My Cat Question

[yukoncpa]

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Really. Her will shouldn't be honored?



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Yeah, her will should be honored. Whoever owns the cat, owns the necklace. Otherwise, her will should be honored and we should be honored to steal the necklace.

[ChrisV]

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"The old lady is dead and her opinions don't matter anymore."

Really. Her will shouldn't be honored?

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A will is a statement about who owns a person's property after they die. It is not a license for the dying person to direct the living to do damn-fool things just because they said so.

Cats cannot own property. If the necklace has a legitimate inheritor, then they own it. If not, it doesn't have an owner and I will take ownership of it.

I don't feel any moral obligation to respect the wishes of the dead. They are DEAD. The dead cannot own property and they cannot have opinions. If I respect the wishes of the dead, it is because I am demonstrating to myself or others a respect for the dead person. But if I didn't respect them, or if their wishes are idiotic, I will disregard their wishes.

"One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only the truth."

-- Voltaire

NB: All of the above is simply my opinion. I am not familiar with the legalities, but they are probably quite different.

Edit: Honouring a dead person's wishes is a bit like going and putting flowers next to someone's grave. It's a ritual, which makes us feel that we are honouring the memory of the person. But there is absolutely no moral obligation to do it.

Distribution of property is different because it is like an instruction made at the moment just before death, which in a perfect world would be carried out immediately. It doesn't involve the hand of a dead person still trying to meddle with the world after they are gone.

Last edit, I promise: If you are given an instruction by a dying person about what to do with a certain piece of property after they are dead, you probably have an obligation to inform them if you aren't going to carry those wishes out and there's someone else they could will it to who would.

[WaimanaloSlim]

I'd steal the necklace, feel guilty, and make sure the cat was well-supplied with catnip, balls of yarn, and tummy scratches. I'll also buy a laser pen, and make it chase that on a regular basis.

[Propertarian]

A better question that "who owns the cat" is "how do we decide who owns the cat"...that is, what is our theory of ownership?

A couple of ACists have denounced the concept of desert in distributive argument, but the reality is that the concept and theory ownership is also debatable, and their criticisms of desert apply to that as well. What does it mean to own something? How does one come to own something? Etc.

This is why I don't think we can ever sensibly say that taxation is theft. We can't ever say who owns something in anything other than a legal sense, and, by definition, taxation says they do not legally own that thing anymore.

I'm going to start a new OP so that I don't hijack this thread, so please post anything related to the theory of ownership in that thread.

[Raliegh]

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Really. Her will shouldn't be honored?

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The rituals of death are for the survivors. If letting the cat play with the necklace makes YOU feel better about the passing, by all means do so. Me, I'm paying off the mortgage, and putting a picture of the old lady on the wall to remember her by.

[Raliegh]

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Really. Her will shouldn't be honored?

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What if her will weren't so benign? What if her will were for the cat to make all of your future financial decisions. Should that will be honored?