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On rights after death, I was trying to make points about mortality and psychology and semantics, not about the law. We sometimes talk about a conceit that you have a right to determine how your property is allocated after you die. But you're dead. You don't have any rights. You don't exist any more. That's it. Notwithstanding, it makes a lot of sense for a variety of reasons to respect the wishes of the dead, not least because it avoids a lot of fighting among members of the living whose competing entitlements would need to be entangled. When we talk about a particular dead person's wealth, the dead person is no longer interested -- we are talking about the children's rights to enjoy that wealth instead of each other or the rest of us.
Now, the fact that we don't like to acknowledge that we're going to die and that other people will be living in our houses, driving our cars, and squandering our loot leads us to pretend otherwise. That's the psychological point.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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