Choosing children over charity

Defining a theology of inheritance

Editor’s note: This will be a chapter in my upcoming book:

“Leaving a Legacy: Don’t surrender your family’s wealth to the charity industry. Take up the calling to establish a virtuous dynasty.”

This essay is a significant refinement of earlier philosophical sketches which appeared in my piece “Your child's life is worth those of a thousand strangers”. Most of the text, logic, and citations (Aquinas, Augustine, Aristotle, Berry) below are new.

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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

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We now know that we have a moral duty to be charitable to all those who 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.