Descendant: A Philosophical Exercise
Inspired by the Netflix movie "Descendant", set in my father's hometown of Mobile, AL.
I have a philosophical scenario I’d like to explore. I want to remain abstract and not tie it to any real situations it may resemble.
Let’s say I live in a village. I go on a robbing spree and take the entire wealth of a group of people in the village. Through a bizarre series of legal events, breaking into the people’s homes to steal the stuff is illegal, but the actual theft is not. Vampire rules, I guess?
So even though I’ve got all this stuff and everyone knows I got it from them, they all think the people’s grandparents gave me the keys (or that I took the keys when breaking in used to be legal), and I‘ll be in serious trouble if they find out I just broke in. The authorities might even kill me.
So years go by, and the people I stole from scrape together what they can and buy some land. They asked my son for some, but he refused. Their kids are poor but making it. My kids are rich and start buying up all the land around them and putting up factories and mills to make more money. The factories and mills poison the air and water around their kids.
The village turns into a town and the town turns into a city. We’re four generations out. The adults on both sides remember sitting at the knee of their grandparents and learning the story of what the grandparents saw as children. Some of the older folks remember some of the original players. It wasn’t that long ago. Their kids tell the story from ramshackle porches with the stench of processed paper in the air. My kids live in the best part of town and tell the story from gilded, airy rooms overlooking lovely gardens. They feel badly about it all, but it was a very long time ago, wasn’t it? And their intermediary generations had to hide the story right? Otherwise there could have been real trouble.
So, now, the questions:
These are not nation-states, but families. Do the families that profited from ill-gotten gains owe the families they stole from anything?
What is the statute of limitations on civil penalties for a criminal act of this type? Remember, it wasn’t okay to break into people’s houses when the crime was committed, so we are talking about a crime at the time, not a situation where the moral goalposts shifted.
If some sort of compensation were owed, what shape would it take? Cash payments? Shares in the industry funded from the wealth? Insurance? What else?