historical injustice

historical injustice, past moral wrong committed by previously living people that has a lasting impact on the well-being of currently living people. Claims to material reparations for historical injustices are typically based on the nature of the lasting impact, and claims to symbolic restitution are often grounded on the moral quality of the wrongs committed. This article considers the theoretical underpinnings of arguments about reparations, responsibility for past injustices, and the rights of those wronged.

The lasting impact of historical injustices

Individuals can make claims to compensation for harms they have suffered. According to the most-common interpretation of harm, individuals can be understood to be fully compensated for an act or policy when they are as well off as they would be if the act had not been carried out. For example, in the United States, have present-day descendants of slaves been harmed as a result of the injustices suffered by their ancestors under this interpretation of harm? The present-day descendants’ existence is the product of unbroken genealogical chains that stretch from the forced removal of their ancestors from Africa to their enslavement in America, all points of which are (very likely) necessary conditions for the descenants’ having come into existence at all. Had their ancestors not been enslaved, they would most likely not exist; those descendants, it can therefore be argued, cannot be said to have been harmed by the enslavement of their ancestors. Also, they would not have been better off had their ancestors not been badly wronged. Thus, we cannot rely upon that interpretation of harm and its accompanying interpretation of compensation to ground the claim that present-day descendants of slaves have been harmed and should be compensated. To rely on those interpretations would imply the nonexistence of the people claiming compensation. This is the so-called nonidentity problem as it arises in the context of providing measures of compensation to indirect victims of historical injustice.

One way to respond to that problem is to allow for a notion of harm that is independent of identity. Under that interpretation of harm, individuals can be considered to be fully compensated for an act or policy (or event) if they do not fall below a specified standard at a particular time. Whether descendants of slaves have been harmed as a result of the way their ancestors were treated depends, by that thinking, upon whether the way the ancestors were treated has led to their descendants’ falling below the specified standard of well-being. However, whether that is the case will turn on those individuals’ current state of well-being.

Injustices committed against people in the past may not give rise to claims to reparations today if such claims can be understood to presuppose an indefensible interpretation of property entitlements. The American philosophers David Lyons and Jeremy Waldron argued against the claim that once we acquire entitlements, they continue until we transfer or relinquish them. They dismissed that claim as indefensible, because there are reasons of principle for holding that entitlements and rights are sensitive to the passage of time and changes of circumstances. Generally speaking, entitlements are sensitive to background circumstances, and they are vulnerable to prescription.

Further, if legitimate entitlement is sensitive to changes in background circumstances, it is possible that the ongoing effect of an illegitimate acquisition and, more generally, of unjust violations of the rights of others can become legitimate when circumstances change. That is what is meant by the thesis that historical injustices may be superseded. However, even if supersession of injustice is possible, the claim that it has occurred in any given situation depends on two claims: it must be determined (1) what circumstances would have to change to make supersession possible and (2) that those circumstances have, in fact, changed.

The moral status of past victims

Even if the nonidentity problem may exclude the possibility of currently living people being indirect victims of past injustice or if the historical injustice under consideration may have been superseded, it is impossible to deny that people in the past were wronged. What, then, is owed to past victims of historical injustices? One could defend the claim that we are obliged to those victims by attributing rights to them. Alternatively, one could attempt to show that currently living people can have duties toward deceased persons even if it is assumed that deceased persons cannot be bearers of rights today. The American political philosopher Joel Feinberg thus argued for the possibility of posthumous harm: the interests of people while alive can be harmed with respect to posthumous states of affairs. That view requires the harm to have occurred before the death of the person, which presupposes a deterministic understanding of the occurrence of the harmful event. Others have argued that currently living people can stand under imperfect duties toward dead people without there being correlative rights of the deceased people. Especially with respect to dead victims of historical injustice, currently living people might be said to stand under a general imperfect duty to bring about the posthumous reputation that people deserve. Commemorative acts of symbolic reparation—for example, a day of remembrance—can be understood as aiming to fulfill that duty toward dead victims of injustice.

Two conditions can encourage acceptance of that duty. First, individuals will accept the duty of providing measures of symbolic restitution only if, as members of ongoing societies, they can identify with the public inheritance of their society in such a way that they will want to respond to what they consider inherited public evils by participating in public acts of symbolic reparation. Second, if transgenerational legal persons (usually states) in whose name previous members committed crimes against others can be understood to accept an obligation to provide indirect victims with compensation, currently living people who are members of such entities can accept a (civic) duty to support their legal person in carrying out its policies of reparation.