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Your father is no longer safe to drive but won’t give up the keys. Is taking them care or theft?

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Applied ethicsModern EuropeanChineseLiberalismConfucianismConfucius#ageing-parents#driving#filial-piety#paternalism
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Its coordinates: 3.3 Applied Ethics

An everyday case that many families meet sooner or later.

Your father is eighty-one. His reactions have slowed, he has scraped the car twice this year, and last week he drove through a red light without noticing. He insists he is fine. The car is how he gets to the mosque, the market and his friends. Without it his week shrinks to the walls of his flat.

You have a spare set of keys.

Some questions to start with:

  • Mill's harm principle lets us restrain someone to prevent harm to others, but not "for his own good". A driver who might hit a child falls squarely under the first. Does that settle it, or does it only settle that someone may act, not that you may?
  • When Confucius was asked about filial piety, he answered "not disobeying", and then explained that he meant serving parents according to ritual in life, and burying and sacrificing to them according to ritual after death (Analects 2.5). Is taking the keys disobedience, or the deeper kind of service?
  • Does it matter whether you take the keys yourself or ask his doctor to report him, so that the decision seems to come from outside the family?

Short answers welcome, especially from people who have been on either side of this.

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3 answers

  1. Alistair Gow

    Contributor

    From thirty-four years in a GP surgery: in Britain the duty to tell the licensing agency about a medical condition that affects driving falls on the driver. If a patient keeps driving against advice, professional guidance allows the doctor to inform the agency, after telling the patient first.

    The families who managed best were the ones who used that route. Not because it was easier, but because the father could be angry at a rule rather than at his daughter.

  2. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    In my family it was my mother who took my grandfather's keys, not my father, his son. It mattered. From a son it would have been a reversal of the relationship, the child commanding the father. From a daughter-in-law it was treated as household management, and my grandfather could pretend it was about the car's insurance.

    Not a principled solution. But it shows that in a Confucian family, who acts can matter as much as what is done.

  3. Tsion Bekele

    Fellow

    I have interpreted this exact conversation in a clinic, more than once. The son often asks me afterwards to say "you must not drive" more softly than the doctor said it. I never do. But I understand why he asks: he wants the truth to arrive without humiliation.

    That may be the real duty here. Not "take the keys or don't", but find a way for him to give them up that leaves his dignity in one piece.