In this view, justice is about paying back what was taken, and thus reparations are a form of compensatory justice: if you benefit from someone else’s suffering, you owe them something. It’s not about victimhood; it’s about taking responsibility.
I tend to generally agree with a net unjust-enrichment theory of obligation, although I think it is rather difficult to apply in practice.
However, I’d note that “what was taken” and what you have benefitted may not be two sides of the same coin. In fact, I think they often are not, especially given the passage of time.
I’ll use an individual example for simplicity and to try to avoid getting into a discussion of any particular injustice rather than the general idea. Suppose my great-grandparents ran whatever the early 20th century version of a big crypto scam is and got away with it. It’s likely—but not certain—that I have accrued some advantages in life as a result of this bonanza, and that at least some of these advantages [1] would constitute unjust enrichment that I should disgorge. However, the extent to which I (and my living relatives) have benefitted from the scam’s existence may be one to several orders of magnitude less than the degree of harm caused.
Indeed, for many significant harms, the correct amount of reparations on an unjust-enrichment theory is ~$0 -- because there is no living person who accrued benefit from the injustice, or the person who did so is sitting penniless in a prison cell for the foreseeable future somewhere. This is a serious practical shortcoming of the criminal restitution system.
I could imagine that some historical and widespread injustices could fall into this category too—if respect for human rights, an educated workforce, ordered liberty, and so on are rather good for society and for economic development, then it follows that I’d probably be better off if my society had done a better job respecting those things for all members of my society than in the actual world.[2] I don’t want to make that assertion about any particular past injustice, certainly not on an unresearched EA Forum comment. But I mention it to illustrate the complexities that arise when one ties the obligation to disgorge unjust enrichment to the payer’s personal benefit.
In the end, I suspect that I am a net beneficiary from injustice and that I should view at least some of my charitable contributions as a form of disgorgement (and I do). But my margin of error here is very large.
That raises another question:
Should there be a connection, if plausible, between the specific injustices which the reparations-payer benefitted from and the recipient of their disgorgement payment? Or is it acceptable, or even preferable, to pay to net injustice-sufferers as a class—on the theory that those whose injustice is not linked to a willing reparations-payer who benefitted are just as deserving of compensation as those whose injustices are linked?
The answer to this question could also influence the extent (if any) to which one thinks reparations in the form of unconditional cash transfers are superior to reparations in the form of bednets.
Determining which advantages would be tricky, and there could be no expectation of precision here. Suppose, for instance, my parents were able to start a business with some of the scam money (and would not have been able to otherwise), but the business was ultimately successful because of their skill and hard work. Neither deeming the business profits wholly cleaned nor applying but-for causation seems satisfactory here.
Over enough time, this might even be true with respect to other societies—if prior generations in my society had treated people from other societies more justly, at some point I suspect that I would be better off than I am now because I’d have more prosperous trading partners, would benefit from more technological progress coming out of those countries, and so on.
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.
In addition to what Linch said, another complexity here is that compensation can seem plausibly owed to people even in situations where they have not been left worse off by the original wrong. Long ago, Derek Parfit pointed out that if you significantly change the course of the future for the worse, the people who exist in the future will be different than if you hadn’t. (The original example was, deplete resources, and the people who exist in the impoverished future would not have exist in the nicer future where you left sufficient resources for future people.) Therefore, as long as those people have lives worth living, the people in the future you spoiled are actually not worse off because of your bad action. They are either overall better off, because they got to have lives worth living, or neither better nor worse off, if you think you can’t compare someone’s well being in a scenario where they do exist, to their well-being in a scenario where they don’t. Nonetheless, it’s still plausible that in some cases future people can be owed compensation for a wrong action that led to their worthwhile existence. I can’t just say “oh, well, if I hadn’t stolen that money from your Dad, he’d never have met your Mum, therefore you wouldn’t exist, so I don’t need to pay it back to you as his heir”. (Why? I think at least because there is value in maintaining a system of compensation for wrongs that goes above and beyond making things intrinsically more fair, but there may be more to it than that and deontologists probably think there is more.)
I tend to generally agree with a net unjust-enrichment theory of obligation, although I think it is rather difficult to apply in practice.
However, I’d note that “what was taken” and what you have benefitted may not be two sides of the same coin. In fact, I think they often are not, especially given the passage of time.
I’ll use an individual example for simplicity and to try to avoid getting into a discussion of any particular injustice rather than the general idea. Suppose my great-grandparents ran whatever the early 20th century version of a big crypto scam is and got away with it. It’s likely—but not certain—that I have accrued some advantages in life as a result of this bonanza, and that at least some of these advantages [1] would constitute unjust enrichment that I should disgorge. However, the extent to which I (and my living relatives) have benefitted from the scam’s existence may be one to several orders of magnitude less than the degree of harm caused.
Indeed, for many significant harms, the correct amount of reparations on an unjust-enrichment theory is ~$0 -- because there is no living person who accrued benefit from the injustice, or the person who did so is sitting penniless in a prison cell for the foreseeable future somewhere. This is a serious practical shortcoming of the criminal restitution system.
I could imagine that some historical and widespread injustices could fall into this category too—if respect for human rights, an educated workforce, ordered liberty, and so on are rather good for society and for economic development, then it follows that I’d probably be better off if my society had done a better job respecting those things for all members of my society than in the actual world.[2] I don’t want to make that assertion about any particular past injustice, certainly not on an unresearched EA Forum comment. But I mention it to illustrate the complexities that arise when one ties the obligation to disgorge unjust enrichment to the payer’s personal benefit.
In the end, I suspect that I am a net beneficiary from injustice and that I should view at least some of my charitable contributions as a form of disgorgement (and I do). But my margin of error here is very large.
That raises another question:
Should there be a connection, if plausible, between the specific injustices which the reparations-payer benefitted from and the recipient of their disgorgement payment? Or is it acceptable, or even preferable, to pay to net injustice-sufferers as a class—on the theory that those whose injustice is not linked to a willing reparations-payer who benefitted are just as deserving of compensation as those whose injustices are linked?
The answer to this question could also influence the extent (if any) to which one thinks reparations in the form of unconditional cash transfers are superior to reparations in the form of bednets.
Determining which advantages would be tricky, and there could be no expectation of precision here. Suppose, for instance, my parents were able to start a business with some of the scam money (and would not have been able to otherwise), but the business was ultimately successful because of their skill and hard work. Neither deeming the business profits wholly cleaned nor applying but-for causation seems satisfactory here.
Over enough time, this might even be true with respect to other societies—if prior generations in my society had treated people from other societies more justly, at some point I suspect that I would be better off than I am now because I’d have more prosperous trading partners, would benefit from more technological progress coming out of those countries, and so on.
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.
In addition to what Linch said, another complexity here is that compensation can seem plausibly owed to people even in situations where they have not been left worse off by the original wrong. Long ago, Derek Parfit pointed out that if you significantly change the course of the future for the worse, the people who exist in the future will be different than if you hadn’t. (The original example was, deplete resources, and the people who exist in the impoverished future would not have exist in the nicer future where you left sufficient resources for future people.) Therefore, as long as those people have lives worth living, the people in the future you spoiled are actually not worse off because of your bad action. They are either overall better off, because they got to have lives worth living, or neither better nor worse off, if you think you can’t compare someone’s well being in a scenario where they do exist, to their well-being in a scenario where they don’t. Nonetheless, it’s still plausible that in some cases future people can be owed compensation for a wrong action that led to their worthwhile existence. I can’t just say “oh, well, if I hadn’t stolen that money from your Dad, he’d never have met your Mum, therefore you wouldn’t exist, so I don’t need to pay it back to you as his heir”. (Why? I think at least because there is value in maintaining a system of compensation for wrongs that goes above and beyond making things intrinsically more fair, but there may be more to it than that and deontologists probably think there is more.)