Locke's Account of Inheritance and Bequest

Locke's Account of Inheritance and Bequest J. J. WALDRON 1. WHEN A MAN DIES, what should become of his property? Do his property rights die with him, leaving his goods, his wealth, ownerless or do the rights survive his death in some form or other? If the rights die with him, then presumably his goods become fair game for anybody to appropriate just as if they had never been owned at all. But if the rights survive, then posthumous appropriation will amount to theft---either against the dead man himself or against some other person in whom the rights have been vested as a result of the death. To a certain extent, one's views on what ought to happen to a man's property after his death will depend on one's conception of death itself: Is it regarded merely as a transition to another realm or is it the terminus of all individual existence? If death is not regarded as a final end, it may be thought that a deceased's goods should be burned or buried with him in order to consign them to that state of existence which he himself has attained. In this case, posthumous appropriation by another is a violation of the rights of the deceased--at least as grievous a violation as stealing from him while he is alive. In Western philosophical thought, despite a very widespread belief in a life after death, an individual's property rights have usually been regarded as confined to the temporal phase of his existence. The dominant belief in post-mortem survival has been Christian, and Christian teaching has it that there is no possibility of taking material wealth or any of its benefits beyond the grave. The custom of interring some property (clothes, casket, flag, weapon) with a deceased is attributable more to a sense of decent ceremony than to a belief that these goods will be of any use to him in the hereafter. The alternatives in Western thought, then, are either the complete annihilation of personal property rights by death or else the vesting of the rights of a dead man in some other person, i One might have expected that someone like John Locke, who justified private property on the basis of an individual's personal investment of labor, would opt for the former alternative. If a right of property is essentially earned by an individual, .then one would expect that right to die with the man who earned it. To vest the earner's fight in I am gratefulto ProfessorAlanMusgrave,of the Universityof Otago, New Zealand, and to the anonymous referees of the Journal of the History of Philosophy for their helpful adviceand criticisms. LLeibniz is supposed to have believed that the immortalsoul of a deceased proprietor had a continuing right, after death, to have its wishes carried out: see W. G. Miller, Lectures on the Philosophy of Law London:(CharlesGriffen& Co., 1884),pp. 257-58. However,Millergivesno indicationwherein Leibniz's works this referenceis to be found. [391 40 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY somebody else as a result of his death would amount to the creation of an unearned right of property--a right not arising from the investment of the labor of the person purporting to hold it. Succession, therefore, would undermine the justification of property entitlements on the basis of labor. At death, according to the purest version of this kind of theory, there should be no succession, no bequest, and no inheritance. Property would return to the state of nature when its owner died and remain there till some other individual came along and mixed his labor with it. Locke, however, did not take this view. In the First Treatise of Government (which contains his most extensive discussion of these matters), Locke wrote: But if any one had began and made himself a Property in any particular thing, (which how he, or any one else, could do, shall be shewn in another place) that thing, that possession, if he dispos'd not otherwise of it by his positive Grant, descended Naturally to his Children, and they had a right to succeed to it, and possess it.2 The parenthetical reference is...