Filial Obligation

In Chengyang Li’s “Grown Children’s Filial Obligation”, he claims that children are bound by duty to assist their parents as they grow old. He disagrees with Jane English’s claim that favors do not require reciprocation if they are not requested in advance. Chengyang Li uses the example of a person, Al, saving a drowning child, and says that in this case the parent of the saved child, Barbara, would have a moral obligation to repay the person who saved the child. However, this example does not completely relate to the question of filial obligation. It seems somewhat obvious that a person is morally obligated to not allow a person to die if they can help it. A parent would be obligated to not allow their child to starve, or to allow an infant to die due to neglect. This kind of obligation is not limited to a parent/child relationship, however. It extends to all relationships. Al’s obligation to save a drowning child would not be caused by his relationship with the child, as the obligation would still stand even if they had never met. If Al needed a similar kind of assistance that Barbara could give, she would not be obligated by a debt she owed him, but by the same universal morality that influenced Al in the first place.

Similarly, a parent is obligated to not allow a child to die regardless of their parent/child relationship. Also, a child would be obligated by the same standards to not allow their parent to starve once they become too old to work. Both moral obligations exist independently of each other. Since putting their parent in a nursing home would be sufficient to prevent them from starving, it would be sufficient in fulfilling this obligation.

Any unrequested favors done beyond this minimum requirement would be supererogatory, as Jane English suggests. Chengyang Li’s argument seems to focus more on this type of favor, and he claims that these supererogatory favors are what are required to be reciprocated by filial obligation. In his response to Jane English’s piece, he excludes her example of two people, Alfred and Beatrice, who are on a date. She writes that Beatrice has no obligation to physically engage Alfred, no matter how much he pays for it. This seems to me to be a more applicable analogy. If Beatrice were led to believe that Alfred was paying merely to be friendly and if she would have refused his favor if she had known that what he expected in return, then she cannot be expected to return it. Similarly, if I were a parent, and I led my child to believe that I were doing them some sort of favor purely out of love, and then later told them they were required to perform another action in addition to loving me in return, they would not be required to perform that action, since it would be an exchange that they had never agreed to in the first place.