The Confucian Filial Obligation and Care For Aged Parents

Introduction Some moral philosophers in the West hold that adult children do not have any more moral obligation to support their elderly parents than does any other person in the society, no matter how much sacrifice their parents made for them in the past or what kinds of misery their parents are presently suffering. This is so, they claim, because children do not ask to be brought into this world or to be adopted. Thus, the traditional filial obligation of supporting and taking care of the aged is left as either the private responsibility of the elderly themselves or as a societal burden on the public.(1) For example, Norman Daniels argues that there is a "basic asymmetry between parental and the filial obligations" (Daniels, 1988, p.29). The parental obligation of caring for their young children, says Daniels, is a "self-imposed" duty, while the so-called children's obligation of caring for their aged parents is "non-self-imposed" and thus cannot be morally required.(2) In her famous essay, "What Do Grown Children Owe Their Parents," Jane English also claims that a favor done without it being requested or a voluntary sacrifice of one for another can only create "a friendly gesture" (Sommers & Sommers, 1993, pp. 758-765). It incurs neither an "owing" nor a moral obligation to reciprocate. Accordingly, "a filial obligation would only arise," says English, "from whatever love (s)he [the adult child] may still feel for them [her parents]."(3) The moral obligation stops whenever the friendship relation ends. Because we cannot always assume a friendship relation exists between a parent and his/her children, filial obligation is not a genuine moral obligation at all.

In what follows I shall argue against the Daniels/English thesis in light of the traditional Eastern Confucian view of the nature of filial obligation. I shall make a distinction between "moral duty" and "moral responsibility" and argue that adult children's filial obligation of taking care of and being respectful to their aged parents should not be understood as a moral responsibility but as a moral duty, which is, by its nature, not necessarily self-imposed. That is to say, it is not consensual, contractarian, and voluntarist but existential, communal, and historical.