What, if anything, do grown children owe their parents — and where could that obligation possibly come from?
For decades the answers have all been given from inside a bond that already exists.
Every biological filial tie begins with one thing — procreation. So ask the prior question: can the act of bringing a child into existence itself ground, complicate, or even undermine what that child later owes?
Not "should we procreate?" — but what procreation means, and what it leaves us with.
Debt · Gratitude · Special Goods · Friendship. Each has been offered as the ground of filial duty. Each fails — and each fails for a related reason.
Keller: only a parent and child can give each other certain goods — a "sense of continuity and transcendence." Being uniquely placed to provide them, he says, is the source of the duty.
But holding something unique for another creates no duty to hand it over. One side may simply not need the good, however special it is. And if the bond is merely a channel kept open for trade — where is the room left for altruism? Possession is not obligation.
English: treat the bond like a friendship — keep it alive, don't tally debts. It dodges the traps of debt and gratitude, yet misses the one thing friendship never has.
"It is almost like a
slave contract —
signed by the owner alone."
The parent–child relation is historically and morally asymmetrical. A child — even in the womb — cannot consent, cannot exit, cannot choose the other party.
And Sommers' collectivist repair is worse: it lets "familyhood" overshadow the person, dissolving the individual's own value into the group's.
All four seat parent and child at the negotiating table too early — as if both had entered on comparable footing.
They never did. To see why, we have to go back further — to the act itself.
Not an innocent gift of life — but a unilateral decision, made for someone who is not yet there to make it, refuse it, or revise its terms.
Parfit's 14-year-old: the child born now and the child born years later come from different gametes — they are different people. "You'd have been better off born later" compares no one to no one.
Benatar re-draws the comparison: this child's existence against this child's non-existence.
Kevin hands out bulletproof vests to his neighbours — generous. But Kevin also built the shooting range in his backyard, in a gun-free street. The danger was his own work. No one owes him gratitude for the vests.
Parents author the very vulnerability their care later answers — and the child never consented. Coming into existence is no creditable gift; the care is no favour. Authorship dissolves the altruism.
The child does not begin owing gratitude for the gift of life. The parents begin owing justification, care, and ongoing responsibility for a decision they made alone. Parenting is not a loan to be repaid — it is compensation for the risk they authored.
With Shiffrin: procreation isn't always wrong — but creating a life exposed to risk, without consent, is morally serious.
Weinberg replies that the odds are good, and that parents may consent on the child's behalf. But a swimmer enters the water willingly; the child never does. And "parent" is not a role you fall into — it is a role you create by throwing another into it. You cannot claim paternal authority over a game you dealt someone into.
Would you have said yes to huge vulnerability and certain pain, sight unseen?
If raising a child merely repays a debt the parents owe, then it generates no new debt in the child. So where could filial obligation come from at all?
Adult children often are the best-placed to help their parents. But being best-placed for a role is not the same as being bound to it — just as holding a unique good never obliged the trade.
So it cannot be inherited at birth.
It has to be built — after the
child becomes a competent adult.
Generic goods — money, care, transport — anyone can supply. What every human needs is a good decision, made by someone who truly knows them.
A friend of thirty years could advise your parents too — recall English's estranged Vance. So why the deep instinct that children are the best choice? Two decades of intimate living build value and trust that no substitute cheaply replaces.
Not economics' wasted sunk cost —
emotion that legitimately shapes
judgment, and should be acknowledged.
Filial obligation is not a must. Care is not a loan, nor a debt of endless gratitude.
What deserves to be cherished is decision-making itself — the choice to hand your wheel to someone who knows you deeply and has earned your deepest trust.