Few people would be as fond of karma as I was. It's "practically Newtonian": what goes around, comes around. And we all like to believe the world is fair. Even Bénabou and Tirole agree. Karma extends this idea to a multiple lifetimes with reincarnation setting. In every lifetime, you accumulate points for doing good things and get negative points for anything that makes God frown. The higher your score, the better your next life will be. It's quite an elegant system: it ensures that one has the will to live a decent life even when one is about to die.
Lately, however, I've been having some misgivings. Or perhaps I should call them reasonable doubts. As I get older, it's a bit difficult for me to continue to believe that someone keeps score so fastidiously for the whole world's population. Is ignorance adequate grounds for arguing innocence? Do you need to create a good score for moksha too or is it based on seniority? If the latter is true, then everyone who spent all their lives amassing good karma would presumably want to spend all of it on a wonderfully hedonistic life in the last time period. Or at least bequeath it to the subsequent generation. How do inheritance laws work with karma? How does one know which time period is the last one before attaining moksha?
Isn't it enough to have to chase so many things in one lifetime without the additional worry of topping the karma charts across lifetimes?
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