What right do you have to hold on to your possessions? What's to stop other people from helping themselves to your books, your car, your stereo? Well, the answer is pretty straightforward. We all agree to live by a simple rule: anyone who has acquired their property honestly, that is without resorting to force, deceipt or coercion, should be able able to keep it. If we all agree to live by this rule, then we are all treated fairly and equally, and no-one has a right to complain that they have been abused.
Furthermore, if you live by the rules, then you are entitled to expect the state to ensure that nobody cheats. People who live by this simple rule are able to have the state (i.e. the police) punish anybody who breaks the rule. The only people who could object to the police having this sort of power are those who want to cheat.
So far so good. This is a contractual view of morality. A implied social contract against acquisition by force, coercion or deceipt is in everybody's interest since it requires everybody to act towards others in the same way that they would want to be treated themselves.
Now, what happens when you die? When you are dead, you no longer have the capacity to participate in the social contract. You can't agree to live by the simple rule because you don't exist anymore. Your property can't belong to you anymore, because quite simply you don't exist.
But if you can't have possessions when you're dead, what happens to the stuff you had when you were alive. WIth one exception that I will explain in a minute, I think that everything that you owned at the moment of your death becomes the property of no-one. Its like an undiscovered island. It doesn't belong to anyone. Unlike an island though, which could remain undiscovered for years, decades or longer, the property of a dead person isn't likely to be undiscovered for long. As soon as you die, somebody else will know that your ownership of your property has ended. Unless we want to allow the property to fall into the hands of the swiftest, greediest people who swarm over the property of the dead, we need some rules to decide who gets what.
Traditionally the wishes of the dead person, as expressed in a will written when they were alive, establish those rules. I think this is wrongheaded. I don't see that a dead person should have any authority over the living. The dead person isn't part of the social contract anymore, and as such they shouldn't have the benefit of state authority to ensure that their wishes are carried out.
No, I think that a person's ability to direct their property to others dies when they do.
That still leaves the problem of what to do with the dead person's property. I think that since it belongs to no-body, it should be transferred to the state, and the state should see that it is used for the benefit of the rest of society. In other words, I think the state would be morally justified in imposing a 100% death tax. They would simply be collecting goods that technically belong to no-body in order to avoid a "free-for-all" among the living trying to scoop up the assets before anybody else.
There is one exception. When the dead person shared their property with other individuals before they died, then those people should be thought of as having acquired partial ownership of the property. So a spouse who shared a house wouldn't lose it when the other spouse dies. The house, and all the goods in the house would be transferred to the surviving spouse. If they shared a bank account, or a portfolio of investments then the surviving spouse would get those too. But if one spouse kept their property segregated so that only they could access or benefit, then the surviving spouse would have no more right to that property than anybody else.
As a social structure, I think this works quite nicely. It encourages sharing and disourages greedy people from hoarding property for their whole lives.....and these are good things. It even encourages people to transfer their assets to their desred beneficiaries while they are still alive. This is wealth redistribution controlled by individuals rather than by the state, this is also a good thing.
The old saying is that death and taxes are the only two certainties. I think they should be combined into one. That's not so radical, is it?