Hanhui XuAdult Childrenʼs Filial Obligations to Their Parents

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Filial obligations are usually considered as being children’s moral obligations to promote their parents’ wellbeing — for example, by offering assistance to parents when they are in need and accompanying parents when requested to do so.

In the last few decades, more and more attention has been paid to questions related to filial obligations, especially the questions of what are adult children`s filial obligations, why do adult children normally have filial obligations and what do these filial obligations require. Existing theories about filial obligations differ from each other on these issues.

There are six main accounts of filial obligations which are the rule-utilitarian account, the Kantian beneficence account, the friendship account, the narrow debt account, the special goods account and the gratitude account. In the book, I argue for the gratitude account of filial obligations which makes use of a model of gratitude, according to which A owes gratitude to B for the benefits A obtained from B, to argue that in the parent-child relationship parents are benefactors and children are beneficiaries. Thus, filial obligations are adult children’s duty of gratitude to their parents.

However, the gratitude account faces a couple of challenges. The first one concerns the benefits that ground adult children’s filial obligations. There are two apparent types of benefit that might be relevant: the life parents give to their children and the benefits they bestow on their children during their upbringing. However, one view treats life as morally neutral and thus should not be seen as a benefit. Another perspective holds that raising children is a duty that parents must fulfill, known as the parental duty. Accordingly, actions performed in the fulfillment of duty do not require gratitude. Following this logic, in the parent-child relationship, if a person has a parental duty, and he only did what his duty required him to do, no gratitude is owed.

The second one concerns how much adult children should benefit their parents and what adult children are required to do to fulfil their filial obligations. A relevant issue that whether adult children can get to a position where they have done all that gratitude requires (they have fulfilled all the requirements of their filial obligations). These issues will be addressed in the work.