Choosing children over charity
Defining a theology of inheritance
Editor’s note: This will be a chapter in my upcoming book: “Leaving a Legacy”.
Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
— 1 Timothy 5:8
We now know that we have a moral duty to be charitable to all those whom we encounter over the course of our lives.
Our next task is to determine whether it is permissible to prioritize some people we encounter over others. 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.
This question of the legitimacy of ‘partiality’ will ultimately allow us to understand whether we can leave a large inheritance to our own children, or whether we have a moral duty to distribute our riches to the wider world.
I hope to demonstrate that partiality - preference for our own - 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. To illustrate this, I will examine the Christian tradition (via Aquinas), the classical tradition (via Aristotle), and some contemporary considerations of my own.
It is unquestionable that there is a Christian hierarchy when it comes to the responsibility of provision. 1 Timothy 5:8 tells us: “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” Here we are commanded not just to accept a special responsibility to provide for our relatives, but even within that group there is a particular responsibility (“especially for their own household”).
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae (‘Summary of Theology’), undertakes a comprehensive analysis of what he describes as the ‘Order of Charity’. He provides us with a theological understanding of the hierarchy of people we ought to prioritize with our love.
First he establishes that, since there are special punishments for the failure to love certain people, we must infer that we likewise have a special requirement to love those people:
One's obligation to love a person is proportionate to the gravity of the sin one commits in acting against that love. Now it is a more grievous sin to act against the love of certain neighbors, than against the love of others. Hence the commandment (Leviticus 10:9), "He that curseth his father or mother, dying let him die," which does not apply to those who cursed others than the above. Therefore we ought to love some neighbors more than others.
He notes that ‘ties of blood’ - family - are continuously reiterated as requiring special loyalty in this regard.