That’s a good point, Phoneutria. The social contract approach seems to create a strong argument for more general forms of reparations.
I think we can make a distinction between rewriting the social contract, which is what general reparations would do, and operating within what is ostensibly the existing social contract, which I think my specific/individualistic form of reparations is doing.
And yet, social contracts are prevy to God’s Covenant, even to the present.
Who is entitled to inherit and on what basis, are still determined up in moral, rather than ethical considerations.
How can territorial inheritance claims be demarked from their morally justified vindication?
Slaves’ rights to reparations are just as convincing than those that stem from the war reparations of Japanese interneees, because the duration of internment do not come even close to that of human slavery.
The politization of benefits is a lot easier of the former, and slavery may be less arguable, since it was a systemic wrong, that derived from less specific territorial deprivation.
Temporal deprivation can be argued on basis of other signifiers.
It is notable that the implication to vindicate a morally justified reparation from an ethical one may not imply no mutual overlap, but it could be safely said , that there are cases where moral , rather then ethical considerations are more relevant.
Those people are still alive though.
I’m challenging your assumption that anything was “stolen” or “taken” when in fact it was won in a very high stakes game of tribal warfare.
Honestly slavery was one of lower stakes of the game played by tribes in competition… we’ve done and continue to do worse to each other.
Had our ancestors lost that game they might have been the slaves and if you go far enough back some of them did and some of them were.
I do not begrudge them playing to win in a game like that… I imagine we would too, in their shoes.
This is the horror that underlines the need for us to stop playing that fucking game… it makes monsters and victims of all of us eventually.
But let’s not pretend our ancestors were playing any other game, that they cheated or things would be different had the other tribe won.
Allow me to illustrate with a thought experiment… let’s assume, that the descendants of slaves somehow had managed to secure for themselves a very comfortable life.
Let’s assume they had managed to secure for themselves an even more comfortable life than the descendants of the slave owners.
Are they still owed?
By your logic the answer is yes… there is a debt, thing was “stolen” by the rules of today, thing must be returned.
It doesn’t matter whether or not this retroactive transfer of wealth is helping or hurting people alive today, what matters is we adhere to your misguided moral principles.
I do not need to appeal to moral nihilism to reject this. I simply do not give a damn… nor am I required to.
What’s more, I reject your utilitarian argument for adopting Idealism.
I somehow doubt we’d instill much confidence in the stability of our contracts by doing so… when we are doing so to explicitly undo past agreements.
I’d much rather reach a new agreement to help each other as needed, from here on out, for mutual benefit… and go from there.
Which means I don’t I think we should give money and aid to people who don’t need it… but instead focus on the people who do.
So what if a child is born into abject poverty because his parents were drug addicts who pissed their money away, OD’ed and left him nothing but nightmares.
That child is a no less a victim for it… and that kid needs help more than Barack Obama does, regardless of who did what to their respective ancestors.
As you may have noticed, I have no use for your score board of grudges.
Not only do I get to keep my moral obligations… I am in fact morally obligated to reject this idealistic precept.
You’ll get no argument from me…
But that game of monopoly did not start 400 years ago… It started 200.000 years ago and has been going on ever since.
Gonna take a wild stab and say beating the tribal war drums with a victim and victimizer race probably not the best strategy toward solidarity.
Just more racism… but hey what do I know… maybe it’ll work out.
it definitely doesn’t work
but neither does dismissing their pain
Agreed
Phoneutria,
The Indian reparations based on old territorial gains were justified, in spite of no living beneficiaries.
Attitudal changes effected by displaced roles may conflate political alliances.
Thay may be the exceptional sliding reason that justifications are withheld for more than generally accepted criteria.
Beneficiaries at times over react, in terms analogous to centuries of intoxication, and when they go cold turkey, a long repressed coil kicks up,
tipping up the necessary covers which had held back betting on high risk values.
That re: Native Americans who may feel some trepidation over the usual non betting recurrent reverse discrimination.
Of course it’s an axiomatic reaction, that becomes visible from both sides of a previous one way mirror.
So I guess as a preliminary question, do you think we’d be justified in enslaving people today? Take some examples: Can republicans enslave democrats? Can China enslave the Uyghers? Can we enslave the remaining uncontacted tribes? and why or why not, under the tribal warfare framing?
I get that we’re ultimately animals, and our moral systems are a kind of uneasy truce. But that seems like a reason to follow our moral systems, to take seriously what they imply, because that’s what’s kept us from killing each other and that’s a good thing. So we take it as settled that slavery is wrong today. And I think we have to take seriously the idea that morality as it applies today should apply to the past, and further that practical applications of that morality, like requiring people to compensate the people they wrong (note that “tort” law is literally the law of wrongs), should also apply to those deeds.
Even if it was just tribal warfare, it’s still true to say that the slavers took the slave’s labor by force. If that happened today, it would require compensation.
What do you think of the case of Japanese internment in the US, where survivors were paid reparations for their internment many years later? That might be a useful test, because it is a case of something that was legal at the time (indeed, Korematsu, the case where the US Supreme Court rejected a challenge to Japanese internment, is still technically the law of the land in the US) but we still deemed to warrant compensation much later. Was that the right thing to do?
To put it more generally: if X is wrong today and would warrant compensation, and we can convincingly demonstrate that a specific person A did X in the past to another specific person B, the successors in interest of B still have a claim for compensation against person A.
I don’t follow this argument. If a poor person steals from a rich person, they still have to give it back, even if the poor person is hurt and the rich person will have a comfortable life without it. Is that not the existing social contract? If so, I don’t see why present circumstances matter. What matters is that we know that a wrong was done that warranted compensation, and that claim for compensation survives death (which is true if my heirs can reclaim the painting someone stole from me).
What agreements are you referring to here?
This sounds to me like an argument against general reparations, and I’m not defending that here. It doesn’t apply, I assume, to a case where someone steals my painting: it’s my painting, I get it back, and “help each other as needed” is just irrelevant to who owns the painting. It doesn’t apply, I assume, to the bank robber robbing the bank: it’s the bank’s money, the bank gets it back, and we don’t see that as punishing the robbers or settling grudges.
I’m not saying we should punish the descendants of slavers for slavery. I’m not saying we should reward the descendants of slaves for the suffering of the ancestors. Even if the outcome is similar in practice, that isn’t what I’m advocating. Rather, where someone had something of value taken from them without consent, we have a rule that they should get it back, or get back compensation of equivalent value. Not as a windfall or a punishment, but to return the ill-gotten gains of one to the person from who they were taken.
This right to compensation survives death (my heirs get my painting), and it isn’t broken by the taker giving the thing of value to someone else (I get my painting back even if the robber drops it on your porch). These are descriptions of the current social contract, not moral arguments. But from them it follows that specific descendants of slaves have a claim against the descendants of specific slave owners, to the extent that the inheritance of the latter included an amount in excess of what was owed.
And note also the burden of proof that this entails: I’m assuming that the descendant of the slave can show who enslaved their ancestor, how much value was extracted through slavery, who the slavers heirs are, and how much value those heirs inherited from the slaver. I am assuming these things are reasonably well established (i.e. established to the extent we would require the facts to be established for my to reclaim my painting). This is the best argument for why it would apply to slavery and not to e.g. the Norman Invasion: we can’t establish the specific facts for the latter. Indeed, I’d expect that in most cases we wouldn’t be able to establish the facts for the former either.
Why does this matter? At the time of Japanese internment, and technically even today (but probably only because it hasn’t been challenged again), the internments were legal.
Carleas, slavery is merely a subset of consent violation. The moral animal has had the concept of consent violation for about 100 years. It is the pinnacle and us as animals have barely scratched the surface. We need intelligence to survive. The more consent violations, the more likely that we disregulate a mind that can help us.
It was different times back then.
Life was poor, nasty brutish and short.
It was do or die, kill or be killed, settle, seize and steal or starve.
Most of the Americas, Africa and Australia were wilderness and thinly populated.
Native Americans were enslaving and exterminating other Native Americans and Europeans.
Sub-Saharans were enslaving and exterminating other Sub-Saharans and Europeans.
Parts of Europe were subjugated by Arabs, Berbers, Mongols, Persians and Turks.
Central Asia use to be white before Turks assimilated them.
If we follow liberal logic, we ought to hand North America over to a council of Natives, Australia to a council of Aborigines and Europe to a council made up of various nonwhites and let them decide our fate for us.
If several men get into a brawl at the bar, do we force the winners to repay the losers?
If certain nonwhites push whites too far, they may wind up with far less than they have now.
What exactly are you asking me here?
The fact is we COULD justify enslaving people t’day.
Criminals and people we consider evil, who have demonstrated that we do not have a social contract with them are locked up.
We could just kill such people to avoid having them be active in and around us (because we can’t trust such people to keep the peace).
If, however, instead they want to be spared and get a share of the world’s resources, it can be billed as fair that they make it worth our while by working for us.
Now you just have to tag on tribalism…
We make your whole tribe guilty of your thoughts and deeds and thereby judge the tribe as evil and/or as rejecting the social contract.
Really not that hard to do… and really never that far from happening, especially against political opponents.
Now if you’re asking me about what I think the objective of morality is and what seems like a good strategy
I’d say morality is a social contract we negotiate to try and give us a way to live in peace and prosper together.
If we can put to bed our tribal wars, make peace and agree to help each other going forward, we should…
The rules we live by are negotiable, but our survival and the welfare of the people we love, rarely is.
I’ll try a different way.
Let’s say the poor person won it in a game of chess… but that we’ve since changed the rules of chess that makes the moves employed by the poor person illegal.
Had he done today what he did then, it would not be allowed and we would say he stole or cheated to gain what he did.
We can decide to have this change of rules apply retroactively, so that the poor person be forced to return, what was then, his winnings… or we could have the new rules apply from here on out.
I’m pointing out your argument for the former does not hinge on anything I’m morally obligated to agree with.
The only reason you want the new rules to apply retroactively is because you want to pretend the rules are transcendent and fixed for all time…
I’m simply rejecting your moral idealism in claiming the rules of today (that you like) are the true rules, written into the fabric of the universe.
I understand you want this to claim the people back then were evil and knowingly cheated… but I have no use for, nor interest in playing that blame game.
Who can know what our ancestors would have done or how they would have lived had they lived by different rules or under different conditions…
We can’t know, so we can’t arrange the world AS THOUGH they did… and we’re straight up lying if we say they broke the rules of their game.
It is sufficient if all we can say is that we’ve found a better set of rules to live by and that we don’t want to go back to the old ways.
In fact, I’d argue the rules could be even better than they are today, if we agreed to look out for each other more…
I think you are extending the game metaphor too far. We aren’t playing chess, this isn’t a one-off tournament, and previous social rulesets still have implications for the social order today. We changed the rules because the previous rules were wrong, not within that then-existing legal order, but from outside it, from appeal to something larger than a legal order and towards which the legal order should converge.
So again I’d argue that your position is just nihilism. If the current polity wants reparations, they get them. Your argument gives you no space to object to any change in policy, or to advocate for different policies, because what the law says just is the morality that matters: change the law, change the morality, nothing wrong no matter what the new law says. Moreover, the rules could not be better, because that could only be true if there were something outside the existing legal system by which to evaluate rules, which as far as I can tell you’re rejecting. Why should I help my neighbor? The law doesn’t require that I do, so I don’t, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Indeed, nothing could be wrong with it, since right and wrong just are the existing rules of the game.
As I said above, that’s fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go very far.
I kind of know this isn’t your position, but I don’t follow how exactly it differs. Let’s start with your claim that “the rules could be even better”: better according to what? How do you make that argument without appealing to some greater good that lets everything I’m arguing in along with it? How do you maintain that slavers did nothing wrong while also claiming that some set of rules exists that is better than the currently applicable set of rules? It seems like if a better set of rules can exists separate from the current set of rules, then the current set of rules can also be said to have existed during the time of slavery as a better and inapplicable set of rules, and so slavers could have known that what they were doing was wrong and unjust if they hadn’t had a large financial stake in not acknowledging it.
Not sure how closely you follow cryptocurrencies, but I’m reminded in this discussion of the Ethereum DAO debacle. Ethereum was one of the first ‘smart contract’ cryptocurrencies, which allows people to write programs for how the Ethereum currency is transferred, e.g. you send a program some Ethereum, and it automatically triggers the code to do XYZ. The DAO was meant to be an autonomous organization based on these smart contracts. But shortly after its release, someone found a flaw in the code that let them withdraw millions of dollars worth of Ethereum. That wasn’t the intent of the code, but that’s what followed from how it was written. So you have a set of rules (the code) that permits something (withdrawing millions in Ethereum), but everyone agrees that’s unintentional and bad. For better or worse, the solution was to roll back the whole ecosystem and undo what happened; the person who found and exploited the flaw lost all the cryptocurrency they had gained, and the owners of the DAO were made whole.
I don’t think this is that unusual. Things that are technically permissible are often retroactively modified, and the people who took a windfall often lose out even though they obeyed the letter of the law (I am thinking here also of the people who bought up hand sanitizer to sell online in the early days of COVID and had their stash seized by authorities).
I wonder if you would make a distinctions between this kind of retroactive change where it happens within a single lifetime, as opposed to where it happens over generations in the case of slavery. If so, how do you make that distinction?
I don’t think I am… It’s the perfect metaphor.
There is a purpose to a game’s design, the same way there is a purpose to our moral code.
Neither morality nor games exist in nature… we invent them.
We may discover things about ourselves and our nature that permits us to get better at designing the rules we play and live by to better accomplish our objectives.
And just like with games… it may turn out to be quite difficult, if not impossible, to design something that works equally well for everyone.
I’d define preserving and enhancing our collective well being, as the sole objective of morality.
By that measure we can make judgements as to which set of rules gives us the best results.
This is how I’d argue slavery was not the best agreement our ancestors could have reached.
But slavery was the agreement our ancestors DID reach and they can at least say it was better than nothing… which is where they started.
You and I, on the other hand, have no such excuse when advancing any change like your take on reparations.
So it falls on you to suggest why such a thing would be beneficial or an improvement on what we have…
In principle, it seems wholly unfair to change the rules retroactively. Even if you play by the rules agreed to, the rules could be changed and then you or your kids, forced to return your gains.
In practice it’s likewise ill-considered… as you might well take money from someone who needs it and give it to someone who does not, doing more harm than good.
I fail to see in what way this principle is a moral good, much less an obligation…
You have only addressed this criticism by appealing to the utility of an idealistic take on morality.
Where we pretend our rules are constants written into the fabric of the universe, as true yesterday as they are today, to instill a false confidence in their reliability.
The absurdity of which I’ve already pointed out to you.
The unintentional part is a very important distinction…
But I don’t think our ancestors accidentally enslaved people… I very much believe it was intentional.
For example, if we legalize drugs tomorrow… I don’t think we should pay reparations to anyone who was convicted and imprisoned for illegal drug trade.
Or if we made the sale of alcohol illegal that we should then ask for our money back or worse imprison anyone who profited from it’s sale when it was legal.
If however, we discover we imprisoned a person for a crime they did not commit… then it makes sense to make amends.
…
Sorry for the delay. I would blame the times, but that would really be to blame my failure to adapt to the times. And I should also credit the quality of your thought; I’ve rewritten the below a few times as trying to formulate a reply has helped me to better understand your points.
I acknowledge that there are similarities, but there are also differences. I’ll try to incorporate the metaphor where I agree it works, and point out clearly where I think the metaphor is misleading.
I actually think an interesting and workable moral system could be built starting from the premise that life’s a game and defining morality in relation to the greater purpose of games, with some small caveat for identifying the purpose. But “make it sporting for everyone” is pretty close to a number of consequentialist moral systems.
Well, both do exist in nature, because humans are part of nature. But I’m not sure how much that matters.
One way the game metaphor works is that my conclusion is required by the rules of the game. Your replies to this argument have been solid: much of slavery was legal at the time, and even those parts that weren’t are probably time-barred. In some sense this is an empirical claims: the claim is that the law as it already exists would support payment of damages, and we can test it by filing a lawsuit. As an empirical claim, its probably wrong. But it may not be: lots of practices around slavery were illegal on paper, and some kinds of claims don’t expire with time. But, legal truths aren’t neat like that; some legal truths are undecided until they’re tested and settled, and even then they can become unsettled if the next generation decides to reverse them or limit them or otherwise throw them back into doubt. So, we’re reasoning from existing rules in an area that isn’t (known to us to be) legally settled. If we’re treating this as a game with rules, we should appeal to the rules themselves to examine that argument. And that’s what I’ve done in pointing to stolen paintings, inherited spoils, etc. (Relatedly, you claim that “slavery was the agreement our ancestors DID reach”, but it’s worth noting who “our” refers to, and whose ancestors clearly didn’t agree to the rules they were held to. If they didn’t agree, then following the rules doesn’t really matter, they weren’t a party to the contract.)
So one question is, do the rules of this game – the laws and their prior versions and change history, the principles that they’re based on, and the principles of how they are applied and how those applications change – do those rules dictate compensation for wrongs incident to slavery for the living descendants of slaves from the living descendants of slavers, and I think the answer is plausibly yes, for the reasons I’ve given.
But another question is what morality now requires that we do about actions in the past, and here I think the game metaphor doesn’t work.
One difference between games and morality that matters is how the rules relate to the purpose. Chess doesn’t exist in order to satisfy the need of putting the king in checkmate, it exists to entertain, and it does that by defining a goal and rules on how it can be achieved. The “purpose” is different from what the rules tell you to do. And so the rules change in relation to a purpose that is orthogonal to the goals defined in the rules. You noted that if we changed the rules after a tournament we wouldn’t ask that the prize money be returned. But changing the rules of the game doesn’t mean that the previous participants failed or were wrong. They may well have been achieving the purpose of the game, but need a rule change now to continue to achieve it (for example if an innovative strategy broke the game by exploiting a loop-hole). Similarly on the other side, achieving the purpose of chess isn’t the same as playing chess. I’m not winning at chess when I play xbox, just because xbox is entertaining. So for games, following the rules doesn’t entail satisfying the purpose, and satisfying the purpose doesn’t entail playing the game. Morality isn’t like that. The rules of morality and the purpose of morality are deeply connected.
I’m going to stick with the ‘sustain an uneasy truce’ function of morality, but I don’t think this point depends on taking that position, it’s just easier to talk about in concrete terms. If the rules of the past led to a civil war, they were actually wrong, because civil war is an objective failure of the uneasy truce. We can reject idealism, and treat morality as contingent – whatever keeps the uneasy truce – and still we can make the extra-temporal claim that those rules were wrong because society didn’t function under them. We changed them because they were wrong, and we changed them so that the rules create a game whose goal is the purpose.
Moreover, if we find some other set of rules that is a complete contradiction of the rules but provably achieves the purpose, we have a strong argument that those rules are actually morality. And that argument applies when a breakdown of the uneasy truce is expected just as well as it applies after it’s occurred. The rules were wrong at the time, because the goal and the purpose were the same goal and purpose that we have now and we know that they didn’t work.
And while we could say that hindsight bias is 20-20, and so not too-strongly condemn those behaviors to the extent that they were based upon a mistake of fact, we still have reason to think that the people who made that mistake should not reap a windfall, and where that windfall is provable, where the mistake that led to it is provable, where the victims are provable, where the path of the windfall can be traced from unclean hands to clean hands, we should consider it as ill-gotten gains and owing to the victims.
Finally, there’s the question of whether such a move would make a good uneasy truce now. I think the existence of global riots suggests that the “it was legal at the time” argument doesn’t work in support of an uneasy truce, so it seems pretty plausible that a limited remedy that only applied in certain circumstances and requires victims to meet a substantial burden is better than the alternative of doing nothing. “Help everyone” doesn’t work when a substantial minority of the population doesn’t trust the majority to follow through (or, more accurately, to include them in the “everyone” that gets help).
I think this intuition is mostly right, but not exactly how things go in practice. Again, to be US-centric, we paid reparations to interned Japanese, even though there was no obligation to do that. Was that wrong?
And again I question how settled the law is here. It seems like there was a slow shift from “this individual, who happens to come from Africa, is a slave” to “all Africans, no matter how they got here, are slaves”, and there are substantial legal grey areas along the way. If we change the laws to seize a warehouse of booze and later changed it back, should we give the booze back to the person we took it from, or should the government (and its well-connected hangers on) get to keep the booze and sell it for their own benefit?
I think summoralilly, the distinction between purposes and goals would serve clarity in direct proportion of the value of declarative settlement, if ever that sort of quantification became a demanded exact figure. As that configuration would duplicate more to the qualification of membership in the supposed claim.
Can such distinction be adjusted summarily, and prescriptivaly, given the political nature of the context in which particular cases may be judged?
Or, van such distinctions become too trivial in the course of overall settlements made over time?
What about if you inherit a sick cat?
Especially if you already have your own cats.
Go ahead and explain to me exactly what I was supposed to do.