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Inheritance, Gifts, and Equal Opportunity

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Inheritance, Gifts, and Equal Opportunity 1 Inheritance, Gifts, and Equal Opportunity Dick Arneson For Duke University conference 12001 “It has become a commonplace to say we’re living in a second Gilded Age,” writes Paul Krugman, attributing the shift in common opinion to the recent work of the economist Thomas Piketty. More strikingly, according to Krugman, this recent scholarship suggests that we are “on a path back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.”1 In the light of such worries, we might wonder about how inheritance and large gifts to individuals would be assessed in the lens of egalitarian political philosophies. This essay explores a part of this large topic. I look at the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill along with Rawlsian fair equality of opportunity, luck egalitarian doctrines, and the burgeoning relational egalitarianism tradition. In the course of this survey, I tack back and forth between considering what the doctrine under review implies with respect to inheritance and gift-giving and considering whether the doctrine under review is sufficiently plausible so that we should care about its implications for this topic or any other. 1. Limits on Individual gains from gift and bequest. A permissive state policy on gifts and inheritance would allow that anyone who legitimately possesses property is free to pass along any portion of it to anyone she chooses, provided the would-be recipient accepts the bequest, and provided the intent of the giver is not to induce the recipient to violate a genuine duty, as occurs in bribery. An even more permissive policy would treat property received by such gifts as exempt from any accessions tax and exempt from taxation as income when it is received. A still more permissive policy subsidizes gifts and bequests by offering special tax advantages to givers. J. S. Mill proposes a more restrictive policy toward inheritance of wealth. The proposal is that a legal maximum limit be placed on the amount of wealth any individual may acquire by gift or bequest. This limit “should be fixed sufficiently high to afford the means of comfortable independence.”2 Two considerations mainly seem to be prompting Mill’s proposal. One is that it is undesirable that any individual start adult life with large wealth or the assurance of large wealth in the future (on the death of those from whom one expects an inheritance). Mill seems to think that such an absolute guarantee of large wealth reduces initiative and effort directed toward wealth creation (and other socially valuable goals) on the part of the beneficiary. A second consideration that if a person is rationally prudent, she first uses her resource to satisfy highest-priority needs, then successively lower-priority needs, so that limiting the maximum amount one can gain from gifts and bequests enables more resources to flow via this channel to satisfaction of people’s highest-priority needs. Mill tends to focus this concern on the slight utility or even disutility of very great wealth, which he regards as tempting one to spend enormous sums on low quality pleasures, silly trinkets, and status symbols.3 Mill also envisages the result that “Wealth which could no longer be employed in over-enriching a few, would either be devoted to objects of public usefulness, or if bestowed on individuals, would be distributed on a large number.” So “there would be a great multiplication of persons in easy circumstances.” This result would be superior to confiscation of estates and provision of a basic wealth endowment to every adult person, Mill must be supposing, because those making bequests, having the freedom to choose whom to benefit, would on the whole and on the average channel the money to individuals who could use it more effectively for themselves and others than could the average member of society. Mill is also evidently supposing that allowing the wealthy to give their money at will to philanthropic causes will have better results than governmental taking of the wealth and using it for public purposes. Perhaps being free to channel one’s wealth in this way will operate as an incentive to work to amass wealth, and perhaps the decentralized philanthropic choices of individual wealthy persons will in the aggregate be more beneficial than centralized choice by state officials. Mill is guessing—it can 1 . Paul Krugman, “Why We’re in a New Gilded Age,” New York Review of Books, May 8, 2014. 2 . J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book II, chapter II, section 4. 3 . See the quality of pleasure discussion in Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 2. 2 hardly be more than guesswork on his part—that “utility in the largest sense”4 would be maximized by spreading wealth ownership without spreading it equally. In Principles of Political Economy Mill does not actually specify a standard for determining how high or low the limit on acquisition of wealth by gift or inheritance should be; I am filling in this blank by supposing his standard would be utilitarianism. He is clearly committed to what we today call welfarism: the consequences of actions and policies that determine whether they are right or wrong are consequences for individual well-being. But he does not consider the range of possible welfarist principles, some of which would register as morally valuable the fair distribution of well-being as well as the increase of its aggregate total. Mill never seriously entertains egalitarian welfarist alternatives to utilitarianism, nor does he wonder whether society perhaps should be maximizing some function of opportunities for individuals rather than welfare outcomes. This essay considers three versions of contemporary liberal egalitarianism. What (I submit) emerges as plausible and worth further consideration are views closer to Mill’s than to contemporary egalitarianisms. At any rate, the contrasts are interesting. 2. Fair equality of opportunity (FEO). John Rawls’s famous theory of social justice famously includes a stringent equal opportunity doctrine: Inequalities in people’s holdings of social primary goods must be attached to positions and offices that are open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity, which require that all those with the same native talent and the same ambition have the same prospects of competitive success.5 To see what this comes to, and why it might be found appealing, think about access to bank loans that might be used to finance starting a business, and access to specially desirable jobs in the bureaucratic hierarchies of government and private firms. In a regime of careers open to talents (where anyone can apply for such loans and jobs and applications are judged on their merits and selection is by merit as revealed by applications), some individuals may have nil opportunity to become qualified. Perhaps one must be appropriately educated and socialized to become properly qualified, and education is provided at great expense by rich people to their children, but not by poor people to their children, and socialization of the right sort is provided by concerned and competent parents/guardians, but not all children are lucky enough to have concerned and competent parents/guardians. In a regime in which the FEO ideal is fulfilled, being born and raised on the wrong side of the tracks, in disadvantageous circumstances, makes no difference at all to one’s prospects of competitive success. The child of an unskilled worker, equally natively talented and equally ambitious as the child of the CEO or successful banker, has equally good prospects of competitive success as the children of well-off parents. FEO states an ideal of a society that is classless in this sense. Now suppose the institutions of society otherwise conform to FEO, except that some individuals are much better off than others because they are the recipients of gifts and bequests showered on them by wealthy members of society. These windfall gains falling on some people are patently not attached to positions and offices open to all, selection to which is made in conformity with formal equality of opportunity, much less stricter FEO requirements. Nobody has the opportunity to apply for the position of child with wealthy parents, who pass on some or all of their wealth to their children by intra vivos gifts and inheritance. Receiving an inheritance might have the effect of giving the recipient advantages in further competitions for positions and roles that provide primary social goods to their occupants. Even if no such effects take place, receiving an inheritance might directly bring it about that the recipient has more primary social goods than others have. Moreover, the assured prospect that one will inherit wealth may provide advantages to one long before inheritance is actually received. The assurance relieves anxiety about one’s future prospects and makes it reasonable to invest more than one otherwise would in higher education and to engage in entrepreneurial risk taking with potential large payoff. Having wealthy parents who will give one gifts of money in response to downward shocks in one’s income prospects also serves as insurance. 4 . Mill, On Liberty, chap. 1. 5 . John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), chapter 2, section 14. 3 Inheriting wealth from one’s parents or being the recipient of substantial gifts of money from them may enable one to spend extra money on one’s children in ways that substantially boost their competitive prospects. Again, the expectation of an inheritance to come may do the same. Parents knowing that they will eventually receive a considerable sum from their parents, may thereby find it feasible to lavish funds on the education and upbringing of their children, sending them to private school, enrolling them in social clubs frequented by rich notables, and so on, thus boosting their children’s competitive prospects.
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