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7/31/2003 07:49:00 PM | Timothy

Reparations, Ethical Individualism, and Ethical Presentism
In The Debt, Randall Robinson makes the appeal for reparations for slavery on the grounds that they are necessary to close the economic gap between blacks and whites as groups, which must be done to solve America's racial tensions and problems:

Lamentably, there will always be poverty. But African-Americans are over-represented in that economic class for one reason and one reason only: American slavery and the viscous climate that followed it. Affirmative action, should it survive, will never come anywhere near to balancing the books here. While I can speak only for myself, I choose not to spend my limited gifts and energy and time fighting only for a penny when a fortune is owed.

However, Robinson does not seem to be striving for complete equality for everyone and accepts certain types of inequalities, but argues they cannot be correlated with race:

After all, the object here is to close all socioeconomic gaps between the races....There will always be differences in the abilities and achievements of individuals, but achievement differences correlate with race must never be tolerated. That gap must be fully closed.

It seems reparations try to deal with two important and difficult issues: injustice in the past, and justice for groups. Jon Elster attack reparations arguments pretty much head-on by arguing for two principles (in his 1993 Monist article "Ethical Individualism and Presentism"):

...for the purposes of distributive justice, groups don't matter and the past doesn't matter. Justice is concerned with living individuals and with future individuals. The view that groups don't matter I call ethical individualism. The view that the past doesn't matter I call ethical presentism

Elster aims to rule out 'vulgar feminist' arguments like 'it is our turn to discriminate now', aristocratic notions of desert, backwards-looking affirmative action arguments, and arguments that we should be concerned about the average welfare of groups rather than individuals. So you can imagine that reparations does not fare well under Elster's analysis.

For ethical presentism, Elster notes that "for purposes of justice only the living matter." But Elster says a theory can still try to say the past matters if it says how the past has left morally relevant traces on the present:

I do not want to rule out theories according to which information about individuals who are no longer alive is essential to determine what is a just distribution among the living. But I would stipulate the following: injustice done to individuals who are no longer alive may constrain present distributions only if it has left morally relevant traces in the present, where what counts as 'morally relevant' is decided by whatever substantive theory we are considering.

Elster claims his two princliples are 'meta-ethical' because they are meant to rule out arguments for policies, not the policies themselves (I'm think they can act substantively to rule out policies, but I won't go into that here). So a policy that redistributes money or jobs from whites to blacks might be justifiable on other grounds besides 'reparations talk' which looks to the past; utilitarian considerations might justify it. But if we use a theory, Elster says we have to use it consistently. So, Elster says, if we use libertarian Robert Nozick's theory of restitution, we cannot appeal to average welfare of groups, as Nozick is not concerned about patterned distributions. (It's not clear to me that Nozick would agree that rectification need take place on an individual basis if present holdings were not justly acquired or justly transferred; rules of thumb would be permitted. Elster also says that John Rawls' specification of the difference principle so as to be concerned with the 'representative' person in the worst off group is also a violation of ethical individualism.)

Elster also says that we can deviate from ethical individualism if we do not have enough data to make fine distinctions (and we have principled reasons for this pragmatic approach). He gives the example of how young men pay higher rates than young women for car insurance because men as a group tend to have more accidents. Elster says that though this is "a violation of ethical individualism" it could "be justified on pragmatic grounds," if there is a "difficulty of getting accurate information about individual drivers...." and even goes so far as to say that "if the correlation was sufficiently high drivers might be rated according to the accident record of their parents."

Despite allowing for descent in car insurances cases, Elster objects to allowing this reasoning to justify reparations for slavery:

"The point is we cannot tell who, among living white Americans, are better off because of slavery. And then, treating all of them as if the were better off because we know that some of them are, is a violation of ethical individualism, a case of collective guilt..."

Elster allows that if person A has done nothing wrong to person B, but A is richer and B is poorer because of what A's father did to B's father, then compensating B at A's expense need not violate ethical individualism and presentism. But Elster notes that he has a "brute intuition" that if A's grandfather harmed B's grandfather, but A and B are no worse or better off than they would have been without that historical injustice, then no compensation can be owed. There are no morally relevant traces left in the present, so to compensate would be to violate ethical individualism. So Elster says he does not expect any claim for compensation to forthcoming.

However, is the intuition so brute that this would be unacceptable even if restored 99 B's to a position like they would have had the injustice not occurred, while hurting only a single A? If it was hard to separate out those few A's and B's, could such a reparations program be plausible?

If Elster did not allow any considerations of the past to matter, his 'ethical presentism' would be silly, but I'm wondering whether we get this result if we consider the problems connected with Parfit in the post below. In what sense does it make to talk about any historical injustice affecting individuals today? Afterall, if it hadn't happen, most of the individuals alive wouldn't likely be alive at all. So how can an injustice ever leave 'morally relevent' traces if we do not want to talk about justice for groups? If any generations-ago historical event had gone differently, no individual alive today would exist at all. That's a condensed taste of some of the stuff on reparations I have been thinking about. A lot of this stuff is offered tenatively and I'm curious what you guys think about ethical individualism and ethical presentism, and whether you can see a theory for reparations that work within those principles. I'm wondering whether there is some slipperness by the way the two principles work together (reparations is damned by one or the other), and whether the notion of collective responsibility always means collective guilt.

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