Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a philosophical analysis of personal human relationships and filial obligations. This dissertation is accordingly divided into two parts. Part One provides some theoretical groundwork for the moral requirements of personal human relationships. I focus on the question of how personal human relationships fare in two traditional ethical theories: utilitarianism and Kantianism. I first discuss Bernard Williams's criticism of utilitarianism and then Lawrence Blum's criticism of Kantianism. According to Williams and Blum, these two ethical theories cannot provide an adequate account of reasons justifying and guiding the special demands required in personal human relationships. They argue that the moral demands of personal human relationships are crucial features of our moral judgment and evaluation. In providing an adequate theoretical foundation for this assertion, second, I distinguish the extreme and moderate impartialist views of the moral demands of personal human relationships from the extreme and moderate partialist views. I argue that both moderate impartialist and moderate partialist views can provide a plausible theoretical groundwork for regarding human relationships based on partiality. In Part Two, I provide a philosophical analysis of the foundation of filial obligations. First, I specify the obligations of parents to their children and the obligations of adult children to their parents in child-parent relationships, define the terms "filial relationship" and "filial morality", and then discuss some theoretical issues concerning filial morality. Second, I provide the perspectives of filial obligations as understood by Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and John Locke. These four philosophers say that the filial obligations required by filial relationships are more compelling than the parental obligations required by parental relationships. Finally, I analyze and investigate three possible arguments for filial obligations: reciprocity, friendship, and gratitude. Among the three possible arguments for filial obligations, I advocate the argument for filial obligations based on gratitude because it most explicitly justifies why adult children ought to have filial obligations to their parents. I believe that this dissertation can contribute to a remedy for the current destruction of family ethics in our social life