This study examines the relationship between ideology and resistance to the government's apology to Asian victims of Japan's colonial rule policy, which varies according to political knowledge. Based on existing research, because only a limited percentage of voters consider politics to be ideology based, it is expected that the association between ideology and resistance to intergroup apologies by one's own government differs according to their level of political knowledge. We selected three issues of political apologies: colonial rule in Asian countries, comfort women, and the massacre of Korean people based on false rumors at the time of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake; thereafter, we conducted an online survey of a panel selected by Nikkei Research Inc. The results suggest that the relationship between ideology and resistance among voters to political apologies varies with the level of political knowledge, as expected. On the contrary, social dominance orientations (SDO) were associated with resistance to apology, regardless of their level of political knowledge. We then tested the reproducibility of this finding by conducting a follow-up test on registered users of a crowdsourcing service after conducting a preregistration. In addition, we also measured general attitudes toward personal apologies and neighboring countries victimized by Japan's colonialist policies as factors that might predict resistance to apologies even among the politically uninformed. The association between ideology, SDO, and resistance to governmental apologies was generally replicated in this study.

Many political theorists, philosophers, and International Relations scholars argue that states are ‘corporate moral agents’, which can be held responsible in many of the same ways as individual moral agents. States can have debts, contractual obligations, reparative obligations, and duties. Should states also be subject to criminal responsibility and punishment? Thus far, the debate about state crime has focused on two general problems with corporate crime: whether corporate entities can have intentions (or mens rea); and whether it is possible to punish them. In this paper, I identify two problems with extending corporate criminal responsibility to the state. First, since there is no ‘international corporate law’ that regulates the internal structures of states, many states fail to meet the conditions for corporate agency (and hence for criminal responsibility). Second, since the most serious international crimes are not subject to a statute of limitations, the argument for state crime paves the way for forms of ‘historical punishment’ that few of its proponents would accept. Finally, I argue that it is unnecessary to hold states criminally responsible, and that state responsibility ought to be understood as reparative rather than punitive.

‘Heritage’ is a concept that often carries significant normative weight in moral and political argument. In this article, I present and critique a prevalent conception according to which heritage must have a positive valence. I argue that this view of heritage leads to two moral problems: disowning injustice and embracing injustice. In response, I argue for an alternative conception of heritage that promises superior moral and political consequences. In particular, this alternative jettisons the traditional focus on heritage as a primarily positive relationship to the past and thus offers resources for coming to terms with histories of injustice.

In this essay, I argue against the bright-line distinction between ideal and nonideal normative political theory, a distinction used to distinguish “stages” of theorizing such that ideal political principles can be deduced and examined before compromises with the flawed political world are made. The distinction took on its familiar form in Rawls and has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the past few years. I argue that the idea of a categorical distinction — the kind that could allow for a sequencing of stages of theorizing — is misconceived, because wholly “ideal” normative political theory is a conceptual mistake, the equivalent of taking the simplifying models of introductory physics (“frictionless movement in a vacuum”) and trying to develop an ideal theory of aerodynamics. Political organization and justice are about moral friction in the first instance. I examine both logical and epistemological arguments for the position that we need the uniquely idealizing assumptions of ideal theory in order to arrive at, or to know, a genuine theory of justice or political morality; and I find them wanting. Such assumptions as full compliance, consensus, and the publicity principle of universal knowledge about consensus can sometimes be useful, if used carefully and with justification; but they are not categorically different from other idealizing and abstracting assumptions in generating normative theory. What is referred to as “nonideal” theory is all that there is, and it is many kinds of theory, not one — the many ways in which we learn about justice and injustice, and seek to answer questions of practical reason about what ought to be done in our political world.