Relationship-Based Action

In “Grown Children’s Final Obligation,” Chenyang Li commits the straw person fallacy when characterizing Jane English’s argument.  Li says of English: “She argues that parents’ sacrifices for having children are not ‘favors’ that are to be ‘repaid’ by their children later, because the children never asked to be born or to be looked after when they were little.”  Li then argues that this is in fact a favor because a request is not necessary for a favor to take place.

English, however is not really making this argument.  In fact, she says that “misunderstandings about the proper relationship between parents and their grown children have resulted from reliance on the ‘owing’ terminology.”  She is arguing that this is not a favor, not because the child did not request it, but because the term ‘favor’ is not applicable.  She says that these sorts of good deeds done for another person tend to promote compassion and loving relationships, which render the quantity of “favors” irrelevant, so long as both sides give according to their ability and the needs of the other. 

I agree with English, and I would take her argument a step further.  She believes that good done for another person because of the relationship between the two people is not affected by “favor” transactions, which are different, but I think that in fact all good deeds are done based on the relationship between the parties.  Relationships are enormously diverse, and that favor-transaction-based deeds are only one example of a kind of relationship. 

The question of how to deal with relationships with strangers depends on the culture, and ours naturally defaults to a transaction-type relationship, but this is not necessarily the case everywhere.  There could very well be a culture in which the normal expectation is that all will do good for each other and there is no understood obligation for recompensation.