Candace Vogler
    Professor at the University of Chicago

    Title of Paper: "You Owe it to Yourself"

Descriptive Paragraph: Do I have any duties to myself?  The claim that I do is perfectly familiar: I owe myself a vacation because I deserve a break.  My debt is also my due.  In advertising and intimate conversation the claim about my obligations to myself has a point - to inspire me to make a better life for myself.  But moral philosophy sometimes sounds a somber note in this otherwise uplifting chorus of voices urging me to be my own advocate.  Kantians argue that I have duties to myself, and that discharging these is (in some cases) prior to acknowledging obligations to anyone else.  I will argue against this tendency in contemporary moral theory, urge that it has a point in Kant's work, and suggest that the moral psychological ground for thoughts about what I owe myself is unstable, quite apart from the peculiar requirements of Kantian ethics.

Biography: Candace Vogler is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College at the University of Chicago.  Her research interests are in practical philosophy (particulary the strand of work in moral philosophy indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe), practical reason, Kant's ethics, Marx, and neo-Aristotelian naturalism.  She has authored two books, John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An essay in moral psychology (Routledge, 2001) and Reasonably Vicious (Harvard University Press, 2002) and essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas.