People Are Not Their Parents

Tonight, I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl with some of my family. One of the major plot points of the movie is that a main character, Will Turner, is the child of a pirate whose blood was needed in order to lift the titular curse. Will is upset to learn that his father was a pirate because he seems to think that taints him somehow, and perhaps, in the culture of the time in which he lived, who a person's parents are mattered more than it does now, but these days, it's fairly well understood that a person is not their parents.

People can sometimes, perhaps often, turn out very different from their parents. They say that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but it can, and it sometimes does. But regardless of what amount of impact parents might have on how their children turn out, all people are individual moral entities. People don't inherit their parents' sins. Will Turner may have been the son of a pirate, but that didn't make him a pirate himself. No matter how good or bad our parents are or were, we are our own people, and, to paraphrase an Article of Faith, we are responsible for our own actions, not for our parents'.

So, we don't need to take any responsibility for anything our parents did wrong, and we cannot take any responsibility for anything our parents did right. We are our own moral entities, and we are responsible for our own actions, regardless of who our parents were or what they did. Each person needs to take responsibility for themselves, not for their parents.