The Second Abolition. Family Chapter: Ending Relational Servitude through Responsibility-Based Family Law

Conflicts in intimate and family relationships do not arise from love itself but from an institutional architecture of unlimited liability built around love. Compulsory marital property pooling, gender-skewed childcare burdens, non-market obligations with no definable limits, inheritance outcomes contingent on death order, and emotionally driven capital transfers collectively turn intimacy into a mechanism of exploitation, emotional coercion, and structural impoverishment—harms borne disproportionately by women and debt-dependent middle-class households [1][8]. This paper proposes a Responsibility-Based Family Law grounded in a single foundational axiom: intergenerational responsibility. Adults cannot impose unbounded obligations on spouses, partners, or future generations; nor may they dissipate inherited potential through capital gifts or non-market transfers that exceed their current disposable income. All further rules follow directly from this axiom. (1) Personhood and Independence Rule establishes full economic separateness for spouses and restores minors’ economic personhood through fiduciary accounts governed exclusively by the child’s best interest [9]. (2) Limit-Based Rule for Non-Market Transfers restricts all non-market exchanges and all forms of gifting—including charitable transfers—to surplus current income, prohibiting any impact on existing assets, future income, or intergenerational entitlements. Even when directed toward genuinely beneficial projects, capital gifting remains an irresponsible act, since every legitimate purpose of such transfers can be fulfilled through investment rather than through responsibility-free asset displacement [10]. (3) Predictable Succession Rule abolishes testamentary freedom and replaces death-sequence inheritance with a deterministic lineage algorithm, ensuring that wealth flows through stable, non-manipulable kinship paths independent of marriage status or timing of death [11]. (4) Disclosure and Pre-Arbitration Rule for Major Voluntary Life Decisions requires debtors to disclose prospective income-reducing choices and allows debtor-initiated pre-arbitration, making relationally induced sacrifices economically transparent and preventing the covert coercion that disproportionately harms middle-income credit-dependent individuals [12]. Together, these rules eliminate unlimited liability from the most intimate sphere of life. Marriage exits the legal system and returns to cultural custom; childcare becomes a compensated fiduciary function; non-market labor can no longer be weaponized into debt claims; inheritance becomes mathematically predictable; and relational coercion loses its economic power. Responsibility-Based Family Law thus completes the liberation trajectory begun by the abolition of bodily slavery and continued by the abolition of economic slavery under modern limited-liability institutions. It constitutes the family chapter of a “Second Abolition”, ending relational servitude and restoring autonomy where human vulnerability is greatest [13].