The topic is clearly of great importance; and perhaps, as Daniel Halliday suggests in this new book, the evaluation of capitalism’s moral foundations will never be complete until some effort is made to address the normative bases of inheritance and bequest. One does not need to be a radical socialist to feel somewhat uneasy about the idea that our life trajectories are primarily determined by the social class into which we are born. At the same time, many of us might feel equally ill at ease with any suggestion that on our death we do not have the right to pass on our possessions to whomsoever we might choose.

In this elegantly written book, Halliday argues that inheritance – when it helps maintain group-based inequalities over time – is something that should be restricted. Halliday, who works in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, is concerned with the role inherited wealth plays in ensuring that one’s prospects in life become dependent on the fortune of being born into a family that already possesses substantial wealth. Halliday is primarily interested in economic wealth that consolidates over a number of generations, and argues that inheritance should be taxed not merely in accordance with the amount of wealth that is passed on, but also in accordance to the wealth’s age. Of course, much hangs here on the causal connection between inheritance flow and the degree to which the fate of any generation’s individual members is connected to that of their parents and their parents’ parents.

Halliday’s arguments against enabling wealth to ‘cascade down generations’ are based on what contemporary political philosophers call ‘luck egalitarianism’, according to which injustice occurs when material inequalities are a matter of fortune or brute luck. Halliday asks what could be more of a matter of brute luck than being born to wealthy parents, and insightfully observes that such brute luck often skips a generation, since many people’s trajectories are already fixed by the time their parents die.

It is important to emphasise that while it is primarily a work in political philosophy, the book is very much grounded in the practical realities of everyday economic and social life. Halliday rightly acknowledges, for instance, that simply reducing the differences in economic inheritance will not eliminate all inherited advantages, since material resources are not the only mechanism via which competitive advantage is transferred from one generation to another.

Perhaps the most significant practical consideration in the book is his discussion and endorsement of the so-called ‘Rignano Scheme’, which involves the imposition of far more extensive rates of taxation upon second-generation inheritance. Some readers might be puzzled as to why his attention is fixed upon the age of the wealth. Why should this be the case? One justification provided in the book for this focus is that over time, and over generations, the inheritance of wealth gives rise to significant forms of economic segregation and with such segregation come morally arbitrary differentials with respect to people’s life chances. However, Halliday is not necessarily opposed to first generation wealth transfers, his reason being that he believes that such transfers often have a valuable role to play in maintaining, and even increasing the size of, the middle class (something which he believes to be socially desirable). There are other reasons for defending second-generation inheritance. Like Rignano, Halliday wants our public policy to distinguish between earned wealth accumulated as a consequence of individual initiative and unearned inherited wealth.

Dr Daniel Halliday (photo via University of Melbourne)As this discussion of the virtues of the middle class and of first-generation inheritance should suggest, Halliday’s project does not involve an extreme levelling program. Instead, it is a relatively moderate egalitarian project that acknowledges, amongst other things, the moral significance of the right to bequeath, and one that limits these inheritance taxes to substantive economic resources. Our keepsakes and mementoes are safe, or so it would seem.

Nonetheless, Halliday’s central thesis remains one that many would wish to reject vigorously. Given its highly controversial nature, it is surprising then that more ink is not spilt responding to possible objections. For instance, some critics might well be concerned about the level of intrusion that regulation of family affairs to determine taxation levels might bring in its wake. It would also have been useful to have had more discussion of socialist objections to inheritance, for there is a rich corpus of philosophical argument to be found within that tradition that is largely ignored by Halliday.

These are, however, minor quibbles and should not draw any attention away from the fact that this is a ground-breaking work, which places the legitimacy of bequest as a social practice back on the agenda. Whatever one’s attitude towards Halliday’s egalitarianism, and his suggestions about the taxation of second-generation wealth, anyone interested in issues of social justice needs to engage with this thoughtful and easily accessible text.