This article examines the relationship between Jeremy Waldron’s supersession thesis and compensation. Recently, Waldron has argued that claims for material compensation for the original injustice cannot be superseded. He limits supersession to issues of restitution. Waldron’s supersession thesis is frequently cited by opponents of claims based on historical injustice, so his view of compensation warrants close examination. In our article, we explain the details of Waldron’s ‘simple model’ of compensation, offer an internal critique of it, and try to (...) sympathetically reconstruct it. We contend that a crucial claim about this model does not work; his model would result in many more backward-looking compensatory claims than he realizes. Waldron’s allowing for material compensation claims from historical injustice is in tension with, or incompatible with, his long-expressed view that the spirit of the supersession thesis is that justice should be forward-looking and look to present-day costs. We have argued elsewhere that the abstract possibility that restitution claims may be superseded due to changing circumstances (what we call the ‘supersession thesis proper’) is separable from the question of whether justice has a forward-looking or backward-looking orientation. We argue here that Waldron’s model of compensation can best be made sense of through our distinction of ‘full supersession’ and ‘partial supersession.’ This allows us to show that Waldron’s model relies on a more strongly backward-looking orientation than he seems to endorse in his earlier works on restitution and his most recent article discussing compensation. We conclude by offering external criticisms of Waldron’s model of compensation. (shrink)

Analyzes the historic correlation of injustice and moral judgments. Universalizability in analyzing moral judgments; Role of payment of money in the embodiment of communal remembrance; Symbolic reparation.

The article presents critical examination of theories about collective responsibility attempting to cover responsibility for historic injustices. The author will also try to establish the possibility of collective responsibility for the present members of the group to make recompense for the injustices committed by their ancestors depending on two factors expounded in the article.

It is commonly argued that cultural objects ought to be returned to their place of origin in order to remedy injustices committed in the past. In this paper, it is shown that significant challenges attach to this way of arguing. Although there is considerable intuitive appeal in the idea that if somebody wrongs another person then she ought to compensate for that injustice, the principle is difficult to apply to wrongdoings committed many decades or centuries ago. It is not (...) clear that historic injustices can meaningfully be corrected, or compensated for, and there are several arguments why, even in cases where there is a prima facie moral case for compensation, repatriation might not be a legitimate means of remedy. In order to bring analytical clarity to the issue, this paper discusses the various steps of the argument that must be addressed in order to ground a valid repatriation claim based on historic injustices. (shrink)

A challenging question regarding compensation for historic injustices like slavery or colonialism is whether there is anyone to whom it would be just to ascribe duties of compensation given that allegedly all the perpetrators--the guilty parties--are dead. Some answer this question negatively, arguing it is wrong to ascribe to anyone compensatory duties for injustices committed by others who died multiple generations ago. This objection to compensation for historic injustice, which I call the Historical Responsibility Objection (HRO), takes (...) as its core premises (1) that one must be guilty of wrongdoing with respect to a given historic injustice in order to bear a duty to compensate for the injustice, and (2) that no one alive today can be considered so guilty because no one alive today was alive when the historic injustice occurred. The result is that we cannot ascribe compensatory duties to anyone for any historic injustic. While all arguments I am aware of that refute HRO reject premise (1), this paper sketches a novel refutation of HRO by exploring the implications of rejecting premise (2). Doing so would invoke the state as a collective agent, distinct from its constitutive individual agents, liable to acquire compensatory duties for wrongs it commits that none of its constitutive individuals bear. To the extent that states that are collective agents committed historic injustices, such states have duties to compensate for historic injustice. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of historical injustice in the context of contemporary political theory. It examines the moral consequences of historical injustice for the descendants of both the perpetrators and the victims and outlines the six questions that any plausible defence of the idea of making reparations for past injustices must deal with. It suggests that taking historical injustice seriously is compatible with moral cosmopolitanism and it also helps with the understanding the nature of various kinds (...) of inequalities that persist today. (shrink)

Liberal political philosophers have underestimated the philosophical relevance of historical injustice. For some groups, injustices from the past—particularly surrounding race, ethnicity, or religion—are a source of entrenched social inequality decades or even hundreds of years later. Rawls does not advocate the importance of redressing historical injustice, yet political liberalism needs a principle of historical redress. Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity, which is designed to prevent the leveraging of class privilege, could be paired with a supporting principle (...) of historical redress that would contend with partiality and bias in open access to positions. (shrink)

In this paper we engage with and contribute to the critical project of highlighting the dilemmas that arise from structurally unequal and unjust social, political, and institutional realities when dealing with past wrongs or, better phrased, historic injustices. We emphasise the present-time character of historic injustices. We think that there is a risk of allochronism in discussing historic injustices mainly as wrongs done in the past. This risk consists in making people forget that redressing these injustices is (...) something to be done in an unjust present structured by domination, and that those very past wrongs and harms helped to shape the present-time condition of structural injustice. As the misplacing in the past phenomena that occur in the present and in one’s practical context, allochronism has the effect that people do not feel responsible for those present-time injustices that derive from wrongs done in the past. Our aim is to propose one way of dealing with this risk of misallocating responsibility (and thus accountability), which consists in intersecting the notion of historic injustices with the notion of coloniality. After showing how an approach oriented by the notion of coloniality helps surmount the negative effects of allochronism and provides a significant complement to a structural approach to injustice (Sect. ‘ Coloniality and Responsibility for Justice ’), we turn to Frantz Fanon (Sect. ‘ Fanon ’) and José Carlos Mariátegui (Sect. ‘ Mariátegui ’) to illustrate the relationship between coloniality and justice and how it is possible to render a construal of ‘past wrongs’ without losing sight of their pervasiveness in the present time. (shrink)

Some claim slavery did not harm the descendants of slaves since, without slavery, its descendants would never have been born and a life worth living, even one including the subsequent harms of past slavery, is preferable to never having been born at all. This creates a classic puzzle known as the non-identity argument, applied to reject the validity of claims for historic justice based on harms to descendants of victims of historic wrongs: since descendants are never harmed by (...) historic wrongs, they have no right to rectification. This conclusion is unintuitive. This article explains the nature of harm involved in historic injustice, overcoming the hurdle the non-identity argument poses to historic justice claims. Historic injustice and the harms it generates are best understood as group harms. Claims for historic justice can be grounded in harms currently living individuals suffer as a function of the harms their group or community currently suffers as a consequence of historic wrongs. One form of harm, constitutive harm, differs from the aggregative account of harm assumed by the non-identity argument and is immune to it. It is the type of harm people suffer as members of certain historically wronged groups and communities. Therefore, the constitutive harm people suffer in cases of historic injustice may serve as a basis for justifying claims for historic justice. (shrink)

What is it to do justice to the absent victims of past injustice, given the distance that separates us from them? Grounded in political theory and guided by the literature on historical justice, W. James Booth restores the dead to their central place at the heart of our understanding of why and how to deal with past injustice. Testimonies and accounts from the race war in the United States, the Holocaust, post-apartheid South Africa, Argentina's Dirty War and the (...) conflict in Northern Ireland help advance and defend Booth's claim that caring for the dead is a central part of addressing past injustice. Memory, Historic Injustice, and Responsibility is an insightful and original book on the relationship of past and present in thinking about what it means to do justice. A valuable addition to the currently available literature on historical justice, the volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, philosophy, history, and law. (shrink)

When states are required to compensate victim groups for the historic wrongs they have committed, how should the compensation due be calculated? It seems that alongside the counterfactual world in which the wrongdoing never occurred, we should also consider the counterfactual world in which the wrongdoing has occurred, but the victims have responded to it in a prudent way. Under tort law, the damages a victim can claim are reduced if they are judged to have been contributorily negligent, thereby (...) exacerbating the harm they have suffered. The paper considers four reasons why victim groups could not be expected to respond collectively to injustice in a way that outsiders might judge to be prudent. 1. The wrongdoing has destroyed their capacity to act as a group agent. 2. The wrongdoing has inflicted psychological traumas that lead them to make poor decisions. 3. They would need to violate a moral norm that is deeply embedded in their culture. 4. They would need to adopt policies that risk inflicting severe injustice on an internal minority. In many instances of historic injustice, one or more of these reasons apply. So although in principle victims’ behaviour is relevant when compensation is being calculated, we must be very cautious in using that doctrine to assess real cases. (shrink)

I argue that changes in the numerical identity of groups do not necessarily speak in favour of the supersession of some historical injustice. I contend that the correlativity between the perpetrator and the victim of injustices is not broken when the identity of groups changes. I develop this argument by considering indigenous people's claims in Argentina for the injustices suffered during the Conquest of the Desert. I argue that present claimants do not need to be part of the same (...) entity whose members suffered injustices many years ago. For identifying the proper recipients of reparation, all that is necessary is that the group who suffered the historical injustice under consideration has survived into the present. I also support a view upon which present living members of a certain group have reasons to redress those injustices perpetrated by their predecessors if they are relevantly connected with each other. In particular, by relying on the notion of collective inheritance, I argue that if present-day members of a certain group claim that they are the continuation of the group whose past members bequeathed them certain goods, they cannot consistently reject such a membership when the very same people legated them certain evils. (shrink)

This article distinguishes historical ills and historical injustices. It conceives of the latter as legalised natural crimes; committed by morally competent agents. A natural crime consists in the deliberate violation of a natural right. 'Legalised' means that the natural crime must be prescribed; permitted or tolerated by the legal system. I advocate an approach which assesses moral competence on the basis of an exposedness criterion; that is: a historical agent must not be blamed for failing to see the right moral (...) reasons if his epoch and social world is utterly unacquainted with these reasons. However; an appropriate application of the exposedness criterion should take social factors and psychological mechanisms into account that obstruct access to the right reasons. I state a number of factors that seem to be auspicious for the development of moral competence. (shrink)

Emotions situate actors in relationships and shape their social interactions. Culture defines both the qualities of individual identity and the constitution of social groups with distinctive values and practices. Emotions, then, are necessarily experienced and acted upon in culturally inflected forms that define not only the conventions of their articulation through individual and collective action, but also the very words that name them. This article develops theoretical arguments to support these claims and illustrates their application in a description of differing (...) emotional repertoires, and their consequences, in Aotearoa New Zealand. The effects of resentment and shame in an ethnic politics of rights and antidiscrimination law demonstrate that context is central to a nuanced understanding of how law and emotions connect in the practicalities of enforcing the protections of anti-discrimination law. (shrink)

In societies that have failed to confront past injustice, the most common justifications for the inclusion of history education within the school curriculum invoke the idea that those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it; or they appeal to goals such as reconciliation, or to the importance of recognizing and morally redressing the harm done to victims. These justifications are all sound and important. However, they must be supplemented with a justification of a different kind, (...) one that appeals to a different kind of value, namely that of personal and political autonomy. When historical injustice is left unaddressed in school, so this paper argues, all children and adolescents are wronged, including those who were not involved in, or were directly affected by, past injustice. This is not simply because as a result they run the risk of repeating, or of being the victims of, behavior that caused past violence; or because without history education the harm done to their predecessors is left unacknowledged. They are wronged because ignorance of past injustice curtails the full exercise of their autonomous agency. It does so by denying them access to information that is crucial for evaluating their values and commitments. History education in schools can avoid this scenario, promoting autonomy instead. (shrink)

This article considers the question of the responsibility that present day generations bear as a result of the actions of their ancestors. Is it morally significant that we share a national identity with those responsible for the perpetration of historic injustice? The article argues that we can be guilty of wrongdoing stemming from past wrongdoing if we are members of nations that are responsible for an ongoing failure to fulfil rectificatory duties. This rests upon three claims: that the (...) failure to fulfil rectificatory duties is unjust; that nations can bear collective responsibility for the actions of their leaders; and that nations are comprised of overlapping generations rather than successive generations. The claim that present day parties should apologise for historic injustice is then considered, and it is argued that such an apology is best understood in relation to an ongoing failure to fulfil rectificatory duties. (shrink)

This article argues against privileging the expectations of settlers over those of dispossessed peoples. I assume in this article that historical rights to occupancy do not persist through all changes in circumstances, but a theory of justice should reduce perverse incentives to unjustly settle on land in hopes of legitimating occupancy. Margaret Moore, in her 2015 book, A Political Theory of Territory, tries to balance these intuitions through an argument based on legitimate expectations. I argue that Moore’s attempt to reduce (...) perverse incentives (through expectation-altering institutional design) fails. Moore unduly privileges settler expectations, especially over those of indigenous peoples. I criticize United States court decisions resurrecting the expectations of past settlers in the allotment era (which share structural features with Moore’s arguments). Lastly, distinguishing between ‘final’ supersession of historical injustice through changing circumstances, and ‘dormant’ supersession, shows how indigenous claims to land and jurisdiction may revive. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is often celebrated and endorsed because of its promise to include, empower, and emancipate otherwise oppressed and excluded social groups through securing their voice and granting them impact in reasoned public deliberation. This article explores the ability of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy to accommodate the demands of historically excluded social groups in democratic plural societies. It argues that the inclusive, transformative, and empowering potential of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy falters when confronted with particular types of historical (...) injustices. It falters because it pays little attention to the historical dimension of injustices and the demands to which it gives rise. The historical dimension of longstanding injustices, it is argued, gives rise to a set of distinctive demands, such as collective memory of exclusion, acknowledgement of historical injustices, taking responsibility, and offering apology and reparations for causing these injustices, which go beyond the type of democratic inclusion that is often offered by deliberative democracy. Yet, the solution is not to abandon the model of deliberative democracy. Quite the contrary, it remains a valuable basis for forward-looking political decision making. The article concludes that in order to achieve inclusive, empowering and transformative deliberation in consolidated democracies that have experienced historical injustices, the politics of reconciliation is indispensable. (shrink)

There are two main sources of theoretical doubt regarding the validity of claims for reparation: the questions arising from the non-identity problem and those arising from the supersession thesis. Neither of them significantly undermines the Palestinian refugees’ claims to reparations and a right of return.

This article explores the role of photography in the global work of justice by way of a case study. It focuses on the publication, in December 2001, of a set of photographs by the Mexican newsweekly Proceso, depicting events that occurred in Mexico City on 2 October 1968. Taken at the culmination of a summer of student activism, when the military opened fire on student demonstrators and bystanders, the published photographs showed previously hidden scenes of detention and torture. Locating the (...) publication of these photographs in relation to the historical processes of democratic reform in Mexico, the article aims to contribute to debates regarding the agency of photographic images in the visual politics of humanitarianism, shifting the emphasis away from questions of whether photographs work, to explore instead how they work. In particular, it focuses on the circumstances that authorized the simultaneous entry of the photographs of 1968 into the Mexican and international media spheres, and seeks to illuminate broader questions regarding their specifically photographic mode of address and the intersection between the national settings in which human rights abuses take place and testimonial appeals addressed to a global imagined community. (shrink)

Driven by a sharp increase in claims for reparations, reparative justice has become a topic of academic debate. To some extent this debate has been marred by a failure to realize the complexity of reparative justice. In this essay we try to amend this shortcoming. We do this by developing a taxonomy of different kinds of wrongs that can underwrite claims to reparations. We identify four kinds of wrongs: entitlement violations, unjust exclusions from an otherwise acceptable system of entitlements, and (...) two kinds where a social practice systematically fails to embody an acceptable system of entitlements. In deliberation about what is required to repair a historical injustice the weight of backward- and forward-looking considerations is a function of the distinctive features of the injustice in question. Hence, the first step in adjudicating claims for reparation is to identify what kind of wrong the claim arises from. From the taxonomy of wrongs we are thus able to construct what we call the Field of Reparative Justice, which illustrates how the structure of deliberation for reparative justice tracks the distinctive features of different kinds of wrongs. (shrink)

This paper makes the case for amnesty of irregular migrants by reflecting on the conditions under which a wrong that is done in the past can be considered superseded. It explores the relation between historical injustice and irregular migration and suggests that we should hold states to the same stringent standards of compliance with just norms that they apply to the assessment of the moral conduct of individual migrants. It concludes that those standards ought to orient migrants and citizens’ (...) moral assessment of how their states handle questions of irregular migration and to inform political initiatives compatible with these moral assessments. (shrink)

The debate concerning the legitimacy of awarding reparations for historical injustices focuses on the issue of finding a proper moral justification for granting reparations to the descendants of the victims of injustices which took place in the remote past. Regarding the case of Romanian communism as a more recent injustice, and analyzing the moral problems entailed by this historical lapse, within this paper I argue that overcoming such a legacy cannot be carried out, as in the case of historical (...) injustices situated more remotely in time, through the means of selective reparations, such as restitutions or compensations. For, even though they are justified from the perspective of rectificatory justice, selective reparations do not fulfill the requirements of social justice. Rather, I argue that the fall of the Romanian communist regime should have been followed by an equal distribution of all properties illegitimately seized by the state, to all adult Romanian citizens at that time, in order to attain the imperative of equal distribution of property among all citizens. The equal distribution thesis is the only way through which the Romanian society could have complied, at that moment of political and social renewal, with the requirements of justice. I also aim at explaining why other principles of justice, which either have or could have been implemented, cannot be properly justified. Finally, I analyze two main objections which could be invoked against my thesis, namely the economic efficiency objection and the legal realist objection. (shrink)

This chapter develops an alternative defence of the climate debt claim via a broader discussion of how historical wrongdoing concerning natural resources could be relevant to climate justice. It first examines climate change as a problem of global justice, arguing that theorists should consider why some groups are more vulnerable to climate impacts than others and to what extent unequal vulnerability could be a result of historical injustice. Focusing on colonial resource exploitation as a significant example of natural resource (...) injustice, it is argued that the legacies of such exploitation will likely be a significant contributor to present-day vulnerability in countries that have since gained formal independence. Such legacies have important implications for our understanding of climate vulnerability; render some climate duties a matter of rectificatory justice, vindicating the climate debt claim; and provide an important lesson in how similar wrongs could be perpetrated through future climate policies. (shrink)

On the basis of Waldron’s supersession thesis, this article discusses the historical injustice argument and contends that in order to evaluate moral claims for restitution of territorial titles it is important to consider the legitimate expectations of citizens that have been formed historically and have been sanctioned by the state through institutional mechanisms of stabilization of expectations. The legitimate expectations of citizens form normative demands that cannot be disregarded when rectifying historical injustices. In his arguments in favour of the (...) supersession thesis, Waldron does not give sufficient attention to the concept of ‘legitimate expectation’, even though the thesis is reinforced by this reference. Unlike exclusively restitutive and rectificatory measures, this paper relies on _present considerations_ of the consequences of past injustices, all within the framework of a theory of justice. In this sense, compensation deals with the past, but in a forward-looking way. (shrink)

‘Heritage’ is a concept that often carries significant normative weight in moral and political argument. In this article, I present and critique a prevalent conception according to which heritage must have a positive valence. I argue that this view of heritage leads to two moral problems: Disowning Injustice and Embracing Injustice. In response, I argue for an alternative conception of heritage that promises superior moral and political consequences. In particular, this alternative jettisons the traditional focus on heritage as (...) a primarily positive relationship to the past, and thus offers resources for coming to terms with histories of injustice. (shrink)

Injustices of the past cast a shadow on the present. They are the root cause of much harm, the source of enmity, and increasingly in recent times, the focus of demands for reparation. In this groundbreaking philosophical investigation, Janna Thompson examines the problems raised by reparative demands and puts forward a theory of reparation for historical injustices. The book argues that the problems posed by historical injustices are best resolved by a reconciliatory view of reparative justice and an approach that (...) explains how people acquire intergenerational responsibilities and entitlements. It ranges in its subject matter from the claims of indigenous people to land stolen from their ancestors to the growing movement for reparations for slavery. The book provides an original and convincing answer to the questions of how citizens can have reparative responsibilities for wrongs committed before they were born, and why descendants of victims may be entitled to compensation for historical injustices such as slavery. It also explains how members of nations can make recompense for injustices of the past without ignoring the inequities of the present.Taking Responsibility for the Past is a significant contribution to philosophical and legal debates about reparative justice, and at the same time an accessible and thought-provoking book for general readers. (shrink)

The relationship between history and justice traditionally has been dominated by the idea of the past as distant or absent . This ambiguous ontological status makes it very difficult to situate the often-felt “duty to remember” or obligation to “do justice to the past” in that past itself, and this has led philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Keith Jenkins to plead against an “obsession” with history in favor of an ethics aimed at the present. History’s ability to contribute to the (...) quest for justice, as a result, often seems very restricted or even nonexistent. The introduction of the “presence”-paradigm in historiography can potentially alter this relation between history and justice. However, to do so it should be conceived in such a way that it offers a fundamental critique of the metaphysical dichotomy between the present and the absent and the underlying concept of time that supports this dichotomy. The “presence”-paradigm can be emancipatory and productive only if presence and absence are not perceived as absolute dichotomies. In the first part of this article I elaborate on the influence that the present/absent dichotomy has on the notion of justice by introducing a conceptual contrast between what I will call the “time of jurisdiction” and the “time of history.” The second part of the article focuses on the way certain aspects of the dominant Western chronosophy reinforce the present/absent dichotomy and thereby prevent us from thoroughly exploring the ambiguous but often very problematic presence of the past. Throughout the article I refer to the relatively recent phenomenon of truth commissions and the context of transitional justice to discuss some challenges for the “presence”-paradigm. (shrink)

This paper discusses the pluralist theory of reparations for historical injustice offered by Daniel Butt (2021). Butt attempts to vindicate purely past-regarding corrective duties in response to Alasia Nuti’s historical-structural model of reparations. I agree with Butt that reparative justice requires both past-regarding and future-looking structural duties. And I agree with him that Nuti’s model leaves out purely past-regarding duties. I argue, however, that Butt does not offer a genuinely pluralist account. I present minimal necessary conditions for past-regarding (corrective) (...) justice and demonstrate that the past-regarding duties Butt advocates do not meet these conditions. The past-regarding duties Butt offers collapse into the kinds of distributive (structural) duties from which he attempts to separate them. Yet, I suggest these shortcomings are instructive and sketch a path forward for a genuinely pluralist account of reparations. A genuinely pluralist account must follow this path in order to vindicate the intuitions that motivate both past-regarding duties and the structural injustice model. (shrink)

In discussions about responsibility for climate change, it is often suggested that the historical use of natural resources is in some way relevant to our current attempts to address this problem fairly. In particular, both theorists and actors in the public realm have argued that historical high-emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs) – or the beneficiaries of those emissions – are in possession of some form of debt, deriving from their overuse of a natural resource that should have been shared more (...) equitably. These accounts of what might be termed ‘natural debt’ generally focus on one particular natural resource (global GHG sink capacity); invoke a principle of justice by which rights to consume this resource should have been allocated (most commonly, equal per capita shares); and then argue that historical violations of this principle give rise to certain rectificatory duties in the present (generally, duties on the part of those who have historically consumed an excessive amount of the world’s GHG sink capacity, or who have benefitted from such excess consumption, to offer some form of compensation to those who have not – such compensation usually taking the form of emission credits or cash). Though many seem to find it intuitively plausible that historical high-emissions have incurred some form of debt, significant challenges arise in rendering the concept of natural debt both coherent and defensible. Such problems are not, however, my focus in this piece. Instead, I here suggest that discussions about historical responsibility for climate change commonly fail to recognise certain other past injustices concerning natural resources that appear to hold contemporary relevance. In particular, I argue that it is not just the unequal consumption of global GHG sink capacity that may be of moral significance here; but also the way in which the world’s resources have more generally been governed. (shrink)