The Structural Diversity of Historical Injustices

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increase in the number and boldness of calls for reparations, both internationally and intranationally. On the international front, the United Nations’ “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, generated a reparations demand by African states against European and North American states for the “crimes against humanity” of African colonialism and the slave trade. On the intranational front, reparations claims have been pressed in the United States by African Americans, native Hawaiians, Native Americans, and others. And reparations have been made to Japanese Americans for forced internment during World War II. In this essay, we develop and defend a general theoretical framework for the analysis of reparations claims, whether international or intranational. We proceed as follows. We first discuss the nature of reparative justice generally and the mix of backwardand forward-looking considerations relevant to the adjudication of any reparative justice claim. We then develop a principled basis for a tripartite taxonomy of reparative justice claims. This taxonomy sorts reparative justice claims according to key structural features of the historical injustices from which they arise. By attending to the different structural features of different kinds of historical injustices, we then generate what we call the “field of reparative justice.” This field represents the differing possible minimal and maximal weights that might be assigned to forwardand backward-looking considerations in the adjudication of different sorts of reparative claims. It does not represent anything like an algorithmic decision procedure. Nor does it represent a patterned distribution of appropriate outcomes or remedies for different sorts of reparative claims. Instead, what it represents is that as we move from reparations claims arising out of simple entitlement violations to reparations claims arising out of morally defective systems of entitlement, the minimal weight that must necessarily be given backward-looking considerations decreases, while the maximal weight that may be given to forward-looking considerations increases. This shifting range of minimal necessary and maximal possible weights to be assigned backwardand forward-looking considerations respectively marks the field of reparative justice. This, we hope, will be made clear enough in due course.