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View submission: On Rights of Inheritance - why high inheritance taxes are justified
This is a contemporary article laying out the various interests and rights when it comes to inheritance. The interesting things happen in chapters *Comparing Interests* and *Would a Confiscatory Inheritance Tax be Unjust?*
From the last chapter:
I conclude, then, that even if we think that there are moral reasons to institute a legal system that protects rights to bequeath and to inherit, there are also reasons, both moral and practical, not to. Whatever interest is served by inheritance is an interest that non-inheritors also have, and if they generate a right in the putative inheritor, they would presumably generate a comparable right in everyone else that must, at the very least, be taken seriously. And the claim of the non-inheritor is bolstered by an appeal to the moral value of equality, to the non-necessity (and sometimes utter incapability) of inheritance to do what morality would seem most likely to require of it, and to the fact that to make a fuss about inheriting things betrays a very strange view of human relationships from the off.
The paper is open access. You may read it for free in HTML or download the PDF.
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