Duties to Oneself in the Light of African Values: Two Theoretical Approaches

Abstract I draw on ideas salient in African philosophy to construct two new theoretical ways of capturing the essence of duties to oneself. According to one theory, a person has a basic duty to “relate” to herself in ways similar to how the African field has often thought one should relate to others, viz., harmoniously, while, according to a second, one has such a duty to produce liveliness in oneself. Beyond articulating these two novel attempts to account for what all duties to oneself have in common and showing that each captures several intuitions about them, I offer reasons to favor the harmony theory, meriting consideration by a global audience as a rival to, say, the Kantian-rationalism common in the West and Confucianism in the East.