I think I’m still not making myself clear. Maybe instead of specific, I should say “individualized”. You’re talking about a policy that taxes the very rich, without reference to their individual actions, and uses those taxes in a way that benefits everyone, regardless of their individual harms. That’s a general policy, even if we know that Jeff Bezos will pay some taxes and Ecmandu will receive some money.
That’s what I mean by a ‘general’ here. It’s not mediated by reference to a specific act. You’re talking about all Xs who fit criteria C, I’m talking about one specific X who’s compensating a specific individual. The application of what I’m talking about would be individualized.
Isn’t this too broad, though? Do you agree that if you steal my painting and I die before I get it back, you don’t thereby gain legitimate ownership of it? Do you further agree that my heirs can reclaim the painting?
I think you meant this as a joke, but it absolutely follows from the argument I’m making and I don’t see that as a problem with my argument.
I mostly agree with your take on morality, but I think more follows from it than you do:
First, if in order to reject the argument I’m making, we need to appeal to moral nihilism, I think that’s a strong endorsement of my position. All claims of the form, “You should do X” are vulnerable to nihilistic dismissals of any moral obligations, so if we need to appeal to that nuclear option here, then our claim is as well-established as a moral claim can be.
But I don’t think you’re really appealing to the nuclear option, you’re invoking it to frame the discussion differently. A broader version of what I read you to be saying is that, if nothing matters at bottom, then whatever uneasy truce we have today is actually morally right, in which case arguments to change the uneasy truce have no moral force, they can only be rent-seeking on the part of whoever would benefit. And I think this is also basically true, but I think we can still make a strong moral claim within that framing:
Moral principles are a useful part of a social contract, and rent-seekers can appeal to them to justify their demands in light of the ostensible social contract, and that poses an actual problem for the broader uneasy truce.
We have, as part of our uneasy truce, principles around how property works and how it can be alienated. We want these principles to be natural, necessary, because if they’re contingent (e.g. if they’re principles now but weren’t at some time in the past), then they’re less reliable; we will have less reason to honor them with respect to other people’s property, because we have less reason to expect that they will honor them with respect to ours.
But if they are natural, necessary, they precede the existing social contract. As part of our social agreement, we pretend that our principles are written into the fabric of reality, because that makes them reliable. But if that’s so, then they applied even before the current agreement existed, and so to be consistent retroactively say that some then-sanctioned behaviors were unjust.
The other consideration around the social contract framing is that we need significant buy-in, and people will just reject the uneasy truce if they don’t perceive it to be fair. It’s all well and good to say that the previous uneasy truce made actions legitimate, but the present uneasy truce may need to undo those actions to get the required buy-in. “Everyone keeps what they have” seems like a fair deal, but it depends on what led to who has what. If I steal your things and then say, “Everyone keeps what they have”, you would be reasonably expected to reject that arrangement, even if you think “everyone keeps what they have” is a good principle.
So, you’re right that you may reject a social contract that includes you losing money, but if you care about property rights now, and you want them to be strongly enforced and valued by all other members of the social contract, it would be in your interest to enforce the consequences of such rights into the past to legitimize them by reducing contingency.
To nuance the claim, I would phrase it differently: your ancestor took something of value from my ancestor, and so your ancestor’s estate owes my ancestor’s estate. You can’t be saddled with your ancestor’s debt, but if you inherited that value from your ancestor’s estate that was not your ancestor’s to give you, then you don’t get to keep it, it belongs to my ancestor’s estate and then to her heirs. You aren’t paying, you’re losing out on your inheritance. (This is the ‘robber drops a bag of cash’ hypothetical I opened with.)
A corollary of this is that the argument I’m making wouldn’t apply to people who didn’t inherit any such ill-gotten gains because they didn’t inherit anything.