Justifying Self-Partiality

Abstract

The role that the first-person perspective is allowed to play in moral reasoning is a major source of contemporary debate between partialists and impartialists. The discussion usually revolves around the question of partiality’s justification when it is intended to benefit our loved ones. Surprisingly, the issue of partiality to oneself is rarely addressed directly and its link with egoism is left unexplored. This is a gap that this paper attempts to fill by focusing on some of the difficulties raised by the idea of justified partiality to oneself.

1 Introduction

A central concern for moral philosophers is whether morality is impartial in nature. This paper argues that we are sometimes morally justified in being partial to ourselves. As evidence of the importance of this question, the issue of partiality’s moral justification has recently received considerable attention (Betzler, 2014 Brandt, 2020; Feltham & Cottingham, 2010; Keller, 2013; Lange, 2022; Lord, 2016). Often, intuitions in favor of justified partiality to our loved ones are fleshed out in thought experiments such as “One faces a choice between saving one’s wife or a stranger. Is one morally justified in saving one’s wife?”.¹ Partiality²also occurs in less dramatic and more familiar situations. Examples include prioritizing one’s own children over other children or favoring friends over strangers. We are also often partial to ourselves. Consider the following situation:

Inveterate Smoker: Rose is an inveterate smoker. When her doctor tells her that she must stop smoking or face serious health issues, Rose decides to enroll in an addiction program. The meetings take place every Monday evening. Unfortunately, Monday evening is also the time when her friend Marianna goes to her chemotherapy session and Rose agreed to drive her to the hospital. Rose is torn between her duties to her friend and the feeling that she should first take care of her own health. Finally, she decides to go to the addiction meeting. When she tells Marianna, she is surprised by her friend’s positive reaction: “I would have done the same thing!”, she says.

We have all experienced such situations and the dilemma they involve: is it sometimes acceptable to put our own interests before those of others? This situation is a case of partiality to oneself that does not intuitively warrant moral criticism. Surprisingly, the literature is mostly silent on this type of cases.³When it does address them, it is through a different lens, for instance by focusing on agent-centered prerogatives (Muñoz, 2020a; Quong, 2020) or moral options (Kagan, 1989).

What explains this lack of attention to self-partiality? Two answers come to mind. A first explanation could be that self-partiality is so widespread and intuitively acceptable that it needs no justification because it lies outside the scope of morality. This option is discussed in Sect. 1. Second, it could be explained by a reluctance to justify something that is perceived as being close to egoism. While this is a justified worry, it is difficult to maintain given that partiality to oneself is so widespread and intuitively morally unproblematic. Indeed, does Rose’s attitude qualify as egoistic? The relation of partiality to egoism is not straightforward and I shall argue in Sect. 2 that the two attitudes are distinct.

My aim is to argue that self-partiality is no more troublesome than partiality to others, which is a widely accepted feature of our moral experience. We face a choice between three options: (1) to claim that only partiality to others is morally acceptable, since self-partiality is egoistic, (2) to claim that both attitudes are morally acceptable by distinguishing self-partiality from egoism, or (3) to claim that all form of partiality are morally unacceptable. Option (2) is the one I advocate. In doing so, I shall try to meet two constraints. The first constraint is to comply with widespread intuitions about cases such as the inveterate smoker according to which Rose is justified in favoring her own interests. The second constraint is that we should offer a unified account of partiality towards others and towards oneself. A unifying explanation of partiality’s justification – both towards self and towards other – is desirable since both form of partiality are subjects to the same type of objections.

I begin in Sect. 1 by outlining the reasons for trying to justify partiality to oneself, insisting that it is intuitively morally acceptable, and that self-partiality is salient in many attitudes that we view as morally justified. Section 2 offers reasons for distinguishing the favoring of one’s own interests and egoism. Section 3 argues that the alleged differences between self-partiality and partiality to others are unsubstantial. Section 4 discusses one prominent attempt to justify partiality to others, the Relationship View⁴ (Kolodny, 2010). In Sect. 5, I put forward my own view, The Duty View and argue that it delivers a better account of the moral justification of partiality. To defend the justification of self-partiality, I rely on two notions: that of special obligations (obligations one only has towards a subset of people)⁵ and that of moral duty to oneself. The discussion presented in this paper will probably fail to convince those who deny that we can be in a moral – and not merely prudential – relationship with ourselves, since the strategy will be to argue that it is the special duties we owe to ourselves that justify us in being partial. The notion of special duties or obligations is, of course, also somewhat controversial, but I shall argue that we have prima facie grounds for preserving it.

2 Can Partiality Be Subject to Moral Evaluation? 

Before exploring whether self-partiality can be morally justified, we first need to establish that partiality has a place inside the moral domain. An important issue is indeed whether self-partiality can and should be subject to moral evaluation (Scheffler, 1986: 532). Consider Williams’s example (1981: 18) in which a man has to choose between saving his wife from drowning and saving someone else’s life. It could be argued that, in this situation, the man’s choice cannot and should not be morally justified, since the dilemma is one whose resolution lies outside the moral domain. It is indeed possible that here the question of morality doesn’t apply.

I agree with Scheffler (1986: 535) that this is not the best description of the situation, since to rule that a situation is morally trivial or that it lies beyond the scope of morality still amounts to making a moral judgment. Indeed, a moral judgement involves the consideration of an act and the context in which it takes place along certain normative dimensions; judging a situation as morally irrelevant is making such a judgment. Morality is pervasive and “no voluntary human action is in principle resistant to moral assessment” (Scheffler, 1986: 532) – not even the occasional favoring of one’s own interests over those of others.

It seems that we can morally assess self-partiality. But is it a good thing to do so? Observe that partiality to ourselves is manifest in routine attitudes such as spending more time and money on our own projects than on those of others or being more interested in our own health and hygiene than in those of others. These are not the kinds of attitudes that generate opposition towards partiality. Yet, partiality is a particularly easy target for so-called ‘slippery slope’ arguments. If one spends more time working on one’s paper than reading a colleague’s work, no obvious problem arises. The worry is that such behavior paves the way for outright egoism. As we shall see, we should still distinguish being partial to oneself from being egoistic, which paves the way for the claim that partiality can be morally acceptable.

The main reason for investigating whether self-partiality is morally acceptable is to avoid distancing ethics too much from what can realistically be demanded of us (Cottingham, 1991: 801). This is contentious, as many are ready to bite the bullet and argue that a moral theory may be demanding to the point that it is practically impossible for the average individual to meet its demands.⁶ Prohibition of partiality, whether to others or to oneself, has such a consequence. One presupposition of my discussion is that we should try our best to avoid such demanding conceptions of morality.

As Scheffler points out, if we find a particular moral theory too demanding because it prohibits any partiality, we face three options (1986: 536). First, we could abandon this morality. Second, we could accept it but try to circumscribe its authority – perhaps morality comprises just one category of considerations, which weigh no more than prudential considerations. Third and finally, we could claim, as mentioned above, that partiality lies outside the moral domain. This third possibility was already ruled out, so we are left with two options: we should either abandon this conception of morality or question its authority.

We should resist framing the issue in the way Scheffler does as one of morality being pitted against prudence. If the authority of a demanding morality must be weighed against other reasons, these reasons do not comprise only prudential reasons but also additional moral reasons, i.e., self-regarding moral reasons.⁷ Thus, we should reject such a morality not only because it asks too much of agents from a prudential standpoint, but also because it prevents compliance with certain self-regarding moral reasons. Consequently, we should go for the last option and reject any moral theory that is demanding to the point that its demands are incompatible with self-regarding moral obligations. On this basis, let me now turn to the task of distinguishing justified self-concern from egoism.

3 Justified Self-Concern and Egoism

This section addresses a paradigmatic argument against self-partiality in order to see with more clarity what we are up against: Peter Singer’s well-known criticism according to which to prioritize ourselves or those dear to us over others is always morally wrong unless it allows for an increase in the overall good. Another intuitive way to put this this worry is that to be partial towards oneself is to be egoistic. By “egoism” I refer to the unjustified favoring of oneself.⁸

In The Expanding Circle (1981), Singer defends the principle of equal consideration, which has it that to act ethically is to act rationally and that to act rationally is to grant equal consideration to the interest of all affected by a decision. For Singer, granting a special importance to self-interest is close to being egoistic: both fail to meet the impartiality constraint. As he insists, “at the opposite end of the spectrum from the principle of equal consideration for the interests of all is some kind of egoism” (p. 103).

Still there is room to claim that granting more importance to our own interests, or those of our loved ones, need not put us “at the opposite end of the spectrum”. A kind of middle-ground position may be morally acceptable. Consider the following example:

Pandemic: The world is ravaged by a deadly pandemic. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies have not been able to create enough vaccines to stem the spread of the virus. It is therefore very difficult to obtain a dose. Nicolas was able to get a few doses of vaccine before all the hospitals and laboratories closed down. He decides to save his wife and children rather than top scientists.

According to Singer, Nicolas’ behavior is immoral because he does not grant equal importance to the interest of all affected by his decision. This kind of conclusion have been much discussed. One interesting response to Singer’s argument has been articulated by Anne Maclean. In The Elimination of Morality (1993), she argues that impartiality doesn’t require that we give equal importance to the interest of all and that actions such as Nicolas can meet morality’s demand.⁹ Maclean spots an equivocation in Singer’s use of the term impartiality. Her reconstruction of Singer’s argument can be summarized as follows (p. 55):

• 1. A system of morality involves moral judgments (what ought or ought not to be done).

• 2. A moral judgment calls for a principle according to which it can be justified.

• 3. Moral principles of justification must be impartial.

• 4. A moral principle is impartial if it can be accepted by the whole moral community.

• 5. To be acceptable by the whole moral community, a moral principle must be disinterested.

• 6. Impartiality requires that equal weight be given to the interests of all affected by a decision.

On one reading, impartiality requires that we act in a way that is acceptable by the whole community. This is the sense of impartiality at work in premise 4. In this sense, we can say that favoring one’s child is acting impartially since this attitude is acceptable by society as a whole. Let us call this “Impure Impartiality”. On this reading, we can surmise that Nicolas’ action is morally acceptable because it is acceptable by his community. During an epidemic, we should be granted the right to favor our loved ones. The action is impartial, since Nicolas is not denying the right for other families to act in the same way. Nevertheless, Nicolas’ decision reflects his recognition of special obligations to his family.

The second reading of “impartiality” is at work in premise 5. Impartiality here denotes an attitude that doesn’t display any partiality – this reading leads to the principle of equal consideration. Let us call this “Pure Impartiality”. On the first reading, there can be special obligations towards our loved ones; on the second reading, the fact that we must adopt the point of view of the universe prohibits any special obligation. An action can thus be impartial on the first reading even if the principle of equal consideration is violated. Maclean concludes that a principle like “During a pandemic, one must always care first for one’s family” can be impartial in the sense that it is acceptable by all, while still acknowledging special obligations. An action can thus be partial in that it favors someone over others while still being impartial in that it is acceptable by all.

Building on Maclean’s insights, we can now draw a distinction between egoism and justified partiality. When we favor our loved ones over others, we are partial in a justified way. It is a form of partiality that is, in a sense, impartially justified. However, we are not impartial in the second sense, although our actions and more generally the special obligations that subtend them are, we believe, acceptable by others.¹⁰ This contrasts with paradigmatic egoistic actions, such as cutting the queue at the supermarket. As in the previous case, the person cutting a queue puts his interests ahead of those of others, but the principle that governs his action is hardly acceptable by others. Someone who acts egoistically is partial in an unjustified way.

In light of the contrast between justified partiality and egoism, the case for morally justified self-partiality looks brighter. There remains, however, a paradox in the general treatment of partiality. People like Nicolas who put the interests of their family before those of others are not usually described as egoists. Are we to conclude that there is a difference between being partial to others and being partial to oneself?

4 From Partiality to Others to Partiality to Oneself

By and large, philosophers tend to view interpersonal partiality more positively than self-partiality. The reason is surely that it is less in tension with our intuitive conception of morality as, basically, altruistic. Still, an asymmetrical treatment of partiality to others and partiality to oneself is problematic for several reasons.

First, partiality to oneself is close to partiality to a privileged member of one’s social circle or family, since one favours in both cases one particular person over others. We could even insist that both forms of partiality put one’s interests before those of distant others either directly (e.g., I go to sleep rather than help my colleague with his paper) or indirectly (I need my children to be well in order to be happy).¹¹ It is far from clear that favouring oneself is always selfish whereas favouring those close to us qualifies as a form of ‘restricted’ altruism (De Gaynesford, 2010: 92).

Second, how exactly should we distinguish partiality to oneself from partiality to others? We should do better than “we owe more to others than to ourselves” or “given our strong tendency to always favour ourselves, it is the role of morality to force us to focus on what we owe to others”. For such claims lead to absurd conclusions such as, “If I owe more to others than to myself, then I must systematically sacrifice my own interests” or “If looking after my children is an indirect way of furthering my own interests, then I must systematically discriminate against my children”. Moral reasons are usually contrasted with prudential reasons, and it is often taken for granted that the interests of others provide us with moral reasons, whereas our own interests provide us with prudential reasons. If we accept that morality is always overriding, i.e., that its authority overrides prudential reasons, we end up concluding that, in the event of a conflict between my interests and those of others, I must always attend to the latter. This, evidently, is not true in the light of the fact that we can have self-regarding moral reasons.

All in all, we should be open to the possibility that self-partiality can be morally acceptable since there is no morally significant difference between situations in which we are partial to ourselves and some situations in which we are partial to people we love. Moreover, it is a mistake to assume that one can only deliberate about self-regarding matters from a prudential standpoint. As others have argued, one can also adopt a moral stance while deliberating about self-regarding matters (Neblett, 1969: 71). This is maybe most salient in cases in which one has to balance one’s prudential interests against one’s moral interests. Examples of such situation could be the following: your boss offers to increase your salary by 50% if you sleep with him. On the one hand, it seems that you will be prudentially better off having more money, on the other hand, self-respect requires that you do not accept such a proposal.¹² These admittedly brief considerations support the conclusion that a good theory of partiality should account for partiality to others as well as for partiality to oneself. On this backdrop, let us turn to considering a prominent account justifying partiality to others: the Relationship View.

5 Justifying Partiality

As Kolodny nicely puts it “Why is there reason for friendship and love of family, but not for racism or omertà? Without a principled distinction between relationships that support partiality and relationships that don’t, a creeping skepticism sets in about partiality as a whole” (p. 170). By way of taking up this challenge, The Relationship View claims that relationships that have intrinsic value provide us with reasons for partiality (Kolodny, 2010; Scheffler, 2002).¹³ This view purports to explain the intuition that partiality to our friends and family members can be morally acceptable because we have a special relationship with them. I shall mainly focus on Kolodny’s version of the view. His proposal is promising on many counts but must be amended, as we shall see, to accommodate our intuitions about partiality to ourselves as well as to respond to some criticism that has been levelled against it.

Kolodny’s view does not aim at explaining all cases of justified partiality in terms of specific relationships. His aim is more modestly to distinguish relations that give us reasons for partiality from those that do not. As we shall see, the view defended in this paper, in addition to allowing for justified partiality outside relationships, also fares better than Kolodny’s in distinguishing relationships that justify partiality from those that do not. So, how to distinguish relationships that provide us with reason for partiality from those that do not? To answer, Kolodny relies on two original ideas: the ideas of resonance and of a history of encounter. Resonance is (roughly) the claim that we should treat identical situations in the same way while still acknowledging that identical situations can differ in importance. The specific importance of a situation will, in turn, justify a different treatment:

Resonance: one has reason to respond to X in a way that is similar to the way that one has reason to respond to its counterpart in another dimension of importance, but that reflects the distinctive importance of the dimension to which X belongs (p. 181).

How should we apply this rather abstract principle to personal relationships and their reason giving force? At this juncture, Kolodny appeals to the idea of a “history of encounter”. A history of encounter is the series of discrete encounters with someone over the course of a relationship. For example, a marriage is composed of many encounters of support, help, care, etc. Factoring in histories of encounter, we now face a new version of the resonance principle:

Resonance of Histories of Encounter: One has reason to respond to a history of encounter in a way that is similar to the way that one has reason to respond to the discrete encounters of which it is composed, but that reflects the distinctive importance of a history shared with another person. (p. 183).

Whatever “important” means here, a history of encounter is more important than the sum of the discrete encounters that constitute it. An example might help.

Friendship: Ana and Maria are friends. Their friendship is interspersed with many episodes of help and support. When Ana was sick, Maria cared for her. When Maria broke up with her boyfriend, Ana comforted here. Each of these events calls for a particular reaction – we might think of gratitude. What began as a random encounter at a party became a friendship that warrants a certain degree of partiality.

According to Kolodny’s resonance principle, while we have reasons for gratitude after a single episode of help, we have reasons for partiality in the context of friendships. In Friendship, partiality is appropriate because it tracks the importance of Ana and Maria’s shared history. Simply put, we have reasons of partiality to people with whom we share positive histories of encounter. In turn, this idea is explained by the resonance principle.

The relationship view accounts for most of the salient aspects of partiality in our relationships, but it faces some difficulties. Kolodny’s way of addressing the issue misidentifies the source of reasons for partiality in our relationships. It is not that they all have intrinsic value or qualify as “histories of encounter”. What they have in common is rather the more general fact that they come with duties. This is manifest in the fact that long lasting relationships are not the only considerations that justify partiality. For example, it is safe to assume that we are justified in being partial to our newborn babies, even after a single encounter. Similarly, we are justified in being partial to an orphaned nephew we have never met. So, it appears that the Relationship View tells us only part of the story, since it cannot account for these important cases.

In addition, the Relationship View cannot account for the justification of self-partiality. This is a problem since an adequate theory of partiality must be able to account for partiality in general. The principle of resonance is associated with the idea of “shared histories of encounter”. As far as partiality towards oneself is concerned, this idea is difficult to apply. An adequate theory must account for the intuition that one is justified in being partial to oneself even if one has no “history of encounters” with oneself. Consider the following scenario.

Accident: Angelo had a dramatic accident when he was only a baby and has been in a coma ever since. When he wakes up, 35 years later, he focuses on building up his strength and on learning everything he should have learned in the past 35 years, from mathematics to cooking skills. While focusing on his physical recovery and the development of other practical and intellectual skills, he is being partial to himself.

Angelo is justified to be partial to himself despite having no “history” with himself¹⁴, in a way that is similar to the way in which he would be justified in being partial to his newborn baby. The Relationship View cannot account for self-partiality since it misidentifies the source of partiality. It provides us with a sufficient condition for justified partiality, though not a necessary one. As is evident with Angelo’s case, Kolodny’s view is too focused on backward looking considerations, i.e., the history of encounter, whereas some cases of partiality are justified in virtue of some forward-looking consideration like the duty to take care of oneself, to develop one’s talent, etc.

I will now argue that the moral justification of partiality is better explained by reference to duties than by reference to the resonance principle. Positive histories of encounters generate duties, but they are not alone in doing so. In a nutshell, the right question to ask is not “What history do I share with this person?” but “What do I owe her?”. Even if the two questions often overlap, they are nevertheless distinct. As will be evident below, the suggestion is not that we reject Kolodny’s view but merely that we expand it so that more things than histories of encounters give rise to duties. The view presented in this paper is compatible with his proposal that what matters in the justification of partiality is the kind of relationship we have with people. The relevant feature in assessing whether a relationship justifies partiality is whether it comes with special obligations or duties.

6 Justifying Partiality to Oneself

6.1 The Duty View

Special duties are duties that we only owe to some people, contrary to universal duties that we owe to all people. For instance, respect is often thought to be a universal duty, whereas care is typically thought of as a special duty that we only owe to people close to us. According to the Duty View, it is not relationships that justify partiality, but the duties that are generated or entailed by certain types of relationships and situations. Consider the following example:

Cat Adoption: Suppose that I want to adopt a cat. I go and visit her to the shelter and after a while I decide to complete the adoption papers to officially become her owner. By signing the papers, I signify my understanding that I am now responsible for her well-being. Being responsible for her well-being, I find myself bound by certain duties: to clean her litter, to feed her and to bring her to the veterinary when she is sick.

In this case, I signed papers, thus generating special duties. Again, when acknowledging special obligations towards my cat, I am partial in that I do not adopt “the point of view of the universe” or “grant equal importance to the interests of all affected by a decision”. I thus fail to be impartial on Maclean’s second reading, i.e., “Pure Impartiality”. Nevertheless, my obligations towards my cat probably fit into the category of things that are recognizable by the group as a whole and thus I can still act impartially in her first reading, i.e., “Impure Impartiality”.

More generally, special duties can arise out of a variety of situations other than “histories of encounters”. I can be bound by a duty because I have some abilities that others do not have, because I find myself precisely at the site of a car crash, because I made a promise, etc. My duty-centered approach allows for the fact that not all relationships warrant partiality, only those that come with special duties, and duties can arise from other factors than a shared history. As a criterion for justified partiality, duty has the needed wide scope, one that is wider than positive histories of encounters.

When I have a duty towards someone, I am entitled to be partial towards them. This claim can be made attractive by reference to the principle “ought implies can”: if something is required of someone, that person must have the means to carry it out. This is also a matter of justice. One cannot be required to care for one’s elderly parents if one is, at the same time, required to divide one’s time equally among all the elderly people on Earth. We all have tasks that we need to perform for different people, and partiality is simply one of the preconditions for us to complete those tasks. So, it appears that partiality is at least sometimes permissible. Is it also sometimes required?

The answer is “yes”. What justifies partiality, the special obligations we have towards others, is also what can render it morally required. This is because partiality is sometimes a prerequisite for us to be in a position to comply with our special obligations. So, when is it required and when is it merely permissible?

Partiality is merely permissible when it constitutes one way among many to abide by one’s special obligation; it is required when we cannot comply with the duty without being partial. For instance, partiality is merely permissible when it comes to deciding between giving the last piece of cake to your child or to another child. The reason why partiality is here merely permissible is that partiality in cake-giving is just one possible way of complying with your duty to care for your child. Alternatively, you can tell them “This time I am giving the last piece of cake to your friend but tomorrow I will teach you how to bake your own cake. So, you see how special you are to me.” On the other hand, partiality is required when it comes to the question of who will get your healthy kidney. Not choosing your child over a stranger in this situation would automatically prevent you from really caring for them. You couldn’t e.g., sensibly tell them “Of course you are my child and I have a duty to care for you, I just choose not to care for you in this way”.

The relationship itself, as mentioned earlier, is not sufficient to account for the kind and degree of partiality that is warranted. Only duties are, and duties can be generated by many different things. We should thus adopt a form of pluralism about the sources of duty: relationships, individuals, projects, and many other sorts of things can give rise to duty. Before moving on to show how my approach can answer the above-mentioned difficulties as well as account for self-partiality, we must first deal with an objection according to which the account is circular.

The worry is this: aren’t special duties already a manifestation of partiality and, if so, how can something already partial, a special duty, justify partiality? To assuage this worry, let me insist that the objective in this paper is a rather modest one: to tie partiality to special obligations in order to give additional credibility to the claim that partiality is sometimes justified. I argued that partiality is justified because it is a mean to comply with our special obligations. The present worry seems to target the justification of special obligations.¹⁵ It is worth noting again that no moral theory, even utilitarianism, denies the existence of special obligations altogether.¹⁶ The remaining issue is whether special obligations can be impartial.

My guess is that special obligations can be impartial on Maclean’s first reading (Impure Impartiality) i.e., be acceptable by the community. On this suggestion, partiality only amounts to a property of some actions by contrast to the principles that justify them. The principles in question are still impartial in the second sense (Impure Impartiality) by being acceptable by the community. The fact that there can be morally justified partial actions would thus not threaten the impartial aspect of morality as we understand it. A parallel might be helpful. In our morality, we accept that people are morally justified in acting violently if the circumstances warrant it, for instance when we act in self-defense. The fact that a moral system occasionally allows violent actions does not mean that it is a violent morality. The same is true of the relation between occasional impartial actions and an impartial moral system: a moral system can make room for partial action without being a partial moral system.

The existence of special obligations remains controversial, but we have prima facie grounds for not rejecting them from the outset. Indeed, they provide a unifying explanation of what is common to all cases of justified partiality, both to oneself and to others: they come with special duties and special duties can arise out of a variety of circumstances.

6.2 The Duty View and Partiality to Oneself

So far, the focus was on interpersonal partiality, but what of self-partiality? The claim of the paper is that the special duties we owe to ourselves allow for the justification self-partiality. For a long time, the notion of duties to oneself has been the subject of controversy (Singer, 1959). Yet, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that such duties do not raise any conceptual worry.¹⁷ As mentioned above, taking care of one’s health, or spending more time on one’s own hygiene than that of others, or even spending more money on one’s own leisure, is intuitively morally acceptable. Perhaps an example can clarify the distinction between duties we owe to ourselves and duties we owe to others. Let us imagine that, like Rose in my Friendship scenario, I am an inveterate smoker, and that I suddenly become aware of the risks to my health. I am morally justified in spending more time, energy, and money to remedy this problem than I would spend on a friend struggling with the same difficulties. This is because I have a duty to attend to my well-being that I don’t have towards others and that others don’t have towards me. I am, so to speak, in my own care just like my children are also in my care. This kind of duty justifies our partiality towards ourselves and justifies others’ partiality towards themselves.¹⁸

The Duty View has many advantages. First, it accounts for partiality to oneself. A second advantage is that it accounts for the fact that I have reasons to be partial towards my newborn baby or my orphaned nephew, human beings that I just met and with whom I don’t share a history. Because I have special duties towards them, I am entitled to a certain proportion of partiality. Third, the Duty View avoids the overgeneralization problem. It does so because it specifies what justifies partiality in terms of special duties. For instance, the property “being a fellow human being” generates only universal duties such as respect and no special duties.¹⁹

In addition, the Duty View allows us to explain how and to what extent relationships ground partiality: they do because they are sources of duties. Indeed, this view allows us to define what kind and degree of partiality is morally justified, depending on the duties generated by a given relationship. A university dean, say, is justified in devoting more time and energy to her children than to other students by cooking with them, going on holidays with them and so on, but is not justified in showing partiality in other areas of her children’s lives. For instance, she is not justified in favoring them in the admission process, or to give them priority to prestigious scholarships.²⁰ That their children are their children is relevant in determining whether they should, for instance, give them a kidney but not in determining who they should grant a scholarship. The fact that they are their children thus give rise to special obligations in one context but not in all contexts. In similar vein, Brad Hooker argues that:

Impartial application of a rule consists in being guided solely by the distinctions identified as relevant by the rule. Some rules make the issue of who is benefited or harmed irrelevant. This is true of rules against lying, stealing, and breaking the law. But other rules distinguish between others by picking out who qualifies for benefits or harms, or for more benefit or harm. (Hooker 2010: 29).

There are thus two categories of rules. The first comprises those rules for which the issue of who is benefited is morally irrelevant. The rules governing scholarship attributions fall under this category: whether the applicant is one’s children is morally irrelevant. The second category comprises rules for which the issue of who is benefitted is morally relevant. The rule governing voluntary organ donation falls under this category: whether the patient is one’s children is morally relevant in deciding whether to voluntarily give them an organ. I essentially agree with Hooker: the fact that someone is our children is relevant in some cases and not in others. Whereas Hooker articulates this intuition with the idea of impartially applied moral principles, I prefer to speak of the presence or absence of special obligations.

And so, we see that appealing directly to duties rather than to relationships makes room for a fine specification of the degree and nature of morally justified partiality in a given situation. The duties we have towards a person and her well-being, for example, depend both on the nature of the relationship, the characteristics of the individuals, whether a promise was made, the more general context in which we are, etc. All of these things may well refer, at least indirectly, to relationships, but what justifies partiality are the duties. The university dean /parent has a duty to help her children flourish, to feed them, to care for them, etc., but has no duty to favor them in the admission process and so partiality in this regard is unjustified.

Before concluding, let us consider one last objection to this proposal.²¹ Supererogatory actions are actions that are good but not morally required. Examples include volunteering on the weekends at your local shelter, picking up trash on the beach during your holidays, giving the last part of cake to your coworker even though you got it first, etc. A standard problem in the literature on supererogation is how to combine the claim that it is good to sacrifice oneself with the idea that we sometimes ought to be partial to ourselves. My view faces a version of this problem in that a duty to favor oneself would make it neutral at best and wrong at worst to sacrifice oneself in the interest of someone else.

By way of answering this concern, let me emphasize that what we really want to avoid is the conclusion that it is always wrong to sacrifice oneself and this is entailed by the claim that we are always required in being partial to oneself. This paper has defended the more modest claim that it is sometimes morally required that we are partial to oneself which only entail that it is sometimes morally wrong to self-sacrifice. Consider the following example:

Julliard: Anette has trained her whole life to join the prestigious Julliard school of arts and sacrificed a lot in order to pay for her music lessons as well as her instruments. She auditions and get ranked 10th in her class. Fortunately for her, they admit precisely ten people in this year’s cohort. Being ranked 10th, she knows that if she declines the offer, another person will be able to join the school.

Imagine that Anette turned down her acceptance at Julliard in order to let another candidate fulfill her dream of joining the school. Most of us, rather than finding Anette’s action praiseworthy would find it morally objectionable. After all she has endured, shouldn’t Annette take up this spot rather than give it away? This is because Anette has a special obligation towards herself, that she does not have towards other contestant to fulfill her dreams, to develop into the best version of oneself²² and ultimately to reach happiness. If we contrast this case with a situation in which one is considering whether one should have the last piece of cake, we see that my account leaves plenty of room for supererogatory actions since there probably is no special obligation to oneself to always satisfy one’s cravings before those of others. Now, it is true that the account is incompatible with the idea that it is always praiseworthy to sacrifice oneself for the sake of others which is a welcome consequence of the proposal.

7 Conclusion

By contrast with the Relationship View, which takes relationships to justify partiality through shared positive histories, this paper defended the idea that partiality is always justified by special duties. This Duty View is compatible with the idea that special duties often arise out of shared histories. It departs from Kolodny’s view in that many relationships that are not characterized by a shared history still come with special duties. Next, I argued that, just as one has duties to others, one also has duties to oneself; in order to properly act on these duties, one must be granted a degree of self-partiality. So, not only is partiality to oneself often morally acceptable, it is also often required. While arguing in favor of some justified cases of self-partiality, I have tried to respect our intuitions about the justification of self-partiality and the idea that a good account of partiality should illuminate both partiality to others and partiality to oneself. There is certainly much more to be said about this and I hope that the present discussion will spark an interest in self-partiality.