What do we do when siblings fight over an inheritance?

The histories say that when I was young and my father died, my mother asked me to share his estate with my sister, and that I gave her the whole of it, since I was content with what came to me from my grandfather. I do not tell you this so that you will do the same. I tell you because I have never once regretted it, and I have regretted many other things.nnIn my private notes I often reminded myself how short everything is. Alexander and his mule driver both died, and both went to the same place. The house you are fighting over will pass to strangers. The money will be spent. The people who argued over it will be forgotten, and so will those who remember them. What remains, while you are alive, is the way you behaved.nnSo set the fight in that light. Your brother or sister is one of very few people who share your memories of your parents. When the quarrel is over and the money is gone, that will still be true, or it will have been destroyed. Which do you want?nnI am not telling you to give in to unfairness. Justice matters, and you may need to insist on it. But insist calmly, without contempt, as someone who will have to live with their own conduct for the rest of their life. Ask what your parent would have wanted to see. Then do the thing you would be glad, on your last day, to have done.

I came to think that justice is not a natural feeling, like affection or pity, but an invention, and a very useful one. If every person cared for everyone else as much as for themselves, or if there were so much of everything that no one ever wanted for anything, there would be no need for rules about property at all. Justice exists because goods are scarce and our generosity is limited. It is a remedy for those two facts.nnA family is the place where generosity normally runs strongest, and while your parent was alive, the rules may hardly have been needed. Now the person who held things together is gone, the goods are divided, and the limited generosity of grown siblings is all that remains. Of course you are fighting. Not because you are bad people, but because the conditions that make justice necessary have arrived suddenly in a place that was used to doing without it.nnSo the remedy is the one that has always worked: clear, impartial rules, agreed in advance and applied evenly. Read the will. Get a fair valuation. Agree on a method of division before you argue about particular items, by lot, by turns, by an independent person. Rules feel cold in a family, but they protect the warmth that is left.nnI was a younger son myself and inherited very little. I learned that feelings about fairness are strong and not always reasonable. Give them a fair procedure to rest on.

A keeper of monkeys was handing out chestnuts. He said: three in the morning and four in the evening. The monkeys were furious. So he said: very well, four in the morning and three in the evening. The monkeys were delighted. Nothing had changed. The total was the same. Only the arrangement was different, and their joy and their anger came from that alone.nnI tell this story because so many quarrels are like it. People fight not over the amount, but over the order, the shape, who gets the clock and who gets the ring, who was asked first, which name appears where. They mistake a matter of form for a matter of substance, and they wound each other over it.nnThe sage, I said, lets right and wrong come to rest in a natural balance. He walks two roads at once: he does not insist on his own way, and he does not give up his own way. He finds the arrangement in which everyone can be content.nnSo look at your quarrel and ask, honestly, whether it is three and four or four and three. If the total is fair, let the others have the shape they want. It costs you nothing and it may save your family. If the total itself is unfair, that is another matter, and you may need to speak. But most inheritance quarrels, I suspect, are about chestnuts in the morning.