Is It Permissible for Filial Children to Resent Their Parents? Rethinking Shun’s Resentment in the Mengzi

Abstract Whether filial children may permissibly resent their parents poses a challenge for both theories of resentment and Confucian ethics. Resentment is often understood as a reactive attitude essentially involving the attribution of responsibility for wrongdoing, and such an emotion appears to be incompatible with the preservation of intimacy between children and their parents, which the Confucian ideal of filial piety requires. Yet the Mengzi presents a striking case in which Shun, an exemplary filial son, is said to feel resentment toward his parents. I argue that this text brings to light deeper ethical assumptions about the nature of resentment. Drawing on the notion of “resentment-yearning”, I propose a form of resentment that does not require attributing responsibility to the other for wrongdoing. Within a Confucian framework, resentment on the part of filial children can be morally permissible when parents commit serious wrongdoing, provided that it remains oriented toward reconciliation rather than estrangement. More broadly, this analysis challenges accounts that treat resentment as necessarily involving responsibility-attribution by showing that resentment may take non-responsibility-attributing forms within the distinctive moral structure of parent-child relationships.