Reparative justice, historical injustice, and the nonidentity problem

History is riddled with injustice. Nazi Germany murdered and stole from millions during the Holocaust. Imperial powers expropriated land, relocated populations, and violently maintain(ed) oppressive colonial systems. The slave trade created unimaginable suffering and oppression. These are examples of historical injustice.

Historical injustices are unjust actions occurring in the past in which the original individual perpetrators and victims are no longer alive. There is widespread intuition that historical injustices require reparative justice. Yet despite this reparative intuition, reparative justice for historical injustices encounters significant philosophical problems. In this paper, I consider one popular philosophical objection: The Nonidentity Objection.¹ The Nonidentity Objection says that contemporary individuals are not owed reparative duties for historical injustices because, without the historical injustice they would not have come to exist.² I show that the objection does not succeed. I accept the claim that particular individuals would not have come to exist without the injustice but deny that it vitiates their claim to reparative justice. I argue that the Objection only challenges reparations if we assume a model of reparative justice on which claims to reparations are generated by the harms that result from an injustice. If we use a different model of reparative justice, the Nonidentity Objection does not succeed and we can vindicate reparations.

I begin (Section 2) by presenting a general understanding of reparative justice, including three questions any model of reparative justice must answer. I sketch a popular model of reparative justice (the Harm Model) that is often used in the context of historical injustice to answer these questions. Next (Section 3), I present the Nonidentity Objection that challenges the possibility of reparative justice for historical injustice. I argue (Section 4) that the Objection only applies to arguments that assume the Harm Model. I offer an alternative model of reparative justice (the Wrongful Interaction Model) on which reparations address the wrongful actions of the injustice. I develop this model by drawing on accounts of relational (second-personal) morality,³ and demonstrate how the model overcomes the Objection.⁴ I conclude (Section 5) by introducing three new problems that my model faces. I argue that we should prefer my model over the Harm Model because these challenges pose a less intractable threat than the nonidentity problem.

Reparative justice starts from the intuition that injustices require repair. Reparative justice is distinct from distributive justice. Distributive justice concerns an allocation of resources, burdens or benefits, or a fair state of affairs. In contrast, reparative justice concerns what is owed to victims of a discrete unjust action. Where distributive justice determines allocations of goods, rights, benefits, and burdens in a society, reparative justice determines what victims of injustice are owed on the grounds of this unjust act.

I am concerned with a particular kind of reparative justice that is about unjust interactions between wrongdoers and victims. This kind of reparative justice is about what victims of these unjust interactions are owed because of these unjust interactions. This interactional reparative justice can be distinguished from structural theories of reparative justice (Butt, 2021; Lu, 2017, 114–143). Structural theories determine what ought to be done to promote a more just state of affairs, distribution, or structure. Interactional theories concern what ought to be done about something that occurs in the past because of the morally significant features of this past event itself, not what addressing this past event will do in the future. There is a related distinction between backwards-looking and forward-looking theories of reparative justice. Backwards-looking justice concerns what is owed to respond to some unjust event occurring in the past. Forward-looking justice concerns what would best promote the just state of affairs in the future. One might think that interactional reparative justice is inherently backwards-looking, whereas structural reparative justice is forward-looking. However, this need not be the case. Forward-looking theories could incorporate elements of interactional reparative justice and backwards-looking theories can incorporate structural elements (see, e.g., Butt, 2021; Nuti, 2019; Waligore, 2016).⁵ I take no stand on the precise relation between interactional, structural, backwards-looking, and forward-looking justice here (I discuss this in other work [Lambrecht, 2024a; Lambrecht, 2024b]). All I am concerned with here is vindicating interactional reparative justice regardless of whether this counts as backwards- or forward-looking reparative justice.

The fact that I limit my discussion here to interactional reparative justice should not be taken to suggest that I think that other forms of reparative justice (e.g., structural or forward-looking approaches) are incorrect or have no place. On the contrary, as I have argued elsewhere Lambrecht, 2024b, I think these other forms of justice are indispensable for addressing historical injustice. I limit my discussion to interactional reparative justice because an optimal theory of reparative justice intuitively includes interactional justice alongside any other forms of justice. Even if you think that structural justice is the most important part of redress for past injustices, interactional justice is also important for things like apologies and accountability for wrongdoers (Butt, 2021; Lambrecht, 2024b; McKeown, 2021). My goal in this paper is to vindicate this kind of reparative justice from the Objection that challenges it.

The nonidentity problem is a general philosophical puzzle developed by Derek Parfit (1984) that runs as follows.¹⁰ When an event (including an injustice) is necessary for an agent coming to exist, that agent does not have a moral claim against this event because, if it had not happened, the agent would not have come to exist. Assuming the agent lives a life worth living (which I assume for the rest of the paper), they cannot be said to be made worse off by the event.

The Nonidentity Objection challenges reparations generated by the HM. To overcome the Objection, we can develop a different model of reparations that does not face the problems the HM does. I'll now develop this model.

I have argued that a model of reparative justice based on wrongs can overcome the Nonidentity Objection to reparations for historical injustice. I want to conclude by noting three potential challenges that this kind of model faces, each of which concerns how to characterize the identities of the parties of the wrong and the particular features of the wrong in question. In cases of historical injustice, the original perpetrators and victims are long dead. Thus, we need a way to characterize the wrong and the parties of the injustice despite the fact that the original perpetrator and victims are long dead. Each way we could do this, however, encounters significant challenges.

First, we could characterize the wrong as one between individuals. But then we need to show how the wrongful interaction of the historical injustice wrongs present individuals. This means that the wrong of the historical injustice must be done also against some present individuals so that they have a claim to reparative justice for it. This encounters the problem of determining how an action can violate second-personal moral reasons or rights of individuals who do not yet exist.

Second, we could instead try to characterize the wrong as one done to a group. In many cases of historical injustice, however, the wrong does not appear to be done to the kind of group that can be wronged. Since a wrong requires violating something that one agent owed to another, a victim of a wrong must be an agent. But only certain types of groups meet the conditions for group agency. Crucially, many of the wrongs of historical injustice do not look to be done to groups who meet these requirements for group agency (see Wenar, 2006). For instance, slavery wronged Black Americans and the Holocaust wronged Jews, yet neither social group involved in these wrongs meets the conditions for group agency. It appears that if we characterize the wrong as being done between groups, we miss many historical injustices.

Third, we also need to show how there can be a party in the present who owes reparations for the historical injustice. Again, both the individual and group-based approaches face difficulties. For the individual approach, we encounter the difficulty of showing how present individuals who did not themselves commit the historical injustices nonetheless bear responsibly for them. For the group-based approach, we face the challenge that many group agents that appear to be wrongdoers of historical injustices (like states) have not persisted since the original injustice. For example, Germany (the obvious candidate for the wrongdoer of the Holocaust) has changed nearly every feature of itself since the Holocaust: it has been a dictatorship, an occupied state, two separate states with vastly different systems of government, and a unified democracy. We need some way of showing that the same group persists such that it can owe reparations for its past wrong.

Each of these are difficult philosophical puzzles that the WIM must address. Yet, despite these puzzles, we still have reason to prefer the WIM over the HM. The HM faces the nonidentity problem, which has been a difficult and intractable philosophical problem that has proven difficult to solve. The WIM offers a plausible solution to this problem. So, even though it faces problems of its own, since it offers a solution to the difficult general philosophical problem, we ought to consider using it. Moreover, there are also already candidate solutions to the problems it faces. On the first problem, for instance, Rahul Kumar (2014) offers an argument for how wrongs of historical injustice (in his case, the wrongs of slavery) wrong present individuals. For the second problem, Alasia Nuti develops an account on which members of a group can be owed reparations based on their “structural position” as members of the group, even if the group is not a group agent (Nuti, 2019, 62). Finally, for the third problem, Janna Thompson (2022) provides an argument for treating certain group agents as having persisted though time. There is more work to be done to show how the WIM can incorporate these kinds of solutions to fully develop the WIM, since many of these solutions do not already use the WIM and are, thus, potentially vulnerable to the Nonidentity Objection. However, the point has been to illustrate that we should prefer the WIM over the HM, despite the challenges it still faces.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.