23 février 2023
4 PM - 6 PM (CET)
Co organizing with Ana Catarina Neves and Axel Gosseries
Online through MS TEAMS -Please use this link to access the event
4PM: The right to inherit as compensation for elderly caregiving tasks
Alejandro BERROTARAN (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba)
4H35pm: Care Workers and the promise of inheritance
Catarina NEVES (CEPS, University of Minho)
5H05PM: Inheritance as a risk to family relational goods: which policy?
Marie BASTIN (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
The right to inherit as compensation for elderly caregiving tasks
Alejandro BERROTARAN, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba
An increasing number of older adults require assistance to carry out their daily activities. This demand for caregiving services is mainly met by family members, mostly women, who perform these tasks without receiving any compensation for it. In this presentation, I will analyze the possibility of recognizing a right to inherit by children who provide care to their elderly parents as a mechanism of compensation for the tasks performed. This compensatory right to inherit will be subjected to three critiques. The first critique states that children have a duty to care for their parents. If providing care is a family obligation, it cannot be the source of a compensation. The second critique states that recognizing a right to inherit for family care tasks violates state neutrality because it implies assuming a comprehensive conception of the family and applying it to society. The third critique points out that the state is the main responsible for financing the care of the elders, so compensation for the performance of these tasks is not the elder's responsibility. In addressing each of these critiques I will present objections that can be made to them. Finally, I will conclude that a right to inherit can be conceived as a mechanism of compensation for care tasks under non-ideal conditions.
Care Workers and the Promise of Inheritance
Catarina NEVES, CEPS - University of Minho
Hendrik Hartog describes a case of a housekeeper that was promised by her employer that she would receive one of his three farms if she would remain working for him. She took care of the old man between 1876-1901, despite earning little. In In the end, however, that promise was not fulfilled, and instead his family was granted the three farms (Hartog, 2012: 102). In another instance, Lourdes Maria Cambra, a domestic worker, who worked for the first woman elected official in Brazil was publicly shamed after claiming that she was promised the possibility to live in her former employer’s house (Schpum, 2004). Both examples illustrate claims from paid care workers to receive an inheritance or to be entitled to gifts they might have received from their employers. These are usually women, who are paid very little, and perform challenging emotional and physical work.
Despite what seem instances of gift-giving, or plausible claims for compensation, both judicial courts (Hacker, 2022; Regev-Mesalem, 2020) and public opinion tend to reject paid care workers’ rights to inheritance. In what follows, I intend to explore this debate, by first discussing what I believe are the three normative arguments behind those who oppose care workers’ right to inheritance: 1) the possibility of corrupted motivations; 2) the idea that family needs to take precedence; and finally that 3) no double compensation should occur. I will proceed to explain each argument and offer objections which I believe strengthen the claim of care-workers to have a right to inheritance.
Inheritance as a risk to family relational goods: which policy?
Marie BASTIN, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
The purpose of my reasoning is to turn a family-oriented argument against inheritance taxation on its head. I begin by presenting a conception of what makes the family valuable that is useful for normative thinking about inheritance using the concept of relational goods (Gheaus 2018). I then characterize the link between inheritance and family value as a risk: inheritance is not necessary for the realization of family relational goods, but it can easily be the means of relational harms. I then compare two types of inheritance policies that can address this risk: control of inheritance and inheritance taxation. I will argue that there is a strong case for inheritance taxation to address the risk that inheritance poses to family relational goods. The main argument for this is the idea that inheritance transmissions have unfair relational consequences, according to a sense of relational equality (Anderson 1999), which concern both social relations in general and inter-individual relations within the family.