{"id":97273,"date":"2025-11-28T01:00:48","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T06:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=97273"},"modified":"2025-11-27T10:02:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T15:02:14","slug":"qotd-life-is-not-a-race-to-some-arbitrary-finish-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/11\/28\/qotd-life-is-not-a-race-to-some-arbitrary-finish-line\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Life is not a race to some arbitrary &#8220;finish line&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>On a friend&#8217;s <em>Facebook<\/em> page I left the following comment about the claim of the writer <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2017\/jul\/24\/utopian-thinking-fund-welfare-state-inheritance-tax\" target=\"_blank\">Abi Wilkinson<\/a> (in the <em>Guardian<\/em>!) that inheritance should be confiscated by government to fund the UK&#8217;s welfare state. What could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n<p>I wrote:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The hostility to inheritance also comes from a mistaken sense of fairness. As Robert Nozick argued in <strong>Anarchy, State and Utopia<\/strong> (I quote from memory), people wrongly think life resembles an athletics race, where the racers compete to hit the finishing line. As a result, those &#8220;lucky&#8221; athletes endowed by nature\/god whatever with stronger muscles etc must be handicapped by having weights in their shoes, for example. Just as a child of rich parents must be deliberately held back to give poor kids a more &#8220;fair&#8221; chance of winning. But as Nozick said, life isn&#8217;t like that. It is about people exchanging goods, services and ideas with one another. There&#8217;s no fixed end-point to which we are all racing.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Also, the idea that there is some &#8220;prize&#8221; that humans compete for implies that someone or some entity has created that &#8220;prize&#8221; in the first place. But that&#8217;s smuggling in a sort of communitarian assumption into the actions of individuals. In an open society, the prizes on offer are varied and multiply constantly.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I should add that the second section of Nozick&#8217;s renowned book dissects and ultimately rejects forced redistribution for egalitarian or other forms of &#8220;patterned&#8221; notions of justice, and he robustly defends what he calls an &#8220;entitlement&#8221; concept of justice.<\/p>\n<p>One of the approaches that the late Prof. Nozick used was the thought experiment, such as the example referenced above about a fictitious athletics race in which the entrants are hampered\/favoured to make the race more &#8220;even&#8221;, and then assuming that society in general should be like this. A race, held by people who know the rules and seek to abide by them, is not like an open society. &#8220;Open&#8221; is the key word here: there is no single end to which persons are heading, such as winning the race.<\/p>\n<p>And yet a lot of the metaphors one comes across around discussions around equality, including equality of opportunity as well as outcome, seem to borrow, perhaps unwittingly, from this &#8220;race competition&#8221; worldview. To give another example, I remember reading some months ago about a university professor (Warwick) who suggested that when parents read stories to their children, this is <a href=\"https:\/\/theaquilareport.com\/professor-read-kids-youre-unfairly-disadvantaging-others\/\" target=\"_blank\">a form of privilege<\/a>. This also plays to the idea that life has a fixed end-measure of success, so that anyone giving a value to someone else is giving the latter an unfair &#8220;head start&#8221; on someone else. It would require a State to exercise totalitarian control of our actions from the moment we wake up to go to sleep lest our actions unfairly advantage\/hamper someone in the &#8220;race&#8221; they are considered, by this worldview, to be on. (It also, by the way, shows that today&#8217;s Higher Ed. is full of certifiable fools and worse.)<\/p>\n<p>Johnathan Pearce, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.samizdata.net\/2025\/08\/the-assault-on-inheritance-and-the-assumptions-that-drive-it\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The assault on inheritance and the assumptions that drive it&#8221;, <em>Samizdata<\/em><\/a>, 2025-08-21.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On a friend&#8217;s Facebook page I left the following comment about the claim of the writer Abi Wilkinson (in the Guardian!) that inheritance should be confiscated by government to fund the UK&#8217;s welfare state. What could possibly go wrong? I wrote: The hostility to inheritance also comes from a mistaken sense of fairness. As Robert [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,4,84,28,53,41],"tags":[374,550,912,76,1574],"class_list":["post-97273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-britain","category-government","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-children","tag-libertarianism","tag-privilege","tag-socialism","tag-technocracy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-piV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97273"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99302,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97273\/revisions\/99302"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}