Blog 7

In reading the passages from English and Li, I found that I strongly agreed with English in the fact that when it comes to grown children and their parents, it is the strength of the relationship between the two that is the determining factor of whether the child should take care of the parent.

A very obvious argument that I can think of that I do not believe was mentioned by Li or English is how the parent treated the child while he/she was growing up. Let's say that the parent fulfilled their basic parental duties in clothing, sheltering, and feeding the child; as well as sent them off to school and financially supported them in the most basic way. Let's add that the parent is also extremely abusive to the child physically and mentally throughout their childhood; when that child is grown up and the parent is claims that they are owed help as repayment for all that they sacrificed to birth and raise them, the child is very likely to disagree (assuming that the relationship between the parent and the child has not been mended). I would ask in this situation why the grown up child should feel any moral obligation to help their parent when that same parent so easily and often threw morality out the window to be abusive to the child. No one would deny that the parent made sacrifices in raising the child, but in today's society that is the law, and if it was such a burden, then the parent should have put the child up for adoption.

Li also rebuts English's argument that the child can claim that they were never asked to be born. While I do think that it is a poor argument for the child to use, Li goes on to talk about the fact that a living person likely prefers to have been born than not. The problem here is that she is using an argument that is almost completely impossible to argue against because the opposition would have to come from an unborn child that does not want to be born.

The last thing that I side more with English than Li is the issue of favors and the obligation to repay them. English believes that the favors that are requested are the ones that have the obligation to be repaid, where as Li thinks that all favors have an obligation to be repaid at a similar level to the favor. She uses one example of Al seeing Barbara's three year-old fall into a pond and jumps in to save her. While it is socially expected that Barbara thank Al, she really does not owe Al anything at all. Al saving the child's life was simply a function of goodwill, which any rational moral human being with the capability to do so should have also done. In fact, it could be argued that it would not be moral for Al to expect anything in return at all. That would give the impression that Al saved the child solely for the purpose of getting a reward, which would be a selfish and greedy gesture and not moral. In this case, I think Li confuses moral obligations with social norms in that Barbara would be going against social norms for not offering to reward Al, but she is in no way morally obligated to do so.