Lack of duty of filial love in the Ten Commandments
Exercise
Analyze from an evolutionary perspective the curious circumstance, pointed out by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), that “In the Decalogue we are commanded to honour our fathers and mothers. No mention is made of the love of our children.”
Analysis
Human beings are and were born helpless. Therefore, natural selection has designed our genes so that they motivate us to instinctively take care of our children. There was no a similar need to take care of our parents, at least in our ancestral “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” in the Pleistocene.
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