Interesting. I’m not sure he can call himself an ethicist, and certainly not THE Ethicist, with that attitude. Based on Prof Appiah’s latest ethics advice column, he doesn’t follow the Ten Commandments, specifically #5, either.
An adult child of an apparently bad mother asks “The Ethicist,”
“Our parents divorced when we were young, and both were neglectful and emotionally abusive. My mother once kicked me out at 17 because her boyfriend told her to choose between him and me. …I see my mother about once every two years and speak to her roughly once a month.Now in her 80s, my mother is showing signs of Alzheimer’s. Her husband recently told me that if he dies first, I will be responsible for her care. I don’t think I can do it. The thought of having her live with me makes me physically sick. My siblings are unlikely to help. Since that conversation, almost a year ago, I have thought about this every day. What, if anything, do I owe my mother?”
I find the NYU philosophy professor’s answer astounding:
“We may owe something to those who raised us, but we have no duty to abandon our own lives to look after them, especially when they failed in their parental duties. Tell her husband that you’re not going to take on her care and that he needs to make the necessary preparations. He should consult with an elder-care lawyer, identify the local Area Agency on Aging and arrange advance directives and other long-term plans while your mother still has the capacity to participate in those decisions. A trustee to manage her affairs once he’s gone should be appointed. These are things you can suggest to him, anyway. They are not things you need to do.”
To be brief:
1. In such a situations it is the shared responsibility of all members of the family to sacrifice as necessary and do their best to care for the mother compassionately. The husband cannot ethically pass the job off on the woman’s adult children, nor can they ethically refuse to participate in her care.
2. One’s ethical obligations to one’s parents are not based on how well they parented. It isn’t a matter of quid pro quo, tit for tat, or just desserts. All children owe a responsibility to their parents unless they left their kids in a ditch to die.
3. “Honor your father and mother” is a cornerstone of a stable and civilized society, even when Mom and Dad are not particularly honorable.
4. The Golden Rule could not be clearer on this issue. Treat your aging and infirm parents as you would want to be treated in similar circumstances.
5. “You were a bad mother to me, so I’m going to be a bad child now, when you need me. So there.” That is not an ethical statement.
Ethics Alarms 
“One’s ethical obligations to one’s parents are not based on how well they parented.” You’re suggesting this is a universal ethical obligation unless one was left in a ditch to die. Being left in a ditch to die is not a dichotomy; it’s a continuum. Who can clearly locate the point on that continuum where filial obligation is ethically annulled? At the very least, this should consider the child’s and parent’s own histories, psychologies, vulnerabilities, and relationships, which is outside an advice columnist’s purview.
Imagine I had abused my children for twenty years. Would I want them to sacrifice their lives caring for me? Perhaps. Would I deserve it? Your appeal to The Golden Rule doesn’t directly answer that.
You were a bad mother… so I’m going to be a bad child.” The adult child isn’t necessarily seeking revenge. They may not be able to survive psychologically becoming their abuser’s caretaker. Mr. Marshall, you subtly reframed trauma as vindictiveness. I don’t think you have earned this confidence, and neither would I if I tried to argue the opposite conclusion with equal certainty.
Call me Jack. (Or Ishmael).
If you don’t like reciprocity (although I find your examples forced), then I’ll posit near absolutism here. Just as the parent has an absolute obligation to care for the child when the child is dependent and vulnerable (and nothing in the account offered The Ethicist suggests that the inquirer wasn’t cared for up until 17, when millions of young people have successfully taken care of themselves), the child has an absolute responsibility to do the same for the parent, and how well the parent performed his or her ethical duty doesn’t lesson or increase the duty from adult child to parent.
Yes, I read the tone of the letter as vindictive and well as based on dislike. Parents not liking their children or vice-versa has never been an ethical consideration, it’s a non-ethical consideration.
You make good points. But still, “…the parent has an absolute obligation…” and therefore “…the child has an absolute responsibility…” isn’t obviously symmetrical. An infant has nothing but his parents. A parent, in contrast, has lived an autonomous life, has had decades to build relationships, acquire wealth, hire help, buy insurance, and interact with public institutions as needed. The dependency isn’t morally identical. Still unanswered is where the abuse threshold lies (physical, emotional, sexual, neglect, etc.) beyond which filial obligation is nullified, or how the child’s psychological vulnerability influences where that threshold may be. But I respect your opinion, Jack, and I think you’ve got one of the greatest blogs out there, even when I don’t entirely agree with it.
Heck, I want, crave, admire and need readers who don’t agree with it! As long as they don’t filibuster like Alizia….
This is a tough one. I agree with your statement regarding the Golden Rule; it should guide us in all our decisions. Upon reading kawaii’ responses, I find I can agree with many of those points as well. I went back and forth in my own mind with many questions:
“In such a situations it is the shared responsibility of all members of the family to sacrifice as necessary” – What if the other siblings refuse? That would imply the mother really was as bad as the child claims (more on that later). It could also put the child in a very difficult financial position and they presumably have their own family to be concerned about.
“The adult child isn’t necessarily seeking revenge.” – True, but..he or she could be.
“All children owe a responsibility to their parents unless they left their kids in a ditch to die.” – Using the Golden Rule, even being left to die is not an excuse to abandon one’s responsibility.
Again, I kept going back and forth. And then I went back and re-read the woman’s letter. The last line struck me as it had not upon the first reading.
She asks: “What, if anything, do I owe my mother?”
I would say: honesty. Not just from her, but from yourself. The child says that mother is “showing signs” of Alzheimer’s; this implies to me that the mother still has many, if not mostly, good day. Perhaps it’s time to have an open conversation with mom and with a professional.
The child says both parents were neglectful and emotionally abusive. Well, that’s conveniently vague. I guarantee that ay one point, my own children would have called me neglectful because I didn’t buy them the high-end Jordans and “forced” them to make due with the specials at JCPenney. Or perhaps I was “emotionally abusive” for disciplining my son when he yelled the “FU” bomb at his mother for daring to tell him to get his butt out of bed and get to school.
The child says that, when 17, mom kicked them out because mom’s boyfriend told her to. Do we know the details? Does the child? Was the mother in an abusive relationship? What was the 17 year-old doing at the time? Were they into drugs or running with a really bad crowd? Could mom have simply panicked upon feeling helpless in a tough situation? We don’t have any answers to some very complicated issues.
It’s impossible for me to put myself in the situation of the child; my parents died when I was young but regardless, I don’t think I could turn my back on them. I think the child needs to get some help, clear up their own feelings, and talk to mom while they still can.
In addition to ethics, we need to look at a the constructive principle of investment. All humans will need help as they age. That costs resources. Human cultures differ in their expectations of where those resources will come from.
Across human history, human societies have developed a variety of ways to handle the problem of aging. Some societies have taken care of their elders communally. Some have had religious orders to serve that purpose, among other charitable functions. In others, elders have wandered off into the wilderness to die, particularly in times of famine. Some societies have involved the elders doing any work they can and begging when they can no longer work. Societies which use money have allowed people to save up enough for their retirement. In societies which demand filial piety, children have been the primary retirement plan, although one of the other systems mentioned may have served as a backup.
As someone with an individualist bias, I dislike the idea of dictating the career and responsibilities of one’s offspring. It has been done throughout most of human history, but I believe we should be trying to move beyond that. Equipping people with the skills we know and value, yes. Instilling them with a sense of community identity and good habits, sure. If that identity includes the responsibilities you want them to have, fine. If they decide they want to uphold different responsibilities instead, I think it’s unethical to railroad them.
I don’t think it’s unethical to refuse responsibilities one is “born into.” Ethics is about maintaining trust. If you refuse a responsibility imposed upon you by your parents, what trust are you breaching? You never agreed to a particular career as a condition of being brought into existence.
I’m reminded of a dialogue from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, where Sidney Poitier’s character argues with his father about whom he can marry. He tells his father that he does not owe his father for raising him, because his father owed him that, as he will owe his children.
Maybe rejecting hereditary responsibilities has some harmful effects on society. Maybe that’s a double-edged sword that the United States has accepted. I think we can get the best of both worlds, as long as we keep thinking constructively. We may want to look into promoting a culture of being better organized and prepared for future eventualities. Jack, you yourself recently wrote an article about how people should get their affairs in order in advance of their own deaths. I’d argue that arranging for one’s own elder care follows from the same principle.
So many unknowns here.
I have 4 children and one of them describes his father as neglectful. Danny regularly worked 65 hour weeks and mine were about 50, but we spent time with each child every day, helped with homework (if they admitted to having any), attended sporting and school events – focused on family when not at work. Still, we worked a lot.
Every once in a while one of the 4 got a swat on the butt – not a beating …. a single swat on the butt. But these days generations younger than Boomers consider a swat to be child abuse.
So, is that the kind of abuse and neglect she is describing, or was she beaten, sexually assaulted, ill-fed, imprisoned?
It makes a difference to me. If I were raped, beaten and thrown out by an abusive father I wouldn’t come near him, no matter much he needed my help in his 80s, Golden Rule or not. I wouldn’t be able to overcome my fear, anger, loathing. At some point this situation might reference a human condition that overrides ethics or morality.
Speculation on my part – I won the family lottery.
The esteemed host and I argued, obliquely, that there is no need to wade through the weeds on this one, though we approached that conclusion from entirely different angles. The host essentially said the child’s responsibility to an aging parent is universal and absolute, barring a microscopic exception for attempted murder. My counterpoint was that a vast matrix of circumstances – psychological realities, cultural contexts, and historical nuances – make makes filial responsibility to a parent a case-by-case negotiation, precluding universals and absolutes. Yet, tmgentry1 and Grandma Lisa step into those weeds with aplomb, demonstrating how messy those case-by-case realities get. Meanwhile, Ex Ceph brings up Sidney Poitier’s speech to his character’s father, that generational debt flows forwards not backward. Good movie! But, as is almost always the case, a Jewish businesswoman and diarist got there first, and better, nearly 300 years earlier: https://www.boxoutbullying.com/the-story-of-the-father-and-the-baby-birds-6-of-52/