And my answer to all of them would be "Well, mostly, it depends. Generally, parents spell out inheritance in a will, and the courts enforce the terms of the will... though children can contest a will in court, and sometimes do so successfully. When someone dies intestate, there are some default ways things work, and again children can contest the will in court. For proxy decisions, any child generally is capable of making these decisions independently, so it's first-one-past-the-gate, and if the children disagree they have to work it out amongst themselves somehow; if it gets too contentious again the courts step in and made a determination of how to proceed. For debts, the creditor generally hands the debt to whichever child seems the best bet for recovery, and again, if they can't work it out the courts get involved. Etc."
And they might well shake their heads and say "Pfah, that's too complicated and confusing. Our system is much simpler, there are only three people involved: the parents and the eldest child! Your system has any number of people involved, no wonder they can't all agree and you need all these courts and judges and things!"
And I would agree, their system would be simpler. It would merely be less just.
And if they were explaining their system to someone from a culture where only the husband was understood to have any rights or external obligations with respect to the family, that third person might well say "Pfah, that's too complicated and confusing. Our system is much simpler, there are only two people involved: the father and the eldest child! Your system has three people involved!"
And I would agree, their system would be simpler. It would merely be less just.
The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
It does not bend towards simplicity.
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dpolicar- David Policar
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(And, orthogonal to your real point, in my understanding, debt isn't actually inherited, unless it was originally held jointly. It comes out of the estate, but if the value of the estate goes negative, that means the kids get nothing. The creditor can't just hand the debt to the child they think will pay it, though they will certainly try to get someone to take responsibility for it.)
And yeah, complexity causes problems as well. I generally prefer to live with problematic complex justice than to live with equally problematic simple injustice, but I'm not sure how I would defend that preference to someone who didn't share it.
Re: debt... really? Cool. I've never had occasion to look into it, I'd just always dimly assumed that it worked the other way, though now that I actually think about it I realize that's inconsistent with other things I believe about inheritances.
In any case, I endorse it working the way you describe.
Edited at 2013-02-28 12:04 am (UTC)
It does help to know about this stuff, and to have a probate attorney (if that's affordable), especially since the laws vary so much by state (much like marriage). For extra fun, I'm dealing with the laws in two states, neither of which I'm a resident of.
There are also predatory buyers still attempting to purchase my late father's house even though it sold last year. I expect I'll be seeing another round of probate spam once the family summer-house goes on the market this year. The ugliest versions of those are the ones disguised as condolence cards.
This is the sort of thing that makes me want to apologize on behalf of the human race.
According to Puerto Rico's Civic Code, succession is the transmission of the rights and obligations of the deceased to his heirs. Anyone who wishes to stipulate beneficiaries (those who would receive his assets in case of death), must do so by writing a will. To guarantee the validity of such will, the testator should get oriented with a lawyer familiar with Puerto Rico's Inheritance Law.
Quite the contrary, I would expect that above a certain threshold of complexity, the odds of a system being just decline precipitously.
But I also expect that for humans, the simplest possible unjust system is simpler than the simplest possible just system.
Here's what I think. It's one thing to build a society around the assumption that all the children of a marriage have rights, but it's quite another to change an existing society from one paradigm to the other. Changing our legal system to encompass multi-partner marriages will be really, really hard.
That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done. It should! But it's many times more complicated than implementing gay marriage, where very few of our laws actually depend on the actual genders of the participants in a meaningful way.
In your analogy, if you proposed to your acquaintance that they should just change their laws to recognize relationships between the parents and all their children, they might go pale and say, "That would be an enormous task! We have tens of thousands of laws, many of which touch on the parent-child relationship, and every single one of them will have to be examined to see if they need to be revised! It would present the potential for enormous chaos!"
And they would be right. In engineering terms, we'd call these corner cases: situations where two or more rules interact in peculiar ways with unforeseen consequences. Rewriting these laws is a project that contains potentially thousands of corner cases. It's a nightmare of a job to take on, and you can be quite sure that the first attempt will never get all of the details right. That means that the legislators who take on the job can look forward to plenty of criticism in the press about the confusing new contradictory laws, the inevitable lawsuits that result, and the broken families produced by arguing over whether the eldest child really should come first.
I do think that the law should recognize multi-partner marriages. Heck, I'm essentially in one, and I sure think my spouse's partner should have some kind of legal recognition. But the logistics of formally recognizing multi-partner marriage, in a society that heretofore has only acknowledged single-partner marriage, is going to be a great deal more complex than, say, extending marriage to same-sex couples. Your friend in the nation of eldest children does have a point.
Yes.
> it's many times more complicated than implementing gay marriage
Yes. Actually, it has very little in common with same-sex marriages, except that the desire to legally recognize it stems from the same realization that legally acknowledging some families while refusing legal recognition to other families is fundamentally unjust.
> they might go pale and say, "That would be an enormous task!" [..] And they would be right.
Yes, they would.
> Your friend in the nation of eldest children does have a point.
I agree. Their system is simpler. It is merely less just.
In a situation where achieving justice is difficult and complicated, it seems the correct thing to do is to start.
So part of what Westerners might see as the unpleasant "adding of complexity" is really "acknowledging the impact of context and differences".
Alternatively, from a programming point of view, it is possible that if a system ends up needing a lot of complexity and explicit specification of different cases to achieve the goal, then the original model of the concepts and goals was probably flawed, so it may be better to start over with a new set of models.
I don't know of a way to refactor our society such that an explicit encoding of justice is simple, without rewriting humans to have much simpler value systems. Our values are complex, so to the extent that our laws capture our values explicitly, our laws will be complex.