ABSTRACT
In certain Polynesian societies many services that we should take to be parental duties are customarily performed by aunts and uncles. In Ancient Greece weak or deformed infants (and sometimes healthy female infants) were left to die on hillsides; it is interesting to note that the Ancient Greeks were reluctant to kill the babies directlyhad this been the custom Oedipus would not have survived to fulfil the prophecy and Paris would not have lived to elope with Helen and so set off the train of events leading to the fall of Troy. In Ancient Greece and in some other societies it was accepted that parents should
offer their children as sacrifices to the gods; we may remember that Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac to Jehovah. These practices may seem bizarre, barbaric and immoral to us because we have different social codes, but the societies concerned have not rejected the moral principle of keeping trust nor even the principle that parents have moral obligations to children. It is the concrete nature of that obligation and also what other duties ought (morally) to override it that are assessed differently, and so vary greatly, in different societies.
