According to Epictetus, how should duties be determined between family members?

Duties, Epictetus says, are universally measured by relations (Handbook 30). If someone is your father, that relation by itself tells you what you owe him: care, deference in everything, patience with his reproaches and corrections. The duty comes from the relation, not from a judgment about whether the person deserves it.

The common misreading is to think Stoic duty toward family is conditional on the family member being good. On this view, you owe your father respect if he has earned it, and you owe your brother fair treatment if he treats you fairly first. Epictetus rejects this directly. He asks: is your father a bad father? Then he answers his own question: you were never entitled to a good father, only to a father (Handbook 30). The relation, not the character of the person occupying it, generates the obligation.

This follows from the dichotomy of control that opens the Handbook. What is up to you is your own judgment, desire, and aversion. What is not up to you is anything outside your own choice, including other people's characters and actions (Handbook 1). Your father's virtue or vice is his business, not yours to control. Your duty as a son or daughter is yours to control, and it does not change because he fails at his end of the relation. The same logic applies to a brother who is unjust: Epictetus tells you to keep your own situation toward him, to watch not what he does but what you are to do to keep your own faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature (Handbook 30).

This is a hard teaching, and Epictetus does not soften it. He is not saying family members deserve kindness because they will probably reciprocate, or because it keeps the peace. He is saying your role carries the duty regardless of outcome or reciprocity. A son's duty to a harsh father does not depend on the father softening. A sister's duty to an unjust brother does not depend on the brother reforming.

What changes for someone who takes this seriously is where they locate the problem. If you wait for your father to become a better father before you give him the respect due to a father, you have handed him control over your own character. Epictetus's point in the Discourses is that only the faculty of choice, the capacity to desire, avoid, and judge, was given to us as fully our own; body and circumstances, including the people we are bound to, were not (Discourses I 1). A difficult relative is exactly the kind of external Epictetus has in mind. You do not get to choose your father's temperament any more than you choose your own body. What you choose is how you occupy your role toward him.

This does not mean Epictetus asks you to pretend mistreatment is fine, or to have no feelings about it. He gives a sharper diagnosis of the pain itself: another person will not hurt you unless you allow it, and you are hurt only when you judge that you are hurt (Handbook 30). The suffering you feel around a difficult family member often comes less from what they do than from the judgment you layer on top of it, the belief that they owed you better and failed you. Separate the relation's duty, which is up to you, from the other person's character, which is not, and you can keep doing what a son or a sister does without waiting for permission from someone else's failures.

A concrete way to apply this: name the role first, before you judge the person. Ask what a son does, or what a sister does, and do that, independent of whether the father or brother has earned it this week.