Hearing screams, you run into the burning building.
Following the sounds, you make your way to a room. Inside, you can see the walls are on fire and the roof is soon to collapse. Two things are in the room: a baby and a Picasso. You only have time to save one.
Instinct takes over, and you run towards the infant. Suddenly - you stop. A terrifying realization enters your mind: if you take the painting - surely worth hundreds of millions - you could sell it and donate the proceeds to charities which could save thousands of lives.
What do you do? Save the baby in the room with you now or save the unknown thousands separated from you by time and space?
I pose this hypothetical to examine the fundamental question of the moral status of ‘partiality’ (a preference for one person or group over another).
It is necessary to understand whether - on the most basic and abstract level - it can be moral to prioritize the needs of those closest to us over the needs of strangers before we can move on to the specific question of inheritance.
I hope to demonstrate that partiality is not just morally permissible, but that it is frequently necessary for morality to be upheld. It is often good to heavily bias towards those you are closest to. I have chosen the extreme thought-experiment of the burning building in order to illustrate the point in stark terms.
You should save the baby. But let’s start by examining the alternative.
You take the painting.
Quickly, problems arise. Overriding your instinct to protect the child caused hesitation and cost precious seconds. Do you still have time to get out of the doomed room?
You just make it through the door when the roof collapses. The baby is gone. But is it so certain that you will save lives? As you run back through the rooms, horrifying realizations begin to dawn on you.
The painting is not holding up to the heat. It looks like it might catch flames any second. You continue running, trying to jam it through door frames before it goes up in smoke.
Is this even a real Picasso? Does it have any value whatsoever? How should you know?
Thankfully, you make it outside without the painting taking too much damage. Once you’re in the fresh air and your mind begins to clear, you realize that it might have been absurd to think that you’d have the legal right to sell this painting and control the resulting funds. In fact, you might actually be arrested for negligence of the baby.
The baby’s family are there, being held back from entering the building by firefighters. They stare at you in shock and disbelief, struggling to understand what you’ve just done, and why you’re holding their painting and not their child. This moment, and the decisions that you have made, will haunt their lives forever. The mother looks like she might die of grief and the father looks like he might kill you. The baby’s sister looks on uncomprehendingly. This moment will affect her forever. Everyone present - the parents, the firefighters, bystanders - has just heard a child’s life end.
It becomes clear that although the baby is certainly dead (a life you - and you alone - had complete control over) the consequences for the lives of others are not nearly as neat as you had hoped.
Will your actions ultimately save lives and improve the world? This remains uncertain; as we will see in the next chapter, fixing the world’s dysfunction by throwing money at complex problems is usually ineffective and frequently counterproductive. You may ultimately never know: the effects will unfold far-away from you and in the future, and will be too complex for you to fully understand.
But that baby is dead.
Despite your hope that you have made the correct moral choice, something feels dreadfully wrong.
Before we move on to my positive arguments as to why you should save the baby, allow me to address a criticism that I’m sure many readers are already considering: this example is too extreme and contrived to be useful to solving the question of partiality in inheritance. After all - your children aren’t going to die if you don’t leave them a fortune, and you will (hopefully) have the time to make well-reasoned decisions when writing a will.
The above thought-experiment is designed to draw out the relevant principles regarding partiality in as stark terms as possible. However, if it’s easier, you can consider a more commonplace form of the same dilemma: should parents leave their infants in daycare from dawn to dusk if it gives them more hours a day to work, and therefore marginally more income to donate to charity? Is it moral for them to ignore the physical and emotional needs of their children to better serve others? Should we prioritize the grave needs of strangers over the marginal needs of our own?
I argue no - this is generally not moral. My view, which I will illustrate both philosophically and with practical case studies over the course of this book, is that each of us has a sphere over which we have personal responsibility, and within which we are competent moral actors. It is our duty to ensure that this sphere is characterized by order and virtue.
Naturally, each of us has spheres of different natures and scales based on our stations and abilities. A few of us - the very wealthy and powerful - bear responsibilities over very large spheres indeed, but we should not be so arrogant as to consider them limitless.
Time and time again, reason and experience shows that when we attempt to privilege the ordering of reality outside our sphere of personal responsibility over the ordering of reality within it, chaos results and the world is made worse.
Instead, it is the compounding effects of the interactions of innumerable well-ordered spheres that make the world a more beautiful and a more just place. Happily, the opportunity will frequently arise to also improve others’ spheres without introducing disorder to our own, and we can still live lifetimes of true charity to our neighbors while fulfilling our personal responsibilities.
You take the baby.
As you emerge into daylight, the mother and father cry tears of relief. The baby is reunited with its parents, whose family is made whole again. They thank you profusely. Their fear that they had lost their child only makes their love for it more intense.
The onlookers are overjoyed. A reporter asks to interview you, in order to share your tale of bravery and heroism with the nation.
You feel proud. You are confident you did the right thing. You might have inspired others to do the same.
Your sphere is well ordered.
But there is still suffering in the wider world. To this we will return.
Parents have a special responsibility over their own children.
Unable to care for themselves, children require the care of others, or disaster results. With regards to the provision of this care, parents have a particular responsibility over their own children, because in this relationship of care they are irreplaceable.
A child does not sometimes require care, it requires relentless care - at least, for the first part of its life. The care a child requires is not always simple to identify and provide; a deep knowledge of the particular child and its context is necessary to provide the care that it requires at any given moment. Children have emotional needs which must be met as part of this care, and this includes the opportunity to bond deeply with a single ‘mother’ figure.
These factors mean that the care of a child cannot be provided by a rotating cast of volunteers or professionals. If care is to be provided at all, it should be provided by a persistent set of deeply invested individuals. The natural actors to fill these roles are the parents. If they do not fill these roles, there is a higher chance that their child’s most basic needs will not be met. One of the benefits of defaulting to the support of direct family members is that this removes any ‘choice paralysis’ and hesitation about the selection of who should fill these carer roles, and allows us to confidently and immediately proceed with a lifetime of mutual giving.
So far, we have identified a simple physical and psychological explanation for the necessity of a particular relationship between parents and children. But is there not also something metaphysically significant about these bonds?
In a seemingly ‘super-rational’ sense - that is, ‘going beyond what is rationally required of an actor in a fair exchange’ - a parent will make sacrifices for their child’s wellbeing that no one else would. A parent will die for their child without hesitation when others would hesitate. A parent will endure abject misery so that their child might find happiness. These relationships are characterized by a durability which transactional relationships are not. As Aristotle says, a relationship of this kind is “immune to lies and gossip, and it has staying power”.1
With parents and children - the very element of ‘sameness’ is one of the foundations of love. This is also true of brothers and of families more generally. Thus the modern trend which insists on diversity over sameness and universality over partiality is directly antithetical to the fostering of true and unconditional love.
The compounding effect of loving, super-rational instincts means that when humans are socially arranged appropriately they become more than the sum of their parts. When parents look after their own children rather than random people each day, the broader social fabric is enriched by the greater presence of this super-rational love and self-sacrifice. On this basis ‘unconditional love’ makes its appearance. This in turn compounds into otherwise unachievable social integrity and harmony.
Conversely, while it may be possible to achieve a greater number of seemingly morally desirable outcomes by abandoning your children and giving more money to charity, it must be acknowledged that by disregarding this central moral responsibility you are undermining your commitment to morality itself. Having abandoned your super-rational motivation for self-sacrifice, using your newfound freedom to achieve arbitrary and self-serving objectives is the natural next step.
This is why - as Aristotle points out - punching your father is worse than punching a stranger: it is destructive of the very strongest bonds of love and mutual obligation.
Whether you believe in the reality of a God-given natural law or not (which I do), it should be recognized that constructing inappropriate social arrangements, like parents abandoning their children to others, degrades the healthy social fabric which binds us together in the first place, harming future charity and self-giving.
Did you know that you can listen to Becoming Noble essays as podcasts? Find our latest episode here:
All of this is to say that partiality is a powerful ethical mandate and force. When we examine the structures of the bonds that hold society together we find that responsibilities are necessarily distributed unequally. By maintaining particular spheres of responsibility, otherwise unachievable systemic stability and charity results. As Aristotle says of the prioritization of personal relationships:
“It’s also absolutely necessary to life. Who would choose to live their life without any friends or family, even if it had all other good things in it? … Also, young people need help from family and friends to avoid mistakes, and the old to have someone to care for them, and for the things they can’t cope with any more because of their frailty. And men in their prime need friends for carrying out honourable actions… friendship seems to hold cities together”.2
Thus it is natural and right that - at least in the circumstances of raising young children - I give far more to one person than I do another. All things being equal, by lavishing my attention on someone within my sphere, I achieve a greater effect than I do by attempting to direct it outside my sphere.
These questions are simple and obvious when it comes to raising a young child. But it is my contention that the same principles apply, in a more subtle and complex form, to all the other domains which are particularly yours to protect and nurture: your family, your community, your home. It is the intention of this book to help you undertake this particular responsibility, and in so doing, to leave a virtuous legacy.
Here we can note that the correct choice of action in the ‘baby in a burning building’ scenario seemingly does not change whether it is your baby or not. The mere fact that you share the same space - that the baby is in a domain in which you now control (‘your sphere’) - gives you a responsibility over its immediate safety which justifies you choosing it over pursuing some arbitrary number of theoretical lives saved at some uncertain distance in space and time.
Let’s look outside your sphere by considering the external effects of your decision to save the baby. Have you not abandoned the distant, suffering children to their misery? Is this not evil?
First, let’s note that it is not certain that you could have actually saved these children. They are far away from you, you do not understand the complex systemic factors which have led to their situation, and your ability to resolve - or even affect - these grand systemic factors is limited, even with significant wealth. Forces exist between you and them which limit your influence: corruption, political dysfunction, poor management of charities, and fundamentally flawed diagnoses and prescriptions of their situations. Haiti has received more than $20 billion in aid in recent decades - yet look at it now. More on this in the next chapter.
Less certain still is whether you could save them if you had chosen to introduce chaos into your own life (by choosing the painting and risking prosecution and public denunciation, as well as the dire consequences for your mental and spiritual health from abandoning the baby).
Let’s also not forget that, even if you take the baby, your window to help the poor has not closed. Your life can still be one of charity. Perhaps the family of the saved baby ask what they can do to thank you, and you ask for a donation to be made to some charity of your choice. If that was a real Picasso, presumably they’re wealthy. You might even ask them to sell it and to make the donation that you would have.
Here it is time for a moment of brutal honesty: are you already giving absolutely everything you can to charity? Or do you allow yourself a disposable income and some luxuries? If you don’t already give everything to charity, do you think that something qualitatively changes if you obtained and sold the painting?
Look: you should invest deeply in helping others during your life. You should set your children up to help others in the same way. But if you’re waiting for a moment when ‘charity’ becomes essentially costless for you, like if a huge fortune falls unexpectedly into your lap (or by waiting to give until you’re about to die…) then you should question whether your actions are moral at all.
Unless you believe that each of us should immediately give absolutely everything we have until we are no better off than the least well-off person in the world, then you recognize my core moral contention: there are good, moral reasons for maintaining inequalities. Specifically, it makes sense to primarily entrust your resources to people and domains that are functional, healthy, dependable, and well-understood, rather than to direct your resources into unknown chaos. There are good reasons to keep the bulk of your charitable efforts within the sphere of your moral competence rather than outside it.
The question of how we lessen our capacity for self-deception is important. Our super-rational responsibility to the child is self-evident and cannot be ignored, manipulated, or shunned. It is difficult to delude ourselves within the sphere in which our moral obligations are clear and immediate.
Conversely, if we instead focus exclusively on ‘rational’ giving to charities outside our sphere, we often find ourselves on much more uncertain moral footing. In a changing world, with billions of inhabitants in constant flux, we must choose who to lavish our resources on and how. According to what moral paradigm will we make this decision?
This quandary opens the door for not just imperfect rationality but active self-deception. Am I pursuing a certain charitable endeavor because it makes me ‘feel good’ over another that is more important but does not elicit dopamine? Will I really use all the time I have gained by ignoring my personal responsibilities on helping others?
History is replete with people who insist that they have a universal love for humanity but who are somehow awful to everyone they meet. Exclusively pursuing such ‘rational’ behavior only serves to make you less human; even psychopathic. It is only a short distance from tolerating the death of the baby to being actively willing to cause others acute suffering for ‘the greater good’. (Should we kill people with valuable items so that we can sell them and donate to charity?)
Charity is a social value, and any approach to charity that ignores or undermines the social fabric which the actor lives within must ultimately be ineffective or destructive. The prioritization of our spheres of responsibility and competence is morally important.
People’s confusion on this issue stems in part from the fact that the family has been widely forgotten as a legitimate institution: indeed, the foundational institution of society. It is as much a vehicle for the true virtue of charity as the professional organizations which call themselves ‘charities’.
It would be absurd to suggest that wealthy nation states, for example, should give up their entire wealth to ‘charities’ between each presidential transition. This is because the nation state, although not a ‘charity’, is understood as a legitimate institution with a mandate and competency to care for people - first and foremost its own, but others also - generation after generation. The family, properly undertaken, should be understood the same way.
Should you have doubts on the validity of prioritizing your own, never forget that the modern browbeating pressure to exclusively focus on professional ‘charities’ comes from a culture that has forgotten how to build beautiful buildings, how to raise virtuous children, and how to nurture people’s spiritual needs.
Now that we have laid the philosophical foundation of our defense of the partiality and the prioritization of the family, we must turn to evidence and the practical record. In the next chapter, we will examine the history and effects of ‘managerial charity’, before we turn to the question of inheritance.
[As I’m sure you can tell, this essay is a sketch of the opening chapter of the book I have now committed to writing, ‘Leaving a Legacy’. I’ll be publishing these chapters as I go, to avoid a long Substack silence. My hope is that readers will still choose to buy and share the actual book once it is released anyway. Thank you for your patience and support!]
Thank you for reading.
If you enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting this project by leaving a like or upgrading to paid.
Upgrading will also gain you access to exclusive posts for supporters and the ability to DM me questions. All revenue goes towards supporting my family, and is truly appreciated.
Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics: Book VIII, trans. Adam Beresford.
Ibid.
You save the life that is before you, the one that requires your immediate attention, the one that, potentially, only you can save.
Many years ago, returning from a Scouting event (back when the Boy Scouts was the Boy Scouts) I suddenly saw a car actually flying through the air maybe 100 yds in front of us on the interstate, turning end over end.
I immediately slowed and pulled onto the grass not far from the now stationary car, which was sitting in its roof, upside down. I told my 7 year old son to stay in our truck and I then rushed to the car wreck.
There appeared to be a family of 4-5 inside, father and mother up front, 2-3 young children in the back, all were screaming, and gas was pouring from the tank. On the ground, just outside the driver’s door, a little girl lay face down, motionless, the driver’s shoulder belt wrapped around her little neck.
I quickly pulled my pocket knife and cut the shoulder harness from her neck and another man and I gently carried her away from the car. We performed CPR on the little girl until a paramedic tapped me on the shoulder and told me to move aside.
After a few seconds of examining her, he looked at me and said she was dead, that her neck was broken, and that there was nothing I could have done to save her.
I stood up and walked back to the wrecked car. Many people had arrived by that time, to lend assistance. The remaining occupants had been removed, with no life-threatening injuries as best I could tell.
With nothing else for me to do, I slowly walked back to the truck and my young son. Neither of us said anything for the remaining 40-minute drive back home.
I think about that little girl often. Even now, 35 years later, tears come into my eyes, telling this story.
Point is, I did what I could, in the moment. I could have tried to pull all of the occupants out, once I had moved the little girl, instead of focusing only on her. I had no idea she could not have been saved. All I knew is I had to try.
One child’s life is of infinite value.
My problem with investing is people is that it has paid very poorly over the course of my life. Most 'friends' are gone in two years, in my experience. They move on, change jobs, whatever...never to be heard from again. Soldiers I served with never return an email. People I knew in college are just that: people I knew and associated with while in college. None of it lasted.
I might have 5 people I'm not related to who take the trouble to stay in touch. This in a time when communications tech enables just about anyone in the world to talk to anyone else in the world at any time.
Family sticks, for good or ill, family sticks. I still get daily texts from Mom and Brother. Few others survive the years.
As far as the thought experiment goes: save the baby, because you want to be the kind of man who saves babies. In the giving of the self is the flowering of Chivalry. Your life for another's. You save the baby to save your soul.