I think there are clear cases in which my future selves have rights against me (or I have duties to my future selves). For example, my future selves have the right to enjoy a healthy life and thus I have the duty to abstain from drug abuse. I may otherwise cause harm to my future selves, violating their rights. This is also reflected in discussions on intergenerational justice.
Now my question is whether there are some examples in which my future selves have duties to my current self?
What about Burke's Social Contract For The Ages? As much as society is the balance of our momentary self-concerned needs with those of others, there is an extent to which we must balance our eras momentary or short-term needs with long-term concerns that reach beyond the lives of individuals and even nations - likely say climate change, or nuclear waste.
It is easy for us to dismiss our formative stages, our past idealism or whatever, naivety, immaturity etc. If we fail to integrate and accept them, we risk failing to understand and accept others, going through formative stages. This is brought in to sharper focus, when we think that our future self may look back on right now, and dismiss your current concerns as baseless, meaningless, trivial. I would say your future self has a duty to maintain continuity, connection, with your current mindset, to at least honor it as part of your path, and not to wipe out the memory or remains of it in a way the prevents any possible reconciliation, integration, or reinterpretation. If we don't understand history, we repeat it, or someone else does.
Usually rights, duties, morality, etc., involve the idea that the parties involved have choice, and the capability to understand morality. So usually we don't accord rights to, for example, house plants, because they can't make choices and can't understand the morality involved.
Your future selves don't exist.
Your past selves don't exist.
In order to be able to make choices or understand morality, an entity has to exist. In order to have rights, an entity has to exist. It is a misapplication of the term to try to accord them rights.
That does not mean there is no morality involved. But giving your past or future self rights is not the way to approach it.
I can't have a duty to something that doesn't exist, namely my future self. I can have, however, and would be well-advised to cultivate the virtue of prudence which would, among other things, take into account how things will be or are likely to be with me in the future.
My future self, by parity of reasoning, cannot have any obligations to my current self : what doesn't exist (my future self) cannot have obligations to anything, including my current self. If my current self is my self at time t1, then supposing at time t2 I still exist, my self at t2 can have no obligations to my self at t1 since my self at t1 will no longer exist and so cannot be the object of any obligations.
In a physical sense, actions in the future have no impact on the past, so I assume you mean in terms of ambition and direction. I believe that people evolve over time and change whether positive or negative is natural. In a way, we become different people, and we owe others nothing.
The present self of an individual is to their old selves what their future selves are to their current self. The question can thus be rephrased as "does an individual's present self have duties to past selves?" - it's evident that the answer is no as their present self cannot affect their past self in any way. That is assuming that time does not have any quirks which enable a Back to the Future like scenario - so far as we know, this is not the case.
