Sungwoo Um (Seoul National University), "Duty, Virtue, and Filial Love"

Philosophy, 2024

By Sungwoo Um

Against Duty to Love One’s Parents

I love my parents and I hope my kids love me too. But I do not want them to love me because they see it as a duty. Love is in its best when it’s spontaneous. However, if someone does not love her parents, we would likely think that she falls short of the virtue of filial piety. How can we make sense of the normative significance of love for our parents without reducing it to a duty? This is the central question driving my exploration in "Duty, Virtue, and Filial Love." It argues that the normative significance of the inner aspects of filial piety – in particular, filial love – is better captured when we understand filial love as a part of a virtue rather than as an object of duty.

Although people may disagree over the specific contents of appropriate filial inner attitudes, I believe it can be largely agreed that filial piety involves more than outward behaviours. It seems reasonable to think that being a filial child constitutively involves having appropriate inner attitudes as well as appropriate outer behaviours. Other things being equal, a person who performs filial actions motivated by love for her parents would be more filial – that is, more virtuous as their child– than one who does the same from a sense of duty.

How can we explain why a person who fails to love her loving parents deserves some negative moral evaluation? I introduce two different kinds of moral evaluation: the evaluation of blameworthiness and that of viciousness. While one may be blameworthy only for something that is under her voluntary control at least to a reasonable extent, one can be criticized as being vicious or not being virtuous even for what is not under her voluntary control. Also, consider when we are ashamed of ourselves for feeling or failing to feel a certain kind of emotion. Here the object of shame is not necessarily what I have done (or failed to do) to bring about or eliminate that emotion. It is about the fact that the emotion is felt out of one’s character, which speaks ill of one’s character. In this sense, we can distinguish negative evaluation of our action from that of our character.

To do justice to the moral importance of filial love, some philosophers make an appeal to the idea of a duty to love. They claim that a child who has been loved by her parents and who accepted that love has a duty to love them in return. However, one serious challenge to the idea of a duty to love—or the general idea of a duty to feel a certain kind of emotion— is the commandability objection. According to this objection, loving someone cannot be a duty because having emotions like love towards a particular person is not sufficiently controllable – i.e., not something we can bring about at will – and therefore not commandable.

There is an additional difficulty related to controllability that is specific to the idea of a duty to love one’s parents. The difficulty is that whether and to what extent a person can love her parents largely depends on how they have treated and educated (or failed to treat or educate) her while raising her. It is to a large degree the parents’ responsibility to raise their child as someone who can love other people genuinely.

My paper also discusses the conceptual difficulty of a duty to love. First, duty to V should not be conflated with a duty to cultivate the ability necessary to V. Strictly speaking, the actions aimed at producing an occurrent loving emotion or cultivating the disposition of loving someone are not themselves part of loving. Rather, the fact that one has to put so much effort into trying to love that person is likely to be a sign that one does not love her—not yet, at least. Loving is the end that those effortful actions aim at and it begins when the efforts to produce loving emotions end.

As we cannot love our parents simply by deciding to do so, what one can do is just to try to love them, that is, doing things that tend to raise the likelihood of loving them. Trying to love includes what a truly loving child would do for her parents such as visiting and contacting them more frequently, reminding herself of good memories they shared, and focusing on positive qualities of one’s parents. However, such effortful activities do not themselves constitute loving. The important point is that loving is not an activity that consists in putting one’s efforts into generating the emotional state and succeeding in it. I suspect that the proponents of a duty to love tend to conflate the alleged duty to love with a duty to produce the disposition to feel loving emotion.

After criticizing the idea of duty to love one’s parents, I argue that the normative significance of filial love can be better captured when we understand it as a constitutive part of virtue, in particular, of filial piety. If we understand it in this way, there is a sense in which we can say that filial piety demands the agent to love her parents. By saying that a virtue V demands an agent A to X in a given situation S, I mean that an agent with the full virtue of V would (characteristically) respond to the situation S by X-ing.

The additional advantage of the virtue-ethical approach to filial love is that we can make sense of its normative significance appropriately considering how virtuous the given agent is. That is, it commands the agent to do what one can do at the moment to get as close as possible to living virtuously. In this sense, virtue ethics, by tailoring its commands to the level of virtuousness in the agent, provides a holistic framework for appreciating the normative significance of filial love.

In sum, my paper invites readers to reconsider the nature of filial love. I argue that, while it is morally important to love our parents, it cannot be a duty! If you are interested in love, parents, or both, embark on a journey through the pages of my paper! Thank you. 😊