That’s the same as inheritance when there’s no will: should it all go to the eldest son? Be split equally among sons? Should even daughters get a share? How about the widow? Adopted children? Nephews? Siblings? Non-married companions? Lovers? Children born out of wedlock and not formally recognized? It’s not rare for the children to disagree on this.
If the parent didn’t specify a will, the law usually has a default case, which hasn’t been the same from one society to another, or from one epoch to another.
The difference here is that heirs are different people using different reasoning, and they can appeal to various factors depending on their capacity for reasoning and their implicit privileges (age, degree of relation, etc.)
Here we are arguing about a case where the “heirs” are not only not privileged over each other in any intrinsic sense, but they are also copies of the same thought process, with access to the exact same threads of reasoning.
This logic works in the scenario where nobody knows who the original is. It doesn’t work as well when there is a known original, since this difference in subjective experience between the two may be enough to break symmetry in terms of which arguments are appealing, and the analogy to heirs probably works best. I myself favour a default case of equal splitting, since it means we don’t have to argue about who is the ‘original’.
That’s the same as inheritance when there’s no will: should it all go to the eldest son? Be split equally among sons? Should even daughters get a share? How about the widow? Adopted children? Nephews? Siblings? Non-married companions? Lovers? Children born out of wedlock and not formally recognized? It’s not rare for the children to disagree on this.
If the parent didn’t specify a will, the law usually has a default case, which hasn’t been the same from one society to another, or from one epoch to another.
The difference here is that heirs are different people using different reasoning, and they can appeal to various factors depending on their capacity for reasoning and their implicit privileges (age, degree of relation, etc.)
Here we are arguing about a case where the “heirs” are not only not privileged over each other in any intrinsic sense, but they are also copies of the same thought process, with access to the exact same threads of reasoning.
This logic works in the scenario where nobody knows who the original is. It doesn’t work as well when there is a known original, since this difference in subjective experience between the two may be enough to break symmetry in terms of which arguments are appealing, and the analogy to heirs probably works best. I myself favour a default case of equal splitting, since it means we don’t have to argue about who is the ‘original’.