The compensatory justice view, as you articulate it, suffers from another major theoretical flaw, even contemporaneously: Whether you do it or not seems heavily empirically contingent upon not just the scale of harm, but the scale of benefit you get from it.
Take slavery. A common anti-slavery talking point in the 1800s was that slavery was net harmful not just to the enslaved but to the slavers as well. These arguments always seemed quite plausible to me. The economic benefits of slavery seem dubious, and it seems prima facie likely that the evils of slavery are morally corrosive.
However, if you take that view seriously, you’d also have to take the view that you do not own compensatory justice for slavery. This seems surprising to me, as a matter of ethics. Usually if you do something bad you ought to compensate your victims. When the courts find someone guilty but do not order recompensation, it’s usually because the aggressor is unable to pay (As philosophers say, “ought implies can”). I’m not a legal expert, but I do not think it’s considered an appropriate defense to say “Your Honor, according to my psychologist stealing has caused me to develop a dependency mindset and I actually have counterfactually lower wealth than if I didn’t steal. Thus, I should not pay my victims.” And yet this appears to be the compensatory justice view!
Usually if you do something bad you ought to compensate your victims.
I agree with that—I don’t view the unjust-enrichment approach as the only pathway that may require someone to pay amends. The person who actively did something wrong—say, a drunk driver who crashes into another vehicle—has an obligation to compensate their victims, and that obligation isn’t contingent on the wrongdoer having received a benefit.
If one views the prior wrongdoers as governments, one could attempt to apply this logic to past wrongs, but it would come across to me as visiting the sins of the fathers and mothers onto their children. As a practical matter, governments are ultimately funded by the resources of their citizens and other taxpayers.
Once we move beyond the person who actively committed the wrongdoing, the more direct pathway usually isn’t going to work. In my hypothetical, my scamming great-grandparents are dead, so there’s no compensation to be had from them. The question is what to do about any passive beneficiaries who were not morally culpable in the commission of the original wrong but have received net benefit from it.
Suppose my great-grandparents realized the benefits of intergenerational wealth, and so I receive a payment from the Scamming Ancestors Family Trust every month. I assert that I am unjustly enriched and incur a moral obligation to disgorge. In this unrealistic toy example, the obligation may extend to the full amount of the payment (although I think this would be uncommon in real-life practice). But it extends no further than that. If my relatives invested the Scamming Ancestors Family Trust in bad crypto and so I never got any payments, I have no moral obligations as a result of its prior existence. The victims are out of luck in that situation.
In the toy example, the existence of a trust makes it fairly easy to see that I personally continue to derive a benefit from the past injustice. In most real-world situations, this will be more difficult to determine.
The compensatory justice view, as you articulate it, suffers from another major theoretical flaw, even contemporaneously: Whether you do it or not seems heavily empirically contingent upon not just the scale of harm, but the scale of benefit you get from it.
Take slavery. A common anti-slavery talking point in the 1800s was that slavery was net harmful not just to the enslaved but to the slavers as well. These arguments always seemed quite plausible to me. The economic benefits of slavery seem dubious, and it seems prima facie likely that the evils of slavery are morally corrosive.
However, if you take that view seriously, you’d also have to take the view that you do not own compensatory justice for slavery. This seems surprising to me, as a matter of ethics. Usually if you do something bad you ought to compensate your victims. When the courts find someone guilty but do not order recompensation, it’s usually because the aggressor is unable to pay (As philosophers say, “ought implies can”). I’m not a legal expert, but I do not think it’s considered an appropriate defense to say “Your Honor, according to my psychologist stealing has caused me to develop a dependency mindset and I actually have counterfactually lower wealth than if I didn’t steal. Thus, I should not pay my victims.” And yet this appears to be the compensatory justice view!
I agree with that—I don’t view the unjust-enrichment approach as the only pathway that may require someone to pay amends. The person who actively did something wrong—say, a drunk driver who crashes into another vehicle—has an obligation to compensate their victims, and that obligation isn’t contingent on the wrongdoer having received a benefit.
If one views the prior wrongdoers as governments, one could attempt to apply this logic to past wrongs, but it would come across to me as visiting the sins of the fathers and mothers onto their children. As a practical matter, governments are ultimately funded by the resources of their citizens and other taxpayers.
Once we move beyond the person who actively committed the wrongdoing, the more direct pathway usually isn’t going to work. In my hypothetical, my scamming great-grandparents are dead, so there’s no compensation to be had from them. The question is what to do about any passive beneficiaries who were not morally culpable in the commission of the original wrong but have received net benefit from it.
Suppose my great-grandparents realized the benefits of intergenerational wealth, and so I receive a payment from the Scamming Ancestors Family Trust every month. I assert that I am unjustly enriched and incur a moral obligation to disgorge. In this unrealistic toy example, the obligation may extend to the full amount of the payment (although I think this would be uncommon in real-life practice). But it extends no further than that. If my relatives invested the Scamming Ancestors Family Trust in bad crypto and so I never got any payments, I have no moral obligations as a result of its prior existence. The victims are out of luck in that situation.
In the toy example, the existence of a trust makes it fairly easy to see that I personally continue to derive a benefit from the past injustice. In most real-world situations, this will be more difficult to determine.
Yeah after thinking about it somewhat more I’m tentatively skeptical about the case for reparations.