re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat

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But the question here is about the foundations of property rights and how inheritances can possibly jive w the Natural Law.

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It jives in the sense that property ownership entails the right of disposal. Owners overwhelmingly dispose of property to their benefit. Intestate inheritance is the state creating an automatic system of disposal to the benefit of the deceased's heirs.

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Granted — but doesn't the prohibition on using others as mere means ultimately rest on the fact that they have a claim to their own body and the products of their labor that you cannot override?

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Agreed

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Whether you ground that claim in self-ownership or in the idea that each person belongs to God and therefore cannot belong to you, the practical conclusion is identical: no one has the right to direct another person's existence toward their own ends.

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Can’t immediately think of a scenario where I disagree, so agreed.

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From a political philosophy standpoint the two views converge almost entirely. The meaningful divergence is narrow — suicide, and perhaps a few other cases where a person's choices affect only themselves. That's a real disagreement, but it doesn't touch the core of what we've been discussing. On property rights, plunder, and the wrongness of slavery, we're describing the same structure from different foundations.

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Mostly agreed, except the reason I engaged on this topic is because I disagreed with how natural rights were being portrayed/ justified.

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The question isn't whether the dead can obligate the living. It's whether the living person's prior disposition of their own property should be honored.

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How are these different?

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We're completing a transfer the living person initiated.

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But that person doesn't exist anymore. They cannot be harmed by our refusal to complete the transfer. They can't be benefited from our fulfillment of the transfer.

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Why should a dead person's wishes

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Because they represent not a dead person's wishes, but the wishes of a living being that preceded death or disability.

You would agree that some people intentionally leave some of their kids out of their wills, correct?

I'm just saying that if a will or some kind of agreement isn't explicitly created, the property rights issue becomes clear as mud, because the person who owned the property didn't make prior, voluntary arrangements of what to do w the property.

Acts were created to alleviate those kinds of problems, but again, just talking about the very foundation of where those property rights come from in the first place

I've read a ton of your posts in the past, so I'm certain you're not trying to argue property rights are just granted by government. That they precede government.

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Why should a dead person's wishes continue to govern property after that person no longer exists?

I know there are laws dictating that the dead person's wishes are honored. That's not what I'm asking.

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Because it is the morally correct thing to do from a justice perspective

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Because justice?

Not a satisfying answer.

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I appreciate your transparency here. Nice to know that, to the communist, it will be incumbent on the host to prove to the leech why they deserve to determine the destination of their life's labor.

You people are dangerous and it's no wonder you are considered enemies of the republic undeserving of civil rights protection.

Hard to imagine someone can be so callous and greedy...yet here we are.

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I am pointing out that identifying something as a social construct isn't an appeal to socialism or communism.

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Working from memory, but in an earlier post I think you stated something like: 'something can be a made up and still be real - like money'.

When you said 'something can be made up and still be real' I took you to be using 'real' to mean causally effective or functionally consequential. But I believe the person you were responding to was using 'real' to mean mind-independent, existing whether or not humans think about it. Both are legitimate senses of the word but they're different, and sliding between them doesn't meaningful address his argument.

In another post you said 'something can be legitimate and still be a social construct', but that's a loaded statement because almost anything can be described as a social construct. Our frameworks for understanding nature, science, and morality all emerge from human cognition, much of it transmitted socially. If everything qualifies, the category carries no philosophical weight. (setting aside the multiple meanings of “Legitimate”, permitted by law, justified or fair, real or not fake, accepted as rightful - and it's normative status)

The interesting question isn't whether something is socially constructed but whether it corresponds to something that exists independently of human agreement - or whether it is only the agreement, with nothing underneath it.

Your reply: "I am pointing out that identifying something as a social construct isn't an appeal to socialism or communism", while it certainly may be true, doesn't help me understand what you actually mean by the phrase "social construct".

I'm not suggesting bad faith, that's why I asked for an example of something that is not a social construct so I can maybe understand how you are using the term and avoid potentially talking past each other.

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How are these different?

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Because honoring a prior disposition isn't about ongoing authority. The act, their transfer instruction, was completed by a living agent. We're not obeying the dead. We're completing a transaction that was legitimately initiated.

Would you say that if someone knew they were dying in 1 hour and they initiated transactions to transfer all their wealth to someone else, any transactions that didn't complete before they actually died should be expunged and not go through?

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But that person doesn't exist anymore. They cannot be harmed by our refusal to complete the transfer. They can't be benefited from our fulfillment of the transfer.

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Because the moral weight was never located in the deceased's ongoing interests. It was located in two places: the living person's right to dispose of what was theirs, and the legitimate interests of the living beneficiaries who are the actual recipients of the transfer.