The Confucian Filial Obligation and Care For Aged Parents

I. Consent and Moral Obligation We may find a basic thesis that underline the Daniels/English rejection of adult children's moral obligation of taking respectful care for their aged parents. It claims that filial obligation, if it is to be a moral obligation, should be based on the voluntary consent of all moral agents involved.(4) Obviously, the thesis expresses a meta-ethical principle which underlies not only Daniels/English argument but also some major accounts of the nature of moral obligation in the modern West. I call it the "principle of intentional consent." "Consent" is required because a moral action ought to be approved of by all the persons involved in the action. It is "intentional" because an agreement or an approval ought to be reached voluntarily and without any kind of outside coercion or deceit. Very clearly, this principle gets its power from Kant's concept of a person as potentially an autonomous, rational, and free agent.(5) That is to say, intentional consent is simply an exercise of one's autonomy and rationality. Therefore, as a free, rational, and autonomous moral agent, I am morally responsible only for the consequences of those actions which I have committed voluntarily, without any coercion and deceit. Otherwise I will not see myself behaving as a free and autonomous being. Living in modern society, it seems that few people can really deny the importance of the principle of intentional consent and that of the concept of autonomy in our consideration of the nature of morality. However, is it the absolute and exclusive grounding of morality? That is to ask, is there any limitation of that principle in our moral practice, especially when we consider filial morality in dealing with the relationship between adult children and their aged parents?

Let me try to answer the question by looking at the following example. When Fred, a strong man and a good swimmer,(6) went by a swimming pool on his way home, he found a three year old child Sheila was drowning in a swimming pool with another young child John crying nearby. Does Fred have any moral obligation to jump into the pool to save Sheila? Most of us, I believe, would say "yes" according to our common moral sense. But what interests us in this example is not whether Fred ought to save Sheila but why Fred ought to try to save her. Obviously, Fred neither made a promise nor gave consent to a request from Sheila's parents or Sheila herself to save Sheila when she is in danger. However, not giving consent does not sufficiently exempt Fred from his moral obligation to save Sheila in such a situation. To me, what makes Fred morally obligated in this case is the existential or factical "being" of Fred, Sheila, and John rather than Fred's intentional consent that is crucial in Fred's moral obligation to try to save Sheila.(7) Similar examples in our contemporary social and moral life can also be found in the cases such as the moral obligation of the present generation of human beings to protect the ecological environment and to preserve some of the natural resources for future generations, a citizen's obligation to defend her home country, a patient's obligation not to have physical contact with healthy persons if she knows that she has an infectious disease, etc. All of these demonstrate that at least some of our commonly and ordinarily accepted and practiced moral obligations can be justified without being preconditioned by the mutual consent of the moral agents

involved in the action. That is to say, they are, pace Daniels, "asymmetrical" rather than "symmetrical."

In order to make the point clearer, I would like to call an attention to the nature of our understanding of "ought" or "moral obligation." When we say "A ought (not) to do X," or "A is obligated (not) to do X," it seems to me that we often have a confusion between two types of "ought/obligation."(8) One type of "ought/obligation" is caused solely by the intentional consent of competent moral agents involved in the action, and I call this moralresponsibility .(9) That is to say, a competent moral agent should be morally responsible for the consequences caused by her consensual action. Compared with moral responsibility,moral duty is another type of "ought/obligation." It does not necessarily depend on the competent moral agent's intentional consent. It is rather determined mainly by what kind of existential situation a moral agent is in and what kind of social role she plays. For example, a normal and healthy person is obligated to yield to a handicapped person because the latter is handicapped. Similarly, a hostess is obligated to show her hospitality to her guests while a stranger is not.

Someone may argue that although many of our moral obligations are determined by different existential situations and social roles we play, we do often consent to be in those situations and to play those social roles in the first place. My response to this argument is, first, we do not always choose our existential situations or social roles. Many times we are thrown into a situation and many social roles are imposed on us without our previous consent. Second, although many times a moral agent does theoretically have an option to play or not to play a specific social role, such an option may not always be practical and therefore not real. Third, consenting to do something and being obligated to do something are not always the same. Therefore, in many cases, I consent to do something because I ought to do it, rather than it being the case that I ought to do it because I have consented to do it.

Thus understood, moral responsibility and moral duty are two types of moral obligation. They are different and the distinction between them should not be confused. The difference, as I have argued above, consists in that the former is caused exclusively by the intentional consent of the moral agent while the latter is not. However, they are not completely irrelevant to each other. Moral responsibility may be seen as a special type of moral duty. That is to say, moral responsibility is a particular moral duty of a moral agent when she behaves as an autonomous being or when she practices her autonomy in her consensual actions. However, a human being as a moral agent is not only an individual autonomous being. A person is also a social and communal being, which imposes on her duties for caring for others as well as for her surrounding ecological environment, and a rational being, which makes her obligated to calculate the consequential implications of her consensual action before she consents to it. Furthermore she is also a historical and cultural being, a concrete and situational being, etc. All of these essential features of a human being have created or revealed different types of moral duties that human beings as moral agents have. Therefore, an appropriate moral evaluation or moral judgement of a person's action should

be based on or determined by weighing these moral duties of the person in her existential situation against one another.

In light of the distinction between the two kinds of moral obligation, i.e., moral responsibility and moral duty, it becomes clear that the filial obligation of adult children to take care of their aged parents belongs to the category of moral duty, which, by its nature, is existential rather than consensual. It is so because the family, which defines the adult children's filial obligation to their aged parents, is basically a natural community rather than a social contractarian community. As long as the natural family is still one of the basic forms of our social and communal life, the parental and filial obligations between parents and children will exist. Therefore, being a son or a daughter of one's parents, one is obligated or has a duty to respect them as parents and to take care of them if they necessary, no matter whether one chose to be the son or the daughter of one's parents.