The Desert of the Rich

Other things being equal, people deserve bad things for bad things that they do and good things for good things that they do – that they themselves do. A daughter does not deserve punishment for something her father did before she was born, neither does she deserve a reward for good things her mother did. No matter how much the parents may have deserved their wealth, the children do not deserve their inheritance.

Of course, the daughter in question may be entitled to receive some or all of her parents’ fortunes. She would not be entitled to any part that her mother stole, of course. Deserved status is not heritable. Entitlement is heritable under the right conditions. Bequeath or give away something to which you were not entitled, however, and your beneficiary will also be unentitled except under rare circumstances. If an heir is entitled to wealth, it is not because of her merit, but simply because her parents so chose to give her assets that they possessed and that were not subject to superior claims of others.

Were the 12 Angry Men Right?

In the 1957 classic “12 Angry Men” Henry Fonda finally persuades the other eleven jurors that, although the defendant may well have been guilty, the prosecution’s evidence did not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the one who stabbed his father to death. In his systematic debunking of prosecution evidence, Fonda rebutted the inference that the knife found in the body must have been the unusual, decorated switchblade that the defendant purchased earlier that night after a fight with his father. Witnesses, friends of the defendant, identified the fatal knife as being exactly the same kind they saw in defendant’s hands on the street, and the shopkeeper testified that he had never seen another like it. In the most dramatic scene of the film, Fonda produced a second identical knife that he had bought down the street during the trial. Was that enough to demote the knife, together with the other evidence, below the reasonable doubt threshold?