Reconceptualizing Intergenerational Obligations in Confucian Family Contexts: A Reciprocal Ethics Framework for Family Theory

ABSTRACT

This article develops reciprocal intergenerational ethics, a nontransactional framework for explaining how obligations between parents and adult children acquire moral force, limits, and negotiability in Confucian family contexts. Existing theories explain how intergenerational support is organized, exchanged, and contested but less often distinguish a culturally endorsed duty from the ethical warrant of a particular filial care claim. Drawing on Confucian role ethics, especially the reciprocal relation between filial responsibility ( xiao ) and parental care ( ci ), I treat filial obligation as a relationally conditioned claim rather than a fixed status duty. Six propositions specify ethical warrant, moral reciprocity, proportionality, ambivalence, constrained hierarchy, and life‐course accountability. The framework links parental and filial responsibilities without reducing reciprocity to repayment and clarifies how structural constraints shape the forms care can reasonably take.