From & To Sathish #7- Page 133

https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-has-solved-one-of-maths-1-million-millennium-prize-problems-20260908/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=&position=1&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=fabbdcb8-5f2d-4917-aa95-164c97adc687&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.quantamagazine.org%2Fai-has-solved-one-of-maths-1-million-millennium-prize-problems-20260908%2F

AI Has Solved One of Math's $1 Million Millennium Prize Problems

https://psyche.co/ideas/is-it-morally-wrong-to-not-take-care-of-yourself

Is it morally wrong to not take care of yourself?

by Laura K Soter, philosopher, and Fan Yang, psychologist

The philosophical debate goes on. But our research on self-obligations suggests there's a common, consequential view

Have you ever felt guilty for how you treated yourself? Maybe you promised yourself you would work towards some goal and you failed to do so, or you continued to feed yourself unhealthy food, or kept yourself sleep-deprived because you wouldn't stop doomscrolling in bed. Of course, we all sometimes make unwise choices or do things that have bad consequences. But there's another intriguing possibility: that, in some cases, we owed it to ourselves to treat ourselves better - in other words, that we have moral obligations to ourselves. So, do such self-obligations exist? Do we feel their pull in everyday life?

Perhaps surprisingly, there is little consensus on whether we have moral obligations to ourselves. Nearly everyone agrees, of course, that we have obligations to other people. Most of us have felt guilty at some point for how we treated someone else; guilt is, often, a sign that (we think) we've done something morally wrong. Such failures can be big (seriously injuring someone in a bar fight, or cheating on a spouse) or small (forgetting a promise to pick up someone from the airport, or saying something unkind). Indeed, it is widely thought that morality exists as a set of norms that govern our interactions with other people. But, because of this, the question of whether there are also moral norms about how we treat ourselves is much more controversial. Obligations to the self don't sit well with many standard ways of thinking about the nature of morality.

Some theorists question whether there are any genuine obligations to the self, for several reasons. One is that morality has been described as a system that arises when there's a need to coordinate the competing interests of different people. Thus, it's possible that how we treat ourselves is not inherently a moral issue. This is a perspective that many psychologists studying morality have taken, including proponents of social domain theory, dyadic morality, and the cooperative theory of morality. A stronger version of this view is that it would be overreaching to think of morality as governing how people treat themselves, in light of essential values of personal liberty or autonomy. For instance, in Fatal Freedom (1999), the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz used this perspective to argue that even suicide is morally permissible.

Another kind of objection is that obligations to the self are conceptually incoherent - they make no sense. With many interpersonal obligations, the person who is owed something can release the one who owes them: if you promise to cook me dinner, I can simply waive your obligation by telling you I don't need you to keep that promise. But if the person who's owed something and the person who owes it are the same person, couldn't I just release myself from any obligation I don't want to fulfil? This is known as the 'paradox of self-release', and philosophers such as Marcus Singer have worried that this renders obligations to the self either impossible or trivial.

Despite these sceptical perspectives, other philosophers have defended obligations to the self as a central component of morality. Immanuel Kant, for instance, thought that the duty of self-respect was fundamental to moral life. He thought that it was wrong to treat oneself (or anyone else) as 'a mere means' to an end rather than an end in oneself - and on this basis, he thought such varied acts as suicide, masturbation, and even cutting one's hair in order to sell it were morally wrong. Confucius thought that self-cultivation was a valuable moral end. And contemporary philosophers have defended a wide range of self-obligations, including pursuing self-knowledge, avoiding self-harm, cultivating one's talents, resisting oppression, and keeping promises to oneself.

A person's sense of moral obligation is an essential force driving their choices and behaviours. If ordinary people endorse the idea of self-obligations, it would suggest that theories of morality that focus only on obligations to others have missed an important component of this moral sense. Therefore, wherever the theorists land on these matters, there's an important psychological question to be asked: do people think that there are moral obligations to the self?

We investigated this in a series of recent studies. We started by simply asking US adults (aged 18 to late 70s) whether they thought they had obligations to themselves, even in cases when their actions would not affect anyone else. More than 85 per cent of the people we asked said 'yes'. When asked for examples of such obligations, they provided a wide range, especially concerning taking care of one's mental and physical health, but also cultivating moral character or living up to religious commitments.

Avoiding self-harm or taking care of one's mental health were seen as matters of obligation to the self

But showing that people really think there are obligations to the self takes more than that. There is some consensus among philosophers that an obligation has at least two essential features. First, it is non-optional. So, obligations to the self can't simply be personal preferences about how to live our lives or treat ourselves: they are stronger than that, and they hold even if we don't always want to fulfil them. Second, obligations are directed to a specific target. It's not just that I owe the money I promised I'd repay; I owe it to the person who lent it to me. In the case of obligations to the self, the target of these obligations needs to be the self. This gets at a crucial distinction between obligations that are genuinely owed to the self, and those that are in some sense about the self but are ultimately owed to other people. Consider, for instance, a soccer player who promises her team she'll get in shape; here, the obligation is about her own body, but it is owed to her teammates.

With this in mind, we tried to dig deeper and see whether people really differentiate obligations from mere preferences, and whether they truly see them as being owed to the self.

When we asked people to classify a wide range of self-directed acts, they identified some, like avoiding self-harm or taking care of one's mental health or personal safety, as matters of obligation to the self, while acts like drinking tea or reading fiction were matters of personal preference. Importantly, they also explicitly judged that, in violating the obligations, a person did something wrong to themselves, not just to other people. Backing this up even more, we asked participants to imagine a totally isolated person living all by themselves - think of someone stranded like Robinson Crusoe - and people still judged that it was wrong for that person to fail to take care of themselves.

In terms of what rises to the level of self-obligation, our final studies suggest that harmfulness is a key factor: people judge acts that are highly harmful to the self to be matters of moral obligation, but acts that are not harmful are more likely to be seen as a matter of preference. Harm may not be the only distinguishing feature - we also found evidence that people think acts that inhibit one's potential or change one's true self can be matters of self-obligation - but these were less predictive than harm.

Together, these results suggest people think that it's wrong if one fails to treat oneself in particular ways. This raises a variety of interesting questions. After all, it seems like such beliefs could have both good and bad consequences, depending on the context.

For instance, it's well known that people find obligations motivating, feeling driven to fulfil them. Is this also the case for obligations to the self? That is, could thinking of something as a matter of what you morally owe to yourself provide the motivation to do things that might otherwise be difficult - such as exercising, taking care of yourself, or pursuing long-term goals? If so, that would be one way that moral self-obligations could be a positive psychological force.

The tendency to moralise self-care might risk making us more judgmental, and less empathetic

But there may also be risks that come along with moralisation. People are often harsh critics of those who fail to fulfil perceived obligations: blaming them, feeling anger or resentment towards them, and in some cases thinking they deserve to be punished. Do we also think this way about those who fail to fulfil self-obligations? If so, such reactions could, in some cases, have negative consequences.

For instance, many self-help or spiritual movements emphasise that you owe it to yourself to be the 'best version of you'. Although this can be a valuable message in the right contexts, we might also worry that such messages can trade on the felt moral value of self-improvement - especially when failing to act in the ways advocated by any particular movement is accompanied by messages of blame, shame or guilt.

Moreover, we might worry about the consequences of perceiving the failure to take care of physical or mental health as the failure of a moral obligation. Various kinds of mental illnesses or addictions might be seen as involving, or resulting in, chronic failures of self-obligations. The tendency to moralise self-care might risk making us more judgmental, and less empathetic, towards people dealing with such challenges - or, if we face these challenges ourselves, turn us into our own harshest critic.

And what happens when an obligation to yourself conflicts with other moral obligations (either to yourself or to other people)? Even if we have genuine obligations to ourselves, are there conditions under which these obligations can be waived or overridden?

These are some of the rich questions that are ripe for both philosophical and psychological investigation - and also questions that each of us might encounter in our own lives. For now, we hope that our research brings into awareness a more encompassing view of obligation, one that many people seem to agree with, even if they've never stopped to reflect on it before. The self might be the one person that many of us prioritise or neglect without recognising that doing so could be a moral issue.

Laura K Soter is assistant professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she also co-directs the PsyPhi Lab. Her research focuses on questions at the intersection of cognitive science, epistemology and ethics, with a special focus on moral psychological questions about how social relationships shape moral cognition, and on questions about the nature of belief and the norms that govern it.