin when the stimulus is given. If it has originally a reflex
character, that character fades out, and leaves it a pure instinct.
These two types of automatic movement (for instinct, however
complicated later with volition, gives rise in these earliest days to
none but automatic movement) are both “purposive,” though not
purposed—that is, they are actions that are plainly adapted to some
end by ancestral intelligence or by natural selection. But there was
another type of movements more conspicuous in our baby than
either, and apparently quite nonpurposive. From the first day she
moved slightly, but almost constantly, the legs drawing up, the arms
stirring, the eyes and head rolling a little. Sometimes the features
were distorted with vague and meaningless grimaces. Most other
observers report these movements, and inexperienced ones say that
the baby “felt with his hands about his face,” or “tried to get his
hands to his head.” Any mother may convince herself that the baby
has no will in the matter by watching till he really does begin to try,
weeks later, to turn his head, put his hands to his mouth, kick up his
legs: the difference in the whole manner of the action is evident.
An odd explanation has been offered for these movements by Dr.
Mumford, an English physiologist. He holds that they have a singular
resemblance to those of swimming amphibians; that their prototype
may be seen in any aquarium; they are, in short, survivals of the
period long before the ape-like stage, long before any mammalian
stage, when our ancestors had not yet abandoned life in the waters.
Now, although it is quite true that biologists believe that if our
ancestry is traced far enough, it does lead back to the water, still it
seems hardly possible that in a human baby, whose structure
passed the amphibian stage long before birth, the most frequent
movements should hark back to that tremendous antiquity. It is more
likely that Preyer’s explanation is the correct one: viz., that the
movements are simply due to the rapid growth of nerve centres,
which causes an overflow of nervous force to the muscles and
makes them contract at haphazard. A certain regularity is given to
these chance movements by the tendency of nerve impulse to flow
in the same paths where it has flowed before, rather than in new
ones, so that the muscles are drawn toward the position they
occupied before birth. This brings the hands constantly up about the
head—a fact that later has important results in development.
These aimless movements are called “impulsive” by Preyer. I have
followed Bain and Mrs. Moore in calling them “spontaneous.”
There were no movements beyond these three types, and therefore
none that showed the least volition. Mothers often think the crying
shows wish, will, or understanding of some sort. But Preyer tells us
that babies born without a brain cry in just the same manner.
Mothers do not like to think that the baby is at first an automaton;
and they would be quite right in objecting if that meant that he was a
mere machine. He is an automaton in the sense that he has
practically neither thought, wish, nor will; but he is a living, conscious
automaton, and that makes all the difference in the world. And it
would be a bold psychologist who should try to say what germ of
thought and will lies enfolded in his helplessness. Certainly, the
capacity of developing will is there, and an automaton with such a
capacity is a more wonderful creature than the wise, thinking, willing
baby of nursery tradition would be.
If mothers would only reflect how little developed a baby’s mind is at
a year old, after all the progress of twelve months, they would see
that they rate the mental starting point altogether too high. And they
miss thus the whole drama of the swift and lovely unfolding of the
soul from its invisible germ—a drama that sometimes fairly catches
one’s breath in the throat with excitement and wonder.
III
THE NEW-BORN BABY: SENSATIONS AND
CONSCIOUSNESS.

I have said that the baby began the world as an automaton, but a
conscious, feeling automaton. And what, then, were these feelings
and this consciousness? What was the outfit for beginning the world
that the little mind brought with it? When I asked such questions I
was skirting the edge of one of the great battle-grounds of
philosophy. Whether all human ideas are made up solely from one’s
own experience of the outer world as given him by his senses, or
whether there are, on the contrary, inborn ideas, implanted directly
by nature or God,—this is a question on which volumes have been
written.
Did the baby start out ready equipped with ideas of space, personal
identity, time, causation, such as we find so ineradicable in our own
minds? That is, did she see objects about her, located in space,
nearer and farther, right and left, and all outside and separate from
herself, as we do? hear sounds coming from without, as we do? Did
she feel herself a separate thing from the outer world? Did she
perceive events as happening in time succession, one after another?
And did she think of one thing as happening because of another, so
that, for instance, she was capable of crying in order to cause her
dinner to be brought?
The hope of answering such questions was the first stimulus to the
study of infants, and the earlier records are much occupied with
them. Philosophers nowadays are less disposed to think that we can
prove anything about the doctrine of innate ideas by finding whether
babies have such ideas to begin with; for we might indeed have
ideas that came direct from God, or from the nature of the mind, and
yet might not enter into our inheritance of these at once.
To me, however, not seeking to solve philosophical problems, but
only to watch and comprehend what was going on in the baby’s
mind, it was none the less interesting to try to make out the condition
of her senses and consciousness—though without the careful
special investigations certain physiologists had made before, I
should have found it blind guessing as to how much she really did
see, hear, and feel; for these processes, of course, went on inside
her little mind, and could only be inferred from her behavior.
She evidently felt a difference between light and darkness from the
first hour, for she stopped crying when her face was exposed to
gentle light; and other observers confirm this. Two or three report
also a turning of the head toward the light within the first week. The
nurse, who was intelligent and exact, thought she saw this in the
case of my niece. I did not, but I saw instead a constant turning of
the eyes toward a person coming near her—that is, toward a large
dark mass that interrupted the light. Either movement must be
regarded as entirely instinctive or reflex. Even plants will turn toward
the light, and among animal movements this is one of the most
primitive; while the habit of looking toward any dark moving mass
runs far back in animal history, and may well have become fixed in
the bodily mechanism. With the beginning of voluntary looking these
instinctive movements fade.
No other sign of vision appeared in the little one during the first
fortnight. The eyes were directed to nothing, fixed on nothing. They
did not wink if one made a pass at them. There was no change of
focus for near or distant seeing; the two eyes did not even move
always in unison,—and as the lids also had by no means learned yet
to move symmetrically with the balls and with each other, some
extraordinary and alarming contortions resulted.
True seeing, such as we ourselves have, is not just a matter of
opening the eyes and letting the vision pour in; it requires a great
deal of minute muscular adjustment, both of the eyeballs and of the
lenses, and it is impossible that a baby should see anything but blurs
of light and dark (without even any distinction of distance) till he has
learned the adjustments. Not colored blurs, but light and dark only,
for no trace of color sense has ever been detected within the first
fortnight of life, no certain evidence of it even within the first year.
The baby showed no sign of hearing anything until the third day,
when she started violently at the sound of tearing paper, some eight
feet from her. After that, occasional harsh or sudden sounds—
oftener the rustling of paper than anything else—could make her
start or cry.
It is well established by the careful tests of several physiologists that
babies are deaf for a period lasting from several hours to several
days after birth. The outer tube of the ear is often closed by its own
walls, and the middle ear is always stopped up with fluid. Even after
the ear itself is clear and ready for hearing, few sounds are noticed;
perhaps because the outer passage is still so narrow, perhaps
because of imperfect nerve connections with the brain, perhaps
because sounds are not distinguished, but go all together into a sort
of blur, just as the sights do. As the usual effect of sounds on wee
babies is to startle them, and to set off convulsive reflex movements,
it is well for them that hearing is so tardy in development.
There is noticeable variation in sensitiveness to hearing, not only
among different babies, but in the same baby at different times. A
sound that startles on one day seems to pass absolutely unheard on
the next.
In observing the sensibility to sound, one may easily be misled. If a
baby starts when a door slams or a heavy object falls, it is more
likely to be the jar than the sound that affects him; if he becomes
restless when one claps the hands or speaks, it may be because he
felt a puff of air on his head. The tap of an ordinary call bell is a good
sound to test with, causing neither jar nor air current.
Taste and smell were senses that the baby gave no sign of owning
till much later. The satisfaction of hunger was quite enough to
account for the contentment she showed in nursing; and when she
was not hungry she would suck the most tasteless object as
cheerfully as any other. Physiologists, however, have had the daring
to make careful test of smell and taste in the new-born, putting a wee
drop of quinine, sugar, salt, or acid solution on the babies’ tongues,
and strong odors to their noses, and have been made certain by the
resulting behavior that these senses do exist from the first. But it
requires rather strong tests to call them into action. Many babies, for
instance, suck at a two per cent. solution of quinine as if it were
sugar; so it seems unlikely that the mild and monotonous taste of
milk, and the neutral smells by which any well-kept baby is
surrounded, are really perceived at all. There are instances related
of very positive discrimination between one milk and another, either
by taste or smell, shown by very young babies; yet the weight of
evidence points to an almost dormant condition of these two senses.
We were told in school that the fifth sense was “feeling,” but
psychologists now regard this not as a single sense, but as a group,
called the “dermal” or skin senses. The sense of touch and pressure,
the senses of heat and cold, and the sense of pain are the principal
ones of the group.
Our baby showed from the first that she was aware when she was
touched. She stopped crying when she was cuddled or patted. She
showed comfort in the bath, which may have been in part due to
freedom from the contact of clothes, and to liking for the soft touches
of the water. She responded with sucking motions to the first touch of
the nipple on her lips. Preyer found the lips of new-born babies quite
delicately sensitive, responding even to the lightest touch; and there
are other sensitive spots, such as the nostrils and the soles of the
feet.
On the whole, however, the rose-leaf baby skin proves to be much
less sensitive than ours, not only to contact, but also to pain, and
perhaps to heat and cold, though this has not been so thoroughly
tested. This is not saying, of course, that the physiological effects of
heat and cold upon the baby are unimportant.
Our baby had no experience of skin pain in her early days, and being
kept at an equable temperature, probably received no definite
sensations either of heat or of cold.
The foregoing are the “special senses,” that is, those that give
impressions of external things, and have end organs to receive and
make definite these impressions,—the eye at the end of the optic
nerve, the different kinds of nerve tips in the skin, and so forth.
Another sense now claims almost to rank with them,—the recently
studied sense of equilibrium and motion, by which we feel loss of
balance in our bodies and changes in their motion (changes only, for
no one can feel perfectly smooth motion). This sense has been
traced to the semicircular canals of the ear; and as this part of the
ear is the oldest in evolution, and the rudimentary ears of the lower
orders of animals are quite analogous to it in structure, biologists
now suspect that hearing may be a more recent sense than we have
thought, and that much which has been taken for sense of sound in
the lower animals—even as high as fishes—may perhaps be only a
delicate sense of motion.
I failed to watch for this motion sense in the baby. It would have been
shown by signs that she felt change of motion when she was lifted
and moved. Equilibrium sense she must have used as soon as she
began to balance her little head, but in the first limp and passive
days there was no sign of it. Still, there are tales of very young
babies who showed disturbance, as if from a feeling of lost
equilibrium, when they were lowered swiftly in the arms.
There is besides a sort of sensibility to vibration that affects the
whole body. We know how much of the rhythm of music may be
caught quite soundlessly through, the vibrations of the floor; and it is
said (perhaps not altogether credibly) that it was thus that Jessie
Brown recognized even the instruments and the tune at the relief of
Lucknow by the tremor along the ground before a sound was
audible. A jar, affecting the whole body, seems to be felt by creatures
of very low organization. Babies are undoubtedly quite susceptible to
jarring from the earliest days. Champney’s baby started when the
scale of the balance in which he was lying immediately after birth
sprang up.
Then there is the “muscle sense”—the feeling of the action of our
own muscles; and a most delicate and important sense this is. It is
safe to say that the baby had it from the first, and felt the involuntary
movements her own little body was making, for it is hardly
conceivable how else she could have learned to make voluntary
ones. But that is another story, and comes later.
Even this does not exhaust the list of sensations the baby could feel.
There was the whole group of “organic sensations,” coming from the
inner organs,—hunger, thirst, organic pain. With older people,
nausea, suffocation, choking, and perhaps some others might be
added; but little babies certainly do not feel nausea,—their food
regurgitates without a qualm. Nor do they seem to feel disagreeable
sensations when they choke in nursing.
Organic pain our baby had her touch of in the usual form of colic;
and hunger was obviously present very early, though perhaps not in
the first two or three days. Thirst appeared from the first, and was
always imperative. Of course, the milk diet largely satisfied it, but not
entirely. Luckily our baby did not suffer from thirst, for grandma,
nurse, and the good doctor had all entered early warning that
“babies needed water,” and that many a baby was treated for colic,
insomnia, nervousness, and natural depravity, when all the poor little
fellow wanted was a spoonful of cool water. The baby’s body, as I
said in my last chapter, is largely composed of water, and the
evaporation from the loose texture of the skin is very great. After
children can talk, they wear out the most robust patience with
incessant appeals, night and day, for a “d’ink,” and consume water in
quantities quite beyond what seems rational. But their craving is
doubtless a true indication of what they need.
There are composites of sensation which the baby experiences very
early. There is the feeling of clothes, for instance, made up of
warmth, of touch and pressure sensations all over his skin, and of
changes in the muscular feelings from constraint, and in the internal
feelings from the effect on circulation. There are feelings of fatigue in
one position, made up of sensations of touch, of the pressure of the
body’s weight on the under surfaces of skin, of some muscular
tensions, and perhaps of several other elements. Our baby’s nurse
saved her much fretting by simply changing the position of the little
body from time to time. We ourselves are constantly moving and
shifting our positions, to relieve a pressure on the skin here, or a
muscular tension there, but the wee baby cannot so much as turn his
head or move a limb at will.
Vaguest and most composite of all is what is called “common
sensation,” or “general sensation”—that feeling of comfort or
discomfort, vigor or languor, diffused through the whole body, with
which we are all familiar. It seems to be very primitive in origin—
indeed, the speculation is that this dim, pervasive feeling is the
original one, the primitive way in which animal tissue responded to
light and heat and everything, before the special senses developed,
gathering the light sensations to one focus, the sound sensations to
another, and so on. But in its present development it is also largely
made up of the sum of all the organic sensations, and even of dim
overflows of feeling from the special senses.
It is with older people notably connected with emotional states. It
varies, of course, with health and external conditions; yet each
person seems from birth to be held to a certain fixed habit in this
complex underlying condition of feeling—pleasant with one,
unpleasant with another. This fixed habit of general sensation is
perhaps the secret of what we call temperament; while its surface
variations seem to be mainly responsible for moods.
Our baby showed temperament—luckily of the easy-going and
cheerful kind—from her first day (though we could hardly see this
except by looking back afterward); and there is no reason to doubt
that she experienced some general sensation from the first. It was
evidently of a pretty neutral sort, however: the definite appearance of
high comfort and well-being did not come till later; nor were moods
apparent at first.
Now in all this one significant thing appears. Sensations had from
the first the quality of being agreeable or disagreeable. The baby
could not wish, prefer, and choose, for she had not learned to
remember and compare; but she could like and dislike. And this was
shown plainly from the first hour by expressions of face—reflex facial
movements, so firmly associated in the human race with liking and
disliking that the most inexperienced observer recognizes their
meaning at once. It is said that facial expression comes by imitation,
and that the blind are therefore deficient in it; but this is not true of
these simplest expressions: they come by inheritance, and are
present in the first hour of life. A look of content or discontent, the
monotonous cry, and vague movements of limbs, head, and
features,—these are the limits of expression of feeling in the earliest
days.
It would seem that in this sense condition there was nothing that
could give the baby any feeling of inner or outer, of space or locality.
We have some glimpse of the like condition ourselves,—when
people say after an explosion, for instance, that it “seemed to be
inside their own heads,” or when we try to locate a cicada’s note, or
when we feel diffused warmth.
Here is the conception I gathered of the dim life on which the little
creature entered at birth. She took in with a dull comfort the gentle
light that fell on her eyes, seeing without any sort of attention or
comprehension the moving blurs of darkness that varied it. She felt
motions and changes; she felt the action of her own muscles; and,
after the first three or four days, disagreeable shocks of sound now
and then broke through the silence, or perhaps through an unnoticed
jumble of faint noises. She felt touches on her body from time to
time, but without the least sense of the place of the touch (this
became evident enough later, as I shall relate in its order); and
steady slight sensations of touch from her clothes, from arms that
held her, from cushions on which she lay, poured in on her.
From time to time sensations of hunger, thirst, and once or twice of
pain, made themselves felt through all the others, and mounted till
they became distressing; from time to time a feeling of heightened
comfort flowed over her, as hunger and thirst were satisfied, or
release from clothes, and the effect of the bath and rubbing on her
circulation, increased the net sense of well-being. She felt slight and
unlocated discomforts from fatigue in one position, quickly relieved
by the watchful nurse. For the rest, she lay empty-minded, neither
consciously comfortable nor uncomfortable, yet on the whole
pervaded with a dull sense of well-being. Of the people about her, of
her mother’s face, of her own existence, of desire or fear, she knew
nothing.
Yet this dim dream was flecked all through with the beginnings of
later comparison and choice. The light was varied with dark; the
feelings of passive motion, of muscular action, of touch, of sound,
were all unlike each other; the discomforts of hunger, of pain, of
fatigue, were different discomforts. The baby began from the first
moment to accumulate varied experience, which before long would
waken attention, interest, discrimination, and vivid life.
IV
THE EARLIEST DEVELOPMENTS

Out of the new-born baby’s dim life of passivity the first path was
that of vision. I noticed about the end of the second week that her
eyes no longer wandered altogether helplessly, but rested with a
long and contented gaze on bright surfaces they chanced to
encounter, such as the shining of the lamp on the white ceiling, or
our faces turned toward the light as she lay on our knees. It was not
active looking, with any power to direct the eyes, but mere staring;
when the gaze fell by chance on the pleasant light, it clung there. But
something must have come to pass, that it could stop and cling to
what gave it pleasure.
I think no one has yet analyzed this earliest stage in progress toward
real seeing, though Professor Sully touches on an explanation when
he says that the eyes “maintain their attitude under stimulus of the
pleasure.”
We know that muscular action is normally caused by stimulus
received from the nerve centres, and that in the earliest days there
seems to be a good deal of random discharge of stimulus,
developed by the growth of the centres, and causing aimless
movements. Now there are two fundamental and profoundly
important things about this nervous discharge. One is that pleasure,
attention, or intensity of sensation seems to have the power of
increasing it, and thus influencing the action of the muscles. The
other is that the discharge always tends to seek the same paths it
has used before, and more and more easily each time; so that
physiologists speak of it as a current deepening its channels. It is
really nothing like a flowing liquid, nor the nerve threads along which
it passes like channeled watercourses. Still, just as a current of water
will deepen a gully till it drains into itself all the water that had spread
about in shallower ditches, so the wave of molecular change running
along a nerve somehow so prepares that nerve that by and by,
instead of spreading about through any fibres that come handy, the
whole energy will drain into the accustomed ones. Then, of course,
the muscles to which these run will perform more and more easily
the accustomed acts. Some of these channels—even whole
connected systems of them—are already well prepared by
inheritance, and hence come instinctive and reflex actions; many are
still to be deepened by the baby’s own experience.
Now suppose the aimless impulse straying to the baby’s eye
muscles, making the eyes roam hither and yon; but as they reach a
certain position, they fall upon a lighted surface, and a pleasant
brightness flows back into the consciousness; and something stirs
within that has power to send an intenser current through those
same fibres. For the time, at least, that channel is deepened, the
wandering impulses are drained into it, and the eye muscles are held
steady in that position. And, in fact, with the beginning of staring the
irregular movements of head and eyes did decline, and gradually
disappear.
It is an important moment that marks the beginning of even a
passive power to control the movements; and when my grandmother
handed down the rule that you should never needlessly interrupt a
baby’s staring, lest you hinder the development of power of attention,
she seems to have been psychologically sound.
A fuller and pleasanter life now seemed to pervade the whole little
body. The grimaces of vague discomfort were disappearing, and the
baby began to wear a look of satisfaction as she lay, warm and fed
and dry, gazing at some light surface. In the bath, where the release
from clothes and the stimulus to circulation from the warm water
heightened the pleasant condition of general sensation, her
expression approached real delight; the movements of her limbs
were freer, and all her muscles tenser.
The neck muscles, especially, were so far “innervated”—that is,
supplied with nervous energy—as fairly to lift her head from the
supporting hand. This was probably not as yet a real effort to hold up
the head, only a drafting of surplus energy into the neck muscles,
partly because of inherited aptitude, partly because the pleasure
received from the lifted head and better seeing tended to draw the
energy thither, just as it was drawn to the eye muscles in the case of
the staring. At least one careful observer, Mrs. Edith Elmer Wood,
records this action of the neck muscles on the first day.
It was at this period that the baby first smiled; but being forewarned
of the “colic smile,” which counterfeits so exactly the earliest true
smiles,—fleeting as these are, just touching the mouth and
vanishing,—I never felt sure whether the baby was smiling for
general contentment with life, or whether a passing twinge had
crossed her comfort and drawn her lips into the semblance of a
smile; and so never dared to record the expression till it first
occurred for unmistakable pleasure.
There must have been rapid progress going on in the clearness of
muscular and touch sensations, and in the forming of associations in
the baby’s mind; but no plain evidence of these inner processes
came till the fourth week. Then I noticed that the baby, when crying
with hunger, would hush as soon as she was taken in the arms in the
position usual in nursing, as if she recognized the preliminaries, and
knew she was about to be satisfied. She could not, in fact, have
remembered or expected anything as yet; it was not memory, but a
clear instance of the working of that great law of association by
which the raw material of the senses was to be wrought up into an
orderly mental life.
The substance of the law is that when experiences have repeatedly
been had together, the occurrence of one of them (still more, of
several out of a group, as in this case) tends to bring up into
consciousness the others. It is a law that underlies psychic life as
profoundly as the law that nerve energy seeks its old channels
underlies physical life. Indeed, it is in a sense the psychic side of the
same law; for it implies that when a group of nerve centres have
formerly acted together, the action of one tends to bring on that of
the rest. So, since the baby had often experienced the feeling of that
particular position (a combination of tactile and muscular and organic
sensations) in connection with the feeling of satisfied hunger, that
comfortable feeling, the missing member of the group, came into her
consciousness along with the rest, some moments in advance of the
actual satisfaction.
I have said that this is not memory, yet there is in it a germ of
memory. A past experience is brought back to consciousness; and if
it were brought back as a definite idea, instead of a vague feeling, it
would be memory.
Close on this came another great advance in vision. This was on the
twenty-fifth day, toward evening, when the baby was lying on her
grandmother’s knee by the fire, in a condition of high well-being and
content, gazing at her grandmother’s face with an expression of
attention. I came and sat down close by, leaning over the baby, so
that my face must have come within the indirect range of her vision.
At that she turned her eyes to my face and gazed at it with the same
appearance of attention, and even of some effort, shown by a slight
tension of brows and lips, then turned her eyes back to her
grandmother’s face, and again to mine, and so several times. The
last time she seemed to catch sight of my shoulder, on which a high
light struck from the lamp, and not only moved her eyes, but threw
her head far back to see it better, and gazed for some time, with a
new expression on her face—“a sort of dim and rudimentary
eagerness,” says my note. She no longer stared, but really looked.
Clear seeing, let us here recall, is not done with the whole retina, but
only with a tiny spot in the centre, the so-called “yellow spot,” or
“macula lutea.” If the image of an object falls to one side of this,
especially if it is far to one side, we get only a shapeless impression
that something is there; we “catch a glimpse of it,” as we say. In
order really to look at it we turn our eyeballs toward the object till the
image falls on the spot of clear vision. We estimate the distance
through which to turn the balls, down to minute fractions of an inch,
by the feeling in the eye muscles.
This was what the baby had done, and I do not dare to say how
many philosophical and psychological discussions are involved in
her doing it. Professor Le Conte thinks that it shows an inborn sense
of direction, since the eyes are turned, not toward the side on which
the ray strikes the retina, but toward the side from which the ray
enters the eye; that is, the baby thinks out along the line of the ray to
the object it comes from, thus putting the object outside himself, in
space, as we do. Professor Wundt, the great German psychologist,
is positive that the baby has no sense of space or direction, but
gains it by just such measurements with the eye muscles; that there
is no right nor left, up nor down, for him, but only associations
between the look of things off at one side, and the feel of the eye
action that brings them to central vision.
This means that before a baby can carry the eye always through just
the right arc to look at an object, he must have made this association
between the look of things and the feel of the action separately for
each point of the retina. It is a great deal for a baby to have learned
in three weeks; still, babies have to learn fast if they are ever to
catch up with the race; and in the early roamings of the eye they
experience over and over all manner of transits of images to and fro
across the retina. Probably, too, it was still only partially learned.
I watched now for what Preyer’s record had led me to expect as the
next development in vision—the ability to follow a moving object with
the eyes; that is, to hold the yellow spot fixed on the object as it
moved, moving the eyeball in time with it in order to do so. I used my
hand to move to and fro before the baby, and could not satisfy
myself that she followed it, though she sometimes seemed to; but
the day after she was a month old I tried a candle, and her eyes
followed it unmistakably; she even threw her head back to follow it
farther. In trying this experiment, one should always use a bright
object, should make sure the baby’s eyes are fixed on it, and then
should move it very slowly indeed, right and left.
So far, there is no necessary proof of will. Longet found that the eyes
and head of a pigeon whose cerebrum had been removed would
follow a moving light. We ourselves can sit absorbed in thought or
talk, yet follow unconsciously with our eyes the movement of a
lantern along a dark road; and if something appears on the outer
edge of our vision we often turn quite involuntarily to look. But the
baby’s new expression of intelligence and interest showed that
whether she willed the movements or not, she attended to the new
impressions she was getting.
Professor Preyer noticed the same dawn of intelligence in his baby’s
face at about the same stage. And it is worth while to observe that
when I came to study my record I was surprised to find how often
such an awakening look, an access of attention, wonder, or
intelligence, in the baby’s face, had coincided with some marked
step in development and signalized its great mental importance. I
should advise any one who is observing a baby to be on the lookout
for this outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual unfolding.
In both these visual developments the baby had proved able to use
her neck in coöperation with her eyes, throwing back her head to see
farther. It began at the same time to seem that she was really and
deliberately trying to hold up her head for the same purpose of
seeing better. She not only straightened it up more and more in the
bath, but when she was laid against one’s breast she would lift her
head from the shoulder, sometimes for twenty seconds at a time,
and look about. Preyer sets this down as the first real act of will.
The baby’s increased interest in seeing centred especially on the
faces about her, at which she gazed with rapt interest. Even during
the period of mere staring, faces had oftenest held her eyes,
probably because they were oftener brought within the range of her
clearest seeing than other light surfaces. The large, light, moving
patch of the human face (as Preyer has pointed out) coming and
going in the field of vision, and oftener chancing to hover at the point
of clearest seeing than any other object, embellished with a play of
high lights on cheeks, teeth, and eyes, is calculated to excite the
highest degree of attention a baby is capable of at a month old. So
from the very first—before the baby has yet really seen his mother—
her face and that of his other nearest friends become the most active
agents in his development, and the most interesting things in his
experience.
Our baby was at this time in a way aware of the difference between
companionship and solitude. In the latter days of the first month she
would lie contentedly in the room with people near by, but would fret
if left alone. But by the end of the month she was apt to fret when
she was laid down on a chair or lounge, and to become content only
when taken into the lap. This was not yet distinct memory and

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