The Confucian Filial Obligation and Care for Aged Parents
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Description: Paper by James Wang delivered at the 20th World Congress of Philosophy. Sets in opposition the Confucian and Western contractarian understandings of family relations.
20th WCP: The Confucian Filial Obligation and Care for Aged Parents The Confucian Filial Obligation and Care for Aged Parents Some moral philosophers in the West (e.g., Norman Daniels and Jane English) hold that adult children have no 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 or what misery their parents are presently suffering. This is because children do not ask to be brought into the world or to be adopted. Therefore, there is a "basic asymmetry between parental and the filial obligations." I argue against the Daniels/English thesis by employing the traditional Confucian view of the nature of filial obligation. On the basis of a distinction between 'moral duty' and 'moral responsibility' and the Confucian concept of justice, I argue that the filial obligation of adult children to care respectfully for their aged parents is not necessarily self-imposed. I conclude that due to the naturalistic character of the family, the nature of our familial obligations (such as parental caring for young children and adult children's respectful caring for aged parents) cannot be consensual, contractarian and voluntarist, but instead existential, communal and historical.
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