Back to the Future: the Historical Dimension of Liberal Justice

Summary

ON JUSTICE

If A wrongfully harms B, then, in the absence of overriding considerations, A should compensate B for the wrong. If I wrongfully (deliberately or negligently) damage your property, then I should repair it, or replace it with its equivalent, or pay you equivalent financial compensation, and perhaps I should pay you some additional compensation for the inconvenience and other non-material harms that my act has caused you. Such wrongful acts damage just relations between the parties, and justice seems to require that the wrongdoer should repair the damage. The obligation to make reparation thus seems to follow from basic ideas of justice, wrongdoing and unjustified harm. Since gross human rights abuses are extreme wrongs, they would seem to give rise to strong obligations of reparation. This conclusion is, however, oversimplified in several ways.

Firstly, gross human rights violations are likely to involve wrongdoers who are not only individuals, but also role-holders in complex organisations (army, security services, police, death squads, etc.); the victims may be numerous and targeted because of group membership (racial, ethnic, religious, political, etc.); and some individuals may belong to both categories: victims may have collaborated in wrongs done to others. This may mean that the simple model of wrongdoer A paying reparations for harm done to victim B may not apply, and the analysis of reparative justice, if applicable at all, will have to be more complex.

Secondly, reparation involves transfers of goods (material and/or non-material), and the justice of such transfers does not depend only on previous wrongdoing for which they are reparations. Suppose, for example, that A stole land from B, who had stolen it from C. A real-life example might be communist expropriation of assets from members of the ‘bourgeoisie’, who may have acquired them from Nazis, who had in turn expropriated them from Jews. Should post-Communist regimes compensate the expropriated bourgeois or the Jews, or both? What if the victims of these wrongs – the bourgeois and the Jews – are well off while others, not involved in these wrongs, are needy?