Adult Children’s Obligations Towards Their Parents: A Contractualist Explanation

Adult children’s obligation to help their parents will be affected by the quality of parenting which they received from their parents. In my discussion, I assume that the aging parents have been responsible parents, who didn’t seriously neglect or abuse their children in the past.

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017). World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision; United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2013. The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World (New York, NY: United Nation Development Programme, 2013).

Christine Vogeli, Alexandra E. Shields, Todd A. Lee, Teresa B. Gibson, William D. Marder, Kevin B. Weiss & David Blumenthal “Multiple Chronic Conditions: Prevalence, Health Consequences, and Implications for Quality, Care Management, and Costs,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 22 (Suppl. 3), (2007): 391–395; Jennifer L. Wolff, Barbara Starfield, and Gerard Anderson “Prevalence, Expenditures, and Complications of Multiple Chronic Conditions in the Elderly,” Archives of Internal Medicine 162 (20) (2002): 2269–2276. See also Center for Disease Control. Chronic Disease Prevention and Promotion. Retrieved from https://​www.​cdc.​gov/​chronicdisease/​index.​htm.

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2010). World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision; Dominic Bailey, Mick Ruddy, and Marina Shchukina, “Ageing China: Changes and Challenges.” BBC News Asia, September 20, 2012. Retrieved from http://​www.​bbc.​com/​news/​world-asia-19630110.

Confucians believe that adult children have strong obligations to reciprocate, and that filial obligations trump other moral concerns. See Confucius: The Analects (D. C. Lau, Trans.). (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 13.18 and Mencius (D. C. Lau, Trans.). (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), 7A35. On a moderate interpretation of the Confucian demands, see Philip J. Ivanhoe “Filial Piety as a Virtue,” In Rebecca L. Walker and Philip J. Ivanhoe (eds.), Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 297–311.

Some writers hold that adult children are not morally responsible for supporting their parents’ lives at all, and that filial obligations are by their nature oppressive or parochial. See A. John Simmons Moral Principles and Political Obligations (New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 157–190; Michael Slote, “Obedience and Illusions,” In Onora O’Neill and William Ruddick (eds.), Having Children (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 319–326.

This story, together with the remarks made by Mrs. Fischer, is taken from John Leland, “For Families of the Ailing, a Brief Chance to Relax.” New York Times, August 18, 2008. Retrieved from http://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2008/​08/​19/​health/​19aging.​html. I am grateful to Daniel Wikler who drew my attention to this case.

Social Welfare Department, the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Overview of Residential Care Services for Elders, 2012. http://​www.​swd.​gov.​hk/​en/​index/​site_​pubsvc/​page_​elderly/​ sub_residentia/id_overviewon. Accessed 24 March 2018.

Elisabeth J. Croll, “The Intergenerational Contract in the Changing Asian Family,” Oxford Development Studies 34 (2006): 473–491. Chau-Kiu Cheung and Alex Yui-Huen Kwan, “The Erosion of Filial Piety by Modernization in Chinese Cities,” Ageing and Society 29 (2009): 179–198.

Ashford, op. cit., p. 279. For Scanlon, a person’s level of welfare (or the considerations of cost alone) is not the sole criterion of reasonable rejection; it also matters how those costs will be imposed on the agent (op. cit., p. 196) and how the “framework of entitlements” (op. cit., p. 214) is structured in the circumstance.

The case of Shipwreck is discussed in Sin, op. cit., p. 13. I owed this case to Daniel Wikler.

Without the attachment of the threshold view, the Moderate Principle may require agents to make significant contributions indefinitely, which will give rise to extreme moral demands.

Needless to say, the same argument can apply to the threshold version of the Extreme Principle.

In reality, many parents are not willing to impose extreme burdens on their children. They want their children to live their own lives too. However, in the present context, we are considering, at a critical level, what amount of sacrifice is reasonable for adult children to bear on behalf of their parents. The parents’ such psychological propensities may not fall within the scope of our investigation here.

There have been different ways to categorize the various explanations of filial obligations. Michael Collingridge and Seumas Miller, “Filial Responsibility and the Care of the Aged,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 14 (1997): 119–128 distinguish between “reciprocity model”, “needs-based model”, “friendship model,” and “conventionalist model”. Li Chenyang, “Shifting Perspectives: Filial Morality Revisited,” Philosophy East and West 47 (1997), 211–232 proposes the following way of categorizing explanations of filial obligations: “English’s Friendship Model”, “Belliotti’s Contribution to Self Principle”, “Narveson’s Prudent Investor Thesis”, “Sommers’ Conventional Expectation Thesis”, “Blustein’s Gratitude Theory” and “The Confucian Alternative.” Simon Keller, “Four Theories of Filial Duty,” The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 56 (223) (2006): 254–274 suggests “the debt theory,” “the gratitude theory,” “the friendship theory,” and his own “special goods theory.” Most recently, Anders Schinkel, “Filial Obligations: A Contextual, Pluralist Model,” The Journal of Ethics 16, (2012): 395–420 distinguishes the “past parental sacrifices model”, “the special relationship model,” and “the conventionalist model”. In this paper, I use Keller’s categories due to their simplicity and usefulness.

Christina Hoff Sommers, “Filial Morality” The Journal of Philosophy 83, (1986): 439–456; Stephen Post, “What Children Owe Parents: Ethics in an Aging Society” Thought Vol. 64 (255) (1989): 315–325; Ivanhoe, op. cit.

Fred R. Berger, “Gratitude” Ethics 85 (1975): 298–309; Nancy S. Jecker, “Are Filial Duties Unfounded?” American Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1989), pp. 73–80; Ivanhoe, op. cit.; Mark R. Wicclair, “Caring for Frail Elderly Parents: Past Parental Sacrifices and the Obligations of Adult Children,” Social Theory and Practice 16 (2) (1990): 163–189.

Jane English, “What Do Grown Children Owe Their Parents?” In Onora O’Neill and William Ruddick, op. cit., pp. 351–356; Jeffrey Blustein, Parents and Children: The Ethics of the Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Nicholas Dixon, “The Friendship Model of Filial Obligations,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 12 (1995), 77–87.

Keller, op. cit. and The Limits of Loyalty (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

On the idea of “sacrifice,” a reviewer comments that “being a parent is part of a person’s identity, and the ‘sacrifices’ it entails are simply part of who one is and what one does, and are therefore as little to be described as ‘sacrifices’ as most other things one does in order to live a good life.” Scanlon, op. cit., p. 129 will agree with this view. Of course, even if a person can fully internalize the costs of a project, such as raising a child, into his life plan, it will not refute the fact that in an alternative course of life, had he not made the sacrifices for this child, the person could pursue his other goals and commitments with more resources and with more concentration than he can in his present life. Thus, the idea of “sacrifice” can be understood from the perspective of a whole-life comparison. On this point, see William Sin, “Internalization and Moral Demands,” Philosophical Studies 157 (2012): 163–175, pp. 171–173.

The debt theory may have presupposed a special sense of sacrifice. When parents bear sacrifices to bring up their children, they can be doing it willingly. Nonetheless it remains possible that the parents could have lived certain alternative lives with a richer amount of resource endowment if they decided not to bring up any children in those lives. We may understand the idea of sacrifice here by drawing reference to the whole-life conception of comparison (see footnote 40). For other interpretations of the debt theory, such as the Confucian one, see Cecilia Wee, “Filial Obligations: A Comparative Study,” Dao 13.1 (2014): 83–97 and Ivanhoe, op. cit.