Historic Injustice

Question 1

What does Butt (2009) say about forward looking approaches?

Answer 1

Forward-looking approaches may result in only a limited recognition of the ethical significance of past interaction and may resist the rectification of historic injustice that do not have effects on people living today, as for these approaches the significance of historic distributions lies in the way in which they contribute towards individuals’ legitimate expectations today so there may be no reason to seek to restore the earlier distribution outside of its relation to the current unjust distribution.

Question 2

In what ways, according to Butt (2009) are current generations linked to past wrongdoings of their political communities?

Answer 2

Three ways in which current generations within particular political communities may be linked, in a morally relevant way to past wrongdoing:
- Benefit: When one community is benefiting, and another is disadvantaged, as a result of the automatic effects of an act of historic injustice
- Entitlement: when one community has possession of property to which another is morally entitled
- Responsibility: When one community is responsible for an ongoing injustice in relation to another community, understood in terms of an ongoing failure to fulfil rectificatory duties over time.

My claim is that, taken together, these morally relevant forms of connection mean that those living in the developed world possess significant rectificatory duties to many of those in less developed countries. They are complementary but distinct bases for modern day rectificatory duties.

Question 3

What case does Nehisi-Coates (2014) make for reparations?

Answer 3

Nehisi-Coates points out the way in which Black people in the US remain handicapped both by a lack of wealth and a restricted choice of neighbourhood that is the result of a long history of slavery, racist laws and policies, and social structures

For example, black people were excluded from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage by redlining which “went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism”.

Nehisi-Coates emphasises how governmental embrace of segregation combined with the racism of white citizens to worsen effects when white neighbourhoods formed block associations for the purpose of enforcing segregation, turned to racial violence when government and private banks were not effective enough, and fled the neighbourhood when this failed in what Nehisi-Coates describes as a “triumph of social engineering”

In the present, Chicago’s impoverished black neighbourhoods remain poor to the extent that they are “ecologically distinct”

Reparations that redistributed wealth would seek to close the wealth gap which illustrates the enduring legacy of a history of treating black people as sub-citizens, and sub-humans.

Reparations would involve a national reckoning that would lead to a spiritual renewal; the history of racial injustice permeates many issues such as healthcare, education, and housing which needs to be dealt with

Question 4

How does Lu describe structural injustice and how, according to Lu (2011) is colonialism a structural injustice?

Answer 4

Structural injustices pervert systems of norms, legitimizing individual wrongdoing.

Coloniser states actions were typically not aberrant violations of international norms, customs, or laws; they happened against unjust baselines.

Most cases of social and political injustice can be analysed on the two levels of the direct causal relationship between individual agents and the injustice, and the social structural processed that enable/encourage this wrongdoing.

According to a structural approach, moral responsibility for wrongful acts can certainly be attributed to the colonizing state and culpable individuals, but some share of historical responsibility should also be attributed to all states, especially the dominant ones, that contributed to perpetuating the unjust social structures of a colonial international system.

Question 5

Why does a structural analysis of colonial injustice not support a simplistic division of colonizers and colonized into perpetrator and victim roles, according to Lu (2011)?

Answer 5

Among colonized populations, individuals and groups occupy different social positions in the structure of colonial domination, and some may use their relatively privileged position and resources to dominate others and may even derive some benefits from participation in colonial enterprises at the expense of their more socially vulnerable compatriots. Another hallmark of structural injustice, then, is its propensity to produce victim-perpetrators: those in colonial positions of subordination (such as all Korean colonial subjects) nevertheless still occupied different social positions that enabled some (for example, private Korean entrepreneurs engaged in the commercial sex industry or human trafficking) to derive benefits at the expense of their more socially vulnerable compatriots (such as impoverished Korean women and girls).

Question 6

Who should be held responsible for structural injustice, according to Lu (2014)?

Answer 6

A structural analysis reveals that the international society of states, in enacting through its rules, customs and practices a colonial international system, bears some historical responsibility for the unjust international social structures that enabled state wrongdoing.

Acknowledging colonial injustices as structural injustices generates a “political responsibility” to effect structural reforms.

Argues, with Young, that non-culpable agents who contribute to the production of unjust structural conditions bear political responsibility to reform their social practices so that they produce more just outcomes.

The justness of the outcomes or social conditions that result from structural reform must include the elimination of social disadvantages that identifiable victims may suffer because of past injustice.

While legal changes can go a long way toward establishing just social conditions, reparations for victims who continue to experience disadvantages resulting from past structural injustices is also necessary for realizing, in practice, the patterns of social relations that define a just international society. In a political responsibility framework, the ground for providing reparations to victims is not that contemporary agents are liable in amorally culpable way for historical colonial injustices. Rather, contemporary agents bear political responsibility to correct inherited structural injustices, and reparative measures that enable former victims to exercise effective political and social agency constitute one requirement for social structures to be considered just.

Question 7

Why should we have backward-looking justifications according to McKeown (2021)?

Answer 7

McKeown argues that there is value in making backward looking reparations claims based on state liability, drawing on the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM’s) 10-Point Plan for reparations to illustrate how forward and backward-looking reparation demands can be made with solely backward-looking justifications

There is a moral case that reparations are owed based solely on historical injustices themselves because there were crimes against humanity committed.

Retaining focus on past ensures that the particular liability and obligations of particular states and agents are recognised and prevents governments from evading their outstanding historical reparative obligations by ‘focusing on the future’.

Acknowledging backwards-looking liability will be to listen to the claims of the communities who have suffered the consequences of the injustices and to recognise the wrongs committed.

There can be backward-looking justifications for forward-looking reparations; there are backward-looking justifications for some forward-looking demands in the 10-point CARICOM reparation plan.

Question 8

What is McKeown’s (2021) response to the counterfactual problem?

Answer 8

Claims for reparations on backward-looking principles do not necessarily seek restoration to a state prior to the injustice or to a state that would have been had the injustice not occurred. For example, the Caribbean Community 10-Point Plan for reparation, which according to McKeown has “fundamentally backward-looking” justifications for reparations as the justifications are based on the wrongs done in the past, makes claims which do not aim to redistribute resources to restore Caribbean peoples to where they would have been had the crimes against them not been committed.

Question 9

Why, according to McKeown (2021) can states be held liable?

Answer 9

Since states can be seen as morally responsible agents because they are more than the sum of their constituent members, they have internal decision-making structure, they have identities over time, and the group is self-asserting, they can be capable of bearing responsibilities and can reason and take purposeful action

Question 10

What does McKeown (2021) say about the structural injustice model?

Answer 10

The structural injustice approach reveals the limitations of CARICOM’s proposal as the state-to-CARICOM approach occludes the responsibility of other actors that might bear reparative responsibilities, including bystander states, corporations, and collaborators with slavery within victim states.

But the structural injustice view not only exposes the limitations of CARICOM’s plan, I argue it also provides resources for improving it. It exposes the need to tackle structural injustice in the international order that maintains the marginalisation of the region.

The social connection model approach does not claim that descendants of slave owners, or all white people, are somehow guilty for living off the inheritance of unjustly acquired wealth. European citizens cannot be held responsible on the liability model, because it is not reasonable to claim that they personally bear liability for the crimes committed; they were not alive at the time of the crimes and played no role in them. However, on the social connection model, European citizens’ connection to persisting structural injustice generates political responsibility to try to overcome it. Thus, European states bear backward-looking liability for reconciling their past transgressions. On my view, the responsibility to pay for this burden can be transferred to citizens in the way that all burdens acquired by the state transfer to citizens, whether or not the state met our contemporary standards of legitimacy at the time. If this justification is rejected, it can still be argued that contemporary European citizens share a forward-looking political responsibility to support reparations on the grounds that they are connected to structural injustice in the Caribbean and therefore share political responsibility to create a better present and future in the region.

Question 11

Why, according to Nuti (2019) should we “de-termporalise injustice”?

Answer 11

Nuti argues for de-temporalising injustice– that is, refusing to separate, in certain cases, the past from the present. Ongoing injustices should be theoretically and normatively conceptualised as the reproduction of unjust history under new circumstances and through changes.

Unjust history should normatively matter in considerations about justice because injustices are reproduced over time, and unjust history shapes the background conditions in which present injustices occur and relations between agents are established in the present. This means that some ongoing injustices should be theoretically and normatively conceptualised as the reproduction of unjust history under new circumstances and through changes, as opposed to being seen as separate from the past

Question 12

What should the process of redress look like, according to Nuti (2019)?

Answer 12

Three required (yet not exhaustive) forms of interventions that should be undertaken in the process of redress: reparations, transformative policy making and counter-historical institutional interventions.

The process of redress should thus entail a backward looking normative analysis holding contemporary powerful agents morally responsible for their significant contribution to the reproduction of an unjust history over time and thus accountable to repair their ‘structural debt’. Reparations demands should be pursued through a participatory approach, which sees claimants at the forefront of the mobilisation and decision-making process. As the activist politics of reparations shows,1 reparations demands usually are both ‘redistributive’ (e.g. free and public educational programmes, a guaranteed minimum liveable income and affirmative actions) and about ‘recognition. That said, reparations should be complemented by other (more for ward-looking) interventions. This is not only because sometimes move ments fighting for historical and structural inequalities do not seem to put reparations on their agenda or reparations may not be as successful as initially hoped at repairing unjust historical structures, but also because redressing the new reproduction of an unjust history calls for an ongoing commitment to preventing its possible ‘reactivation’ and remodelling our background conditions (also through institutional innovation).

Question 13

In what way does Nuti criticise Lu?

Answer 13

Lu’s understanding mistakenly grounds responsibility on the allegedly equal contribution all agents participating in structures make to their sustainment, overlooking differences among different types of agents within structures and the different power agents display in their contributions

Some agents inherently have a significant capacity to influence structural processes due to their features of the role the occupy in society/internationally. These agents should therefore be held responsible for acting/failing to act in a way which reinforces structural injustice.

Question 14

Who should be held responsible for structural injustice, according to Nuti (2019)?

Answer 14

No agent, as powerful as they may be, can on their own transform unjust structures. However, some agents inherently have a significant capacity to influence structural processes in virtue of their features (e.g. states) or the role they occupy in a society or internationally (e.g. the US president), and they possess this capacity independently of whether they choose to use it.

If we take structural injustice (and, especially, injustice that is the new reproduction of an unjust history) seriously, we should pay particular attention to relations and mutually constituted positions within structures and offer an account of political responsibility that is deeply sensitive to them.

Those who are privileged by certain structures have the political responsibility to contributing to eradicating them.

Question 15

What is the principle of wrongful benefits, according to Pasternak (2016)

Answer 15

The “principle of wrongful benefits” refers to the duties of agents who benefit from an original wrongdoing; agents can either just benefit from a wrongdoing or can benefit and contribute to it, and agents can either voluntarily or non-voluntarily benefit from this wrongdoing.

Question 16

What is Simmons’ (1995) argument?

Answer 16

Trys to undermine the standard complaint about historical theories of property rights that they cannot specify the precise content of rights to rectification in any even remotely complicated contexts not by arguing historical theories can specify precise contents for these rights, but rather by arguing that their inability to do so constitutes no defect in the theories. Historical theories can be coherent and plausible and can thus define real rights, even when those rights do not have a perfectly determinate content. The best historical theory will entail that persons can sometimes have rights that give us only imprecise, but nonetheless principled, guide- lines for rectification, rather than giving us determinate entitlements to particular things or performances.

If I am right about this, then a properly developed historical theory of rights will accept the idea of property rights in shares of goods. But the historical rights in question will be to particularized shares - not rights either to particular objects or to general shares of the whole of the divisible resources. The historical theory thus still retains some of the essential particularity of historical claims. But by acknowledging that some historical rights are not rights to particular things, the theory also gives us some reason to believe that the problem of rectifying complicated injustices may not be insoluble in principle

Mere passage of time, considered strictly by itself, can have no effects on the substance of our moral rights, including our rights to rectification of past injustices.

We can have genuinely historical rights whose content is nonetheless imprecise. This imprecision of content, however, does not reduce such rights to general, nonhistorical (i.e., end-state) rights to any fair share. Rather, such rights can be to particularized, though not particular, fair shares of land or resources. These arguments enable us to defend a conception of Native American rights to rectification that preserves at least some of the particularity of the claims actually advanced in lawsuits and published arguments by (or on behalf of) Native American tribes.

Question 17

What is the compensatory view and the disgorgement view, according to Pasternak (2016)

Answer 17

Compensatory View: Those who have benefitted from the injustice owe duties directly to the victims of the wrongdoing who were made worse off and have legitimate claims for compensation. Examples of arguments in favour are that it stems from the condemnation of the unjust act and invokes the duty not to free ride
- Calculation Problems: how far are the descendants harmed by wrongs, what is the baseline by which we measure harms/benefits, and how well can we track impact of wrongful benefits.

Disgorgement View: Those who benefit from wrongdoing have a duty to disgorge the benefit, even when there is not someone identifiable who has a claim to the benefit (Pasternak, 2016, p.416)
- Less vulnerable to drawbacks of compensatory view
- But has problem that benefits will remain as “morally tainted” unless given up in compensation to a victim; whoever has benefits once given up is still benefitting from the wrong.

Limitations: possibly too demanding and innocent, non-voluntary beneficiaries may have a legitimate claim to the benefit if during the period of unavoidably benefiting from it and being ignorant of the wrongful source, the agent became deeply intertwined with it

Question 18

What is Simmons’ (1995) response to the counterfactual argument?

Answer 18

historical rights can be coherent and plausible without having perfectly determinate content. Historical rights should be to particularised shares rather than particular objects, allowing us to see that rectification could be achieved without saying precisely to what particular thing some individual is entitled. For purposes of assigning blame and liability we assume a normal unsurprising course of background events, roughly like the one that actually occurred. And we assume that our and others’ choices would have likewise been more or less the same

Question 19

What is Simmons’ (1995) response to the problem of different generations?

Answer 19

If the victim’s rights die with him, of course, then Native American rights cannot possibly have persisted through the centuries in the ways my previous remarks suggested. And why should we suppose that rights of rectification have simply been passed down family lines, from the original victims of injustice all the way to their current descendants?
- First, our counterfactual judgments about how things would have gone on in the absence of the wrong should be conservative
- Children have rights against their parents to the receipt of property that is needed by those children for a decent life
- Finally, and perhaps most obviously relevant, we have the fact that the land and resources at issue were taken by Native Americans to be tribal property, not individual property.

Question 20

What is the value of reparations, according to Waldron (1992)?

Answer 20

There is an importance to the historical recollection of injustice regarding identity and contingency… Remembrance in this sense is equally important to communities-families, tribes, nations, parties-that is, to human entities that exist often for much longer than individual men and women. To neglect the historical record is to do violence to this identity and thus to the community that it sustains.

People and communities live with the consequences of injustices. Their lives may be dependent and altered significantly by the present effects of events that took place several generations earlier. So even if the action cannot be altered, we may be able to alter the consequences.

Quite apart from any attempt genuinely to compensate victims or offset their losses, reparations may symbolize a society’s undertaking not to forget or deny that a particular injustice took place, and to respect and help sustain a dignified sense of identity in-memory for the people affected.

Question 21

What is the problem of identifying counterfactuals according to Waldron (1992)?

Answer 21

Problem of identifying counterfactuals is that it is hard to say what would have happened if some event which did occur had not taken place, as they would have been determined by human choice which it will be hard if not impossible to reach determinate conclusions about. Especially the case if the injustice originally took place a long time ago.

Reparation of historic injustice really is redistributive: it moves resources from one person to another. It seems unfair to do this on a basis that reconstructs a profile of holdings by attributing rational choice motivations to only some, and not all, of the parties who are affected.

Question 22

How does injustice perpetuate, according to Waldron (1992)?

Answer 22

Instead of regarding the expropriation of aboriginal lands as an isolated act of injustice that took place at a certain time now relegated firmly to the past, we may think of it as a persisting injustice. The injustice persists, and it is perpetuated by the legal system as long as the land that was expropriated is not returned to those from whom it was taken. On this model, the rectification of injustice is a much simpler matter than the approach we discussed in the previous section. We do not have to engage in any counterfactual speculation. We simply give the property back to the person or group from whom it was taken and thus put an end to what would otherwise be its continued expropriation.

Difficulties arise of course if the original owner has died, for then there is no one to whom the property can be restored. We could give it to her heirs and successors, but in doing so we are already setting off down the counterfactual road, reckoning that this is what the proprietor’s wish would have been had she had control of her property. Fortunately, that difficulty is obviated in the case of many aboriginal claims: usually the property is owned by a tribe, a nation, or a community-some entity that endures over time in spite of mortality of its individual members. It is this enduring entity that has been dispossessed, and the same entity is on hand now more than a hundred years later to claim its heritage.

The main difficulty with this is whether we are sure that that the entitlement that was originally violated all those years ago is an entitlement that survives into the present.

Question 23

Does Waldron (1992) believe injustices can be superseded?

Answer 23

It is widely believed that some rights are capable of “fading” in their moral importance by virtue of the passage of time and by the sheer persistence of what was originally a wrongful infringement. This may seem unfair but there are reasons in its favour such as changes in background social and economic circumstances or the idea (by Nozick) that the basis of property rights is the establishment of an intimate relation between a person and a resource.

The burden of justifying an exclusive entitlement depends (in part) on the impact of others’ interests of being excluded from the resources in question and that that impact is likely to vary as circumstances change. Similarly, an acquisition which is legitimate in one set of circumstances may not be legitimate in another set of circumstances. From this I inferred that an initially legitimate acquisition may become illegitimate or have its legitimacy restricted (as the basis of an ongoing entitlement) later on account of a change in circumstances. By exactly similar reasoning, it seems possible that an act which counted as an injustice when it was committed in circumstances Ci may be transformed, so far as its ongoing effect is concerned, into a just situation if circumstances change in the meantime from C, to C2. When this happens, I shall say the injustice has been superseded.

Behind the thesis of supersession lies a determination to focus upon present and prospective costs-the suffering and the deprivation over which we still have some control. Arguments for reparation take as conclusive claims of entitlement oriented toward circumstances that are radically different from those we actually face.

Question 24

When does Young (2006) say that structural injustice exists?

Answer 24

Structural injustice exists when social processes put large categories of persons under a systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time as these processes enable others to dominate or have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising their capacities

Question 25

Whatis the constructivist view of reparation, according to Taiwo (2022)?

Answer 25

Taiwo argues for the perspective that reparation is a construction project, about social justice, reconciliation and eliminating institutional racism.

The constructive view of reparation: a historically informed view of distributive justice, serving a larger and broader worldmaking project. Reparation, like the broader struggle for social justice, is concerned with building the just world to come. But its more specific role concerns how we get there. The transition from the unjust status quo to justice in the future will not be costless, and it will come with its share of benefits and burdens. Reparation is concerned with how to distribute these. To make that determination, it looks in part to the past.

These ideas wouldn’t be implemented for free. Moreover, they would distribute benefits and impose burdens and obligations on various states and regions in markedly different ways than the previous colonial social order had. The change they aimed to make in the world, its “forward-looking orientation,” was to reshape that world order rather than simply manage its consequences.

The just world we are trying to build is a better distribution system, by apportioning rights, advantages, and burdens in a better manner than the one we’ve inherited from the global racial empire. It is also a view that looks to justly distribute the benefits and burdens of that transitional process of rebuilding.

The constructive view is not an approach to reparations that fits every instance of atrocity or crime. It is built specifically in response to trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism.

The project of reparations is to learn how to distribute capabilities justly in order to make a new world. Such a just world must by its nature be fundamentally incompatible with the one we are in now: the world of global racial empire, in which laws and norms maintain the unjust distributions of racial capitalism.

Question 26

What is the global racial empire according to Taiwo (2022) and example of an effect this has?

Answer 26

We now live in a social system that is as large as the globe, and that this system was built by the converging processes of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism that I call “global racial empire.” We should understand this system as a system of distribution, explaining where social advantages and disadvantages are made and how much of those social advantages and disadvantages different people and places get. Over time, advantages and disadvantages accumulate.

An example of past injustices bringing about present structural injustices is that the negative effects of climate change will not be evenly distributed and will be distributed in a way that “compounds and locks in the distributional injustices we’ve inherited from history”, reflecting the economic and political systems developed by global racial empire

Question 27

Why does Taiwo (2022) take a global and historical view?

Answer 27

This book argues for a kind of cosmopolitan view that looks at specific global superstructures – institutions, associations, chains of production, and norms – to ground a distributive justice analysis for specific historical reasons.

But our views on distributive justice shouldn’t stop at problems visible from a snapshot of our present circumstances, otherwise important as they may be. Our social systems are processual—that is, they are the way that they are because of many different activities, all of which take place over time.

On a historical view of distributive justice, we are still concerned about the problems with current distributions of justice on purely consequential grounds, based on the differences they make in the lives of the people here and now. But we also understand the nature of the here and now. ‘Here’ is a place in a global system, and ‘now’ is a moment in an ongoing global transfer that does not pause just because we took a picture.

Question 28

What, according to Taiwo, needs distributing justly?

Answer 28

Justice, then, sometimes literally comes down to a construction project. Among the things we need to produce and distribute are practical affordances: parts of the built environment that make it navigable and usable by people with a wide range of abilities.

The worldmaking perspective on justice, then, is concerned with material and social resources, formal rules and norms, and also with informal patterns of attention and care. A just system should move material resources around to places that can produce wheelchairs and assisted walking devices, and then we should move those wheelchairs to the homes of people who need them

Everyone in the world order should have capabilities that grant effective access to the means of maintaining their biological existence, economic power, and political agency. Our target must be a global community thoroughly structured by non-domination.