Duties to Self in § 2 of Kant's Doctrine of Virtue

Abstract In § 2 of the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant appears to claim that duties to self have primacy over duties owed to others. This paper critically examines a reading of Kant according to which duties to self have primacy because all duties are self-imposed and a duty is owed to the lawgiver. Instead, Kant is claiming that a feature of duties to self that supposedly makes them contradictory is shared by duties to others. To deny the existence of duties to self on the basis that they possess that feature would therefore also rule out duties to others.