Reparative Justice for Historical Injustice

Reparative justice for historical injustice concerns what present agents and societies must do to remedy past wrongs. Examples of historical injustice include the Holocaust, colonial violence and land expropriations, and chattel slavery in the United States. There is widespread intuition that these kinds of past wrongs require some form of reparation. However, because of the time that has passed between past wrongs and the present, explaining why reparative justice for these wrongs is possible encounters philosophical issues, including the nonidentity problem, the supersession thesis, issues of causal indeterminacy, question of personal identity, and questions of group responsibility. These issues have created many debates among philosophers about the ideal account that can best explain how reparative justice for historical injustice is possible. In this paper, I carve up the conceptual terrain of these debates. I present the different positions one could take for each major philosophical issue in concerning historical injustice, and I discuss their merits and drawbacks. To conclude, I sketch an account that offers what I take to be the most promising way forward for an account of reparations for historical injustice that best incorporates the insights from these debates.