Reparations

The current concept of reparations for slavery is ill-conceived. If someone wrongs or harms a person, he owes him compensation. A case might be made that if someone harmed your ancestor, and this has resulted in your being worse off than you would have been otherwise, he owes you compensation. If the person who did the harm is dead, can forcing his descendants to make compensation be justified? I can imagine cases where it could be, but only if the causal links can be specified, which seems extremely unlikely in the present case. However, to establish that the descendant of the wronged persons has been harmed, one must show that he is worse off than he would have been had his forebear not been wronged. But the counterfactuals are problematic for the advocate of reparations. With a probability approaching certitude, if someone now living in the U.S. is a descendant of persons enslaved in the U.S., then if they had not been enslaved but left in Africa he would not exist. (Any number of past events were, in the context, necessary for a person to be born. If Hitler had not invaded Poland, I would not have been born. Thanks Adolf! See post below.) Assuming he places an inestimable value on his own life, those who enslaved his ancestors did not harm, but benefitted him. If we ignore all this, we could instead ascertain where his ancestors originated, find the current mean per capita income there, calculate the difference between this and his current income, and pay him the difference. But it’s close to certain that he is now better off in the U.S., despite having enslaved forbears, than if they had been allowed to remain in Africa and (improbably) still been his ancestors. One can be made better off than he would have been by extremely evil deeds that wronged and harmed others, even his ancestors. Rather than paying him reparations, perhaps we should send him a bill! Whether reparations for discrimination after slavery can be justified is a further matter.