Can We Have Moral Duties to Ourselves?

Duties usually appear to relate one person to another: I owe you an explanation, and you have standing to demand it. If obligation is only this kind of creditor relationship, “owing myself” looks puzzling. The claimant and the duty-bearer are the same person, so it seems I could release myself whenever I wished.

Kant nevertheless recognised duties to oneself. He argued that we must not treat the humanity in our own person merely as a means, just as we must not treat another person that way. Self-respect and the development of our capacities therefore appear among his perfect and imperfect duties to ourselves. Their basis is not simply that they make us feel better. A rational agent should not treat their own status as a person as something wholly disposable.

Imagine someone who accepts continuing, explicit humiliation for a promotion and begins to insist that their dignity has no value. The problem is not only whether the bargain will later cause regret. It is also whether the person is participating in the degradation of their own standing. Kant's particular catalogue, and its severity, remain disputed. If every choice about health, efficiency or talent becomes a duty, morality invades private life.

My judgement is that duties to oneself are defensible only within restrained limits. They do not command us to optimise ourselves at every moment. They set a floor: being both the actor and the person affected does not make every form of self-treatment permissible. Prudence protects our interests; duties to ourselves protect the standing of the agent who judges, commits and continues a life.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-obligations/