From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun May 26 2002 - 11:54:05 MDT
Phil Osborn wrote:
>
> No one can legally bind a kid to such a contract.
> However, having a viable personal trust with highly
> valued shares would be a huge asset - much more so if
> it caught on large scale - in getting further
> capitalization to start a business, for example. A
> kid could revoke his trust, but, barring unusual
> circumstances such as criminally negligant trustees,
> for example, he could expect to pay a high price in
> terms of lost opportunities to acquire capitalization.
> Few people would feel very generous toward someone
> who had simply welched on the people who had invested
> their hard-earned dollars in raising him or her, and
> there would be public records that would follow such a
> person.
It is not "welching" unless you, personally, agree to sign a contract.
There is no analogy between defaulting on a credit card bill that you,
personally, ran up, and defaulting on a debt that was run up by your parents
without your consent - whether or not it was done "for your benefit"!
Nothing morally binds a person to repay a trust except their personal
agreement to do so. Having someone else do expensive things "for your
benefit" creates no moral obligation in the absence of an explicit
agreement.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:23 MST