Compensation and Transworld Personal Identity

The Monist 62 (3):378-391 (1979)
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Abstract

A natural way of viewing compensation is to see it as the restoration of a good or level of well-being which someone would have enjoyed if he had not been adversely affected by the act of another. This view underlies Nozick’s assertion that “something fully compensates … person X for Y’s action A if X is no worse off receiving it, Y having done A, than X would have been without receiving it if Y had not done A”; and it has been held by many others as well. Because the notion that compensation is the restoration of a good which a person would have had but for the act of another is so pervasive, I shall refer to it as the official view of compensation. One noteworthy feature of the official view is the ease with which it allows compensation to be justified in particular cases. If compensation is just the restoration of a good which one would have had if the ordinary course of things had not been disrupted, then to provide a prima facie justification of it, one need only argue that the natural course of things should not have been disrupted in the first place.

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George Sher
Rice University

Citations of this work

Personal Identity and Ethics.David Shoemaker - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Intergenerational justice.Lukas Meyer - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
A Lockean argument for Black reparations.Bernard R. Boxill - 2003 - The Journal of Ethics 7 (1):63-91.
Transgenerational Compensation.George Sher - 2005 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 (2):181-200.

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