What we owe to ourselves: Investigating people's sense of obligations to the self

Core to our moral sense is that we have obligations toward others, such that we are expected to curb self-interests in light of obligations to other individuals and society at large. But do we also have obligations to ourselves? Motivated by this underexplored question in moral psychology, we conducted six studies (N = 1,860) to systematically investigate how people view obligations to the self. Study 1 found that most participants endorsed the idea of obligations to the self, providing examples such as preserving physical and mental health. Study 2 found that, like obligations to others, people distinguished violations of self-obligations from personal preferences or social conventions, and judged them as wrong regardless of external authority or majority behavior. Study 3 demonstrated this tendency even in the case of a socially isolated agent, suggesting self-obligations are not reducible to obligations to others. Study 4 showed that people judged that both self- and other-related obligations justified a moral transgression, more so than personal preferences, goals, or social conventions. Studies 5 and 6 revealed that perceived harmfulness to the self is a key mechanism in shaping whether people judge an act to be owed to the self. Together, these findings highlight obligations to the self as an important category in our moral framework, offering a deeper understanding of the role of self-interest in morality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).