Question I don't think I like my mother as a person. I mean, if I were not her daughter I think I will not befriend this kind of woman. It's not that I hate her, I just dislike the value she has. Is this feeling acceptable? Do we, children, have an obligation to love our parents? Or is it suppose to be natural?

Accepted:
July 26, 2012

Comments

There is an old saying (I'm told it originates with Kant, but I am not sure about that), which goes, "'ought' implies 'can.'" The idea is that you can only be held responsible or have an obligation to do something (you "ought" to do it) if it is something that is under your control. Do you suppose that emotions (such as love) are under one's voluntary control? I'm inclined to doubt that (with a few reservations, which I will get to momently). But if love is not something that you can voluntarily control, then it makes no sense to say that you have an obligation to love your mother (or anyone else, for that matter).

On the other hand, we do also evaluate people on the basis of how they feel about things, and on the basis of emotions they have and display. We same that some anger, for example, is inappropriate, and we regard most examples of hatred as at least unfortunate, if not contemptible. Does this make sense? I think it does make some sense, in that at least one of the things we value (positively or negatively) in people are their characters, and this includes emotions and such. So does this violate "ought" implies "can"? That seems to me to be more complicated, because while it does seem implausible to say that we can turn emotions on and off like faucets, it also seems plausible to say that the sorts of characteristics we have are at least to some extent the result of things we are able to do--for example, we can train ourselves to improve upon the way we might react to certain things (go to anger management therapy, for example, or biting our tongues when we feel impulses to say things that are cruel or hateful). people who have (or display) bad character may not be able to act any differently at the moment, but it still makes sense for us to hold them responsible for not having done the character-building that would have made them better people who would not have behaved so badly in that moment.

So back to loving your mother. On the one hand, if what you find unlovable about her are her values, it could well be that your reaction is simply the right one. There may be some respect(s) in which one need to respect and recognize the special relationship of parent and child, but I can't see why someone who is a bad person deserves to be loved by anyone, child or otherwise. On the other hand, before you take this as an excuse, you might do some serious double checking on your own values, which are leading you to reject hers. All I can know for sure, if yours and hers conflict, is that at least one of you is wrong. It might not be her, and it also might be both of you!

I suppose the ideal is that love between a parent and a child is sustained quite naturally, and is actually deserved in both cases. But maybe that is not going to be possible in this case. If so, then as I said, there are still some reasonable constraints about how you should respond to your mother (because she is your mother), having to do with civility and respect for her role in your life. There are certain duties and kinds of loyalties that we reasonably expect along these lines (though as I have already indicated, these are defeasible, if those to whom we normally would supply these have violated the ground for such things badly enough--an abusive parent, for example, may reasonably be thought to have lost any claim even on the most basic forms of loyalty from the child he or she has abused). At the very, very least, your mother deserves from you the kind of civil and polite responses you would provide as a matter of common decency.

But I can't help but wonder if perhaps you can do better than this. I don't know your mother or her values that you object to. But I suspect that civil discussion and allowing her to explain those values to you, and why they are important to her might at least allow you to achieve a level of understanding that would allow you to be more tolerant. Tolerance is not the same as love, I agree, but it's a start!