Arguments for slavery reparations have fallen out of favor even as reparations for other forms of racial injustice are taken more seriously. This retreat is unsurprising, as arguments for slavery reparations often rely on two normatively irregular claims: that reparations are owed to the dead (as opposed to, say, their living heirs), and that the present generation inherits an as yet unrequited guilt from past generations. Outside of some strands of Black thought and activism on slavery reparations, these claims are (...) widely rejected. I develop an argument for slavery reparations around those foundational claims by adopting the normative framework of Immanuel Kant. On what I call the Basic Argument for slavery reparations, the application of Kant’s retributivist theory of punishment to slavery justifies reparations as a kind of proportional punishment for slavery. I also show that Kant’s philosophy offers reparations theorists resources to overcome several contemporary objections to slavery reparations. (shrink)

Although genocide—a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves—remains a sickeningly frequent phenomenon in the twenty‐first century, it is not an immutable aspect of the human condition. Genocide is a choice, and the civilized world must choose its demise. The unique experience of American Indians—a group subjected to genocide in the process of the creation and expansion of the United States—presents a (...) logical heuristic through which to assess more broadly the requirements of redress for historical episodes of genocide and, even more important, the means to prevent its recurrence. (shrink)