When one makes a promise to others, one puts oneself under obligation to them. Can one then incur an obligation to oneself by making a promise to oneself? If not, why not? Do the disanalogies between promises to others and “promises to oneself” show that “promises to oneself” are morally insignificant or, more generally, that obligations to oneself are impossible?

There are several reasons for raising these questions.

First, the idea of promises to oneself is familiar but puzzling. We often talk of such promises in jest, but sometimes quite seriously. Some find the idea quite natural, while others dismiss it as absurd. These phenomena suggest conceptual tensions of some philosophical interest in themselves, apart from any implications for larger issues.

Second, “promises to oneself” are frequently invoked in the controversy about whether one can have moral obligations to oneself. For example, some philosophers ridicule the idea of obligations to oneself by noting that I am not morally to blame if I “promise myself” a treat and then fail to take it. Obligations to oneself, it is assumed, would be self-serving requirements whereas morality is concerned with interpersonal relations. Other philosophers use the paradoxical idea of a “promise to oneself” to illustrate and support their general contention that “obligations to oneself,” construed literally, are logically impossible. The example is important to their case because promising is a paradigm of putting oneself under obligation to someone in the most literal sense.