Simon Stromer, M.A.

PhD project

Working title: "From (no) Filial Duties to a Value-based Account of Familial Obligations"
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Monika Betzler, LMU, and Prof. Dr. Christine Bratu, University of Göttingen.

What do adult children owe their parents? Or rather, what moral duties, e.g. duties of care, are justified in a parent-adult child relationship? And how are these duties justified? These are questions investigated in my doctoral research. There is a strong moral intuition that merely questioning if one should care for one’s parents, and to what extent, already makes one a 'bad child'. In my thesis, I will defend the idea that from the mere existence of a legal or biological parent-child relation no (special) duty to, for instance, take care of one’s parents may be derived. Such a special duty would need to be justified by further normatively relevant factors. I will make fruitful the idea that to be justificatory for special duties, a relationship would need to have value and that these respective special duties are grounded in the specific value of the relationship. Adults who enjoy - in a specific sense - a valuable relationship with their parents would then owe it their parents to, for instance, take care of them. However, as my research into what that value actually entails and how a relationship may come to be valuable will show, such a special relationship is not necessarily a very widespread occurrence. As part of this doctoral project, I will also discuss what it means to be a child.