The phone rings. It’s the hospital. There’s no time to revisit the past. Old age intrudes without asking about the nature of relationships. Suddenly, biography ceases to be a memory and becomes a responsibility.
In increasingly aging societies, where caring for the elderly still largely falls to the family, this scene is repeated. But not all family stories are built on strong bonds. When parents grow old, an uncomfortable dilemma arises: do we care because we want to, or because we have to?
The issue transcends the realm of feelings and enters the realm of morality. Filial care cannot be resolved solely in terms of what we feel, but also in terms of what we believe we owe one another. It’s a responsibility that doesn’t vanish just because the emotional bond has changed. It is not based solely on love, but neither can it be reduced to an automatic debt. It refers to social norms, to the vulnerability that resurfaces, and to a shared history that, even when it was difficult, does not entirely disappear.
Love as a moral criterion
How has the idea that parents must be cared for been culturally constructed? Why does this mandate seem to be activated even when the emotional bond is fragile? Noemí Villaverde, a social educator and anthropologist, author of Una antropóloga en la luna (or An Anthropologist on the Moon), determines that this expectation has to do with the central place that love has occupied in our societies.
“We have placed love at the center,” she explains, to the point of turning it into the lens through which we organize our relationships. From there comes the idea that the best care is the care given “with love,” and that someone who loves cannot ask for anything in return, because true love is not calculated and demands giving without expecting anything back.
However, she clarifies that none of these premises are indisputable. We can care out of love, but also “out of justice, freedom, commitment, or solidarity.” As she explains, when love doesn’t involve negotiation between equals, it can end up becoming dependency or a power dynamic. The problem arises when caregiving is identified exclusively with personal feelings. Then any distance or ambivalence is interpreted as a moral failing.
The fragility of autonomy
In the modern moral thought, which the German philosopher Immanuel Kant formulated with particular clarity, duty does not depend on affection. Obligation arises not from inclination or sympathy, but from the recognition of the other as an end in themselves. From this perspective, caring is not a matter of love or gratitude, but of respect for human dignity. The question is no longer whether we want to do it, but whether we can turn away from this obligation.
This universal conception of duty has been challenged by those who remind us that no one is truly autonomous. The ethics of caregiving introduces another perspective. Joan Tronto, a U.S. political philosopher and one of the leading theorists of the ethics of caregiving, argues that caring is not a private act, but a practice that makes the common world viable — a set of activities aimed at maintaining and repairing the environment that makes life possible. The philosopher Eva Feder-Kittay, who has worked on dependency and justice, reminds us that vulnerability is not an exception, but a recurring condition. Autonomy is fragile and depends on support networks.
From this perspective, caring for one’s parents cannot be explained solely by affection or by an abstract duty. It places us in a more basic reality, because all of us go through moments of dependency. The question is no longer only what we feel, but how we respond when vulnerability returns.
The care of the elderly is not organized solely through individual decisions. In aging societies, this responsibility still largely rests within the home.
Verónica Montes de Oca Zavala, coordinator of the Interdisciplinary University Seminar on Aging and Old Age at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), says that in Latin American contexts the filial duty maintains a significant force, “especially towards mothers”.
Aging and caregiving, she notes, are marked by a double feminization: more women reach old age, and it is often daughters who take on their care. The idea of reciprocity (“giving back what was received”) functions as an internalized norm, even when it is experienced as a burden and generates tensions — especially when the responsibility is not shared equitably.
In this sense, Montes de Oca points out that what is often perceived as an individual moral obligation can also be understood as the result of a social organization that privatizes care and delegates to families what is, in fact, a collective matter.
What distance cannot erase
Laura Quintana, professor in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia) and author of Política de los cuerpos (Politics of Bodies), proposes shifting the discussion away from abstract duty toward a relational conception of responsibility.
Before answering this question, she points out that all social relationships are permeated by emotions and that “emotions are related to the marks that experiences leave on our bodies.” Even difficult relationships are marked by shared histories and social conditions that have shaped those experiences.
From this perspective, she argues that responsibility cannot be conceived as an isolated decision and emphasizes that “we are never isolated individuals,” but rather people formed within networks of relationships that affect us and that we also affect. Autonomy, she adds, does not disappear, but it is relational and unfolds with others on whom we depend for our existence and sustenance.
This creates a difficult tension between responsibility and desire. The desire may be to distance oneself or protect oneself from painful relationships. In some cases, this dilemma becomes especially complex, such as when dealing with absent or abusive parents. In this context, Montes de Oca adds a crucial point. As she states: “People who have experienced abuse or violence in their lives also have the right to justify their lack of care; this is where the state must step in.”
However, those histories also bind us to what we may yet become. That is why Quintana insists that our decisions do not occur in a vacuum, but are inscribed in shared stories that remain unfinished.
She warns that caregiving cannot be confined to the private sphere. Support networks depend on social structures that make them possible. When vulnerability intensifies, care practices should not fall solely on the family, but should have public frameworks that support caregivers.
This can be achieved, for example, through measures such as the effective development of the dependency law, accessible professional support, or formulas that allow people to reconcile caregiving with working life and prevent responsibility from becoming a burden placed on each individual.
The debate isn’t limited to individual experience or emotional history. When affection isn’t enough, the question doesn’t disappear; it merely shifts its focus. It’s no longer just about what we feel, but about how we understand our responsibility. Perhaps it’s there, in that uncomfortable shift, that our understanding of responsibility and coexistence is at stake.
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