Moral questions surrounding suffering tend to focus on obligations to relieve others’ suffering. In this paper, I focus on the overlooked question of what sufferers morally owe to themselves, arguing that they have the duty to self-care. I discuss agents who have been shaped by moral luck to contribute to their own suffering and canvass the ways in which this damages their moral agency. I contend that these agents have a duty to care for themselves by protecting and expanding their (...) agency, which involves precluding further destruction of agency and ensuring the continued ability to self-care. (shrink)

Although clinical understandings of self-injury, the deliberate mutilation of body tissue, have developed significantly since the phenomenon was first studied, the predominant stereotype of who self-injures is still White, teenage girls.1 White girls as well as White women are, indeed, at risk for SI, and sociocultural explanations appealing to oppressive socialization—particularly the influence of Western beauty norms—have been offered to explain their high rates of SI. Yet evidence exists to challenge this conception that SI is exclusively a White, female issue: (...) Black women, South... (shrink)

Common-sense morality tells us we should help our loved ones who suffer. Self-saboteurs complicate this intuition: ought we help someone who wants to suffer? In this paper, I discuss mechanisms of and motivations for self-sabotaging behavior. I then turn to the ethical complications of these cases: the risk of becoming complicit in another’s self-sabotage; the acceptable limits of caring for a self-saboteur; and the permissibility of paternalistic interference. I argue that while there is some permissible leeway involved in meeting another’s (...) needs—including submitting to their low-stakes manipulation—doing so risks damaging the relationship. While paternalistic interference may seem justified, I argue that this approach is a morally problematic denial of the self-saboteur’s agency. Instead, I offer an alternative route between complicity and interference: carers ought to try to maintain a relationship built on the honest recognition of each other’s reasons, which may include the self-saboteur’s legitimate reasons to suffer. (shrink)

A common question in moral philosophy concerns how we should regard traumatic histories that have influenced wrongdoing. In this paper, I argue that one standard line of response—survivors are exempt from blame for a given wrongdoing because of a traumatic history that influenced this wrongdoing—is problematic. Instead of trying to determine how trauma categorically exempts survivors from blame, I argue that we should start from the fact that survivors are members of the moral community who can be as blameworthy as (...) anyone, and then ask how considerations of trauma might impact a moral response to their wrongdoing. I consider and reject three attempts to exempt survivors on the grounds of traumatic histories, arguing that each risks divesting survivors of moral agency. I then develop an account of compassionate blame, a unique attitude in which we can blame the survivor for their wrong while also taking compassion towards the survivor in light of their traumatic history, and argue that this is the appropriate moral attitude to cultivate in these cases. (shrink)