Group agency and the challenges of repairing historical injustice

ABSTRACT

The corporate account of responsibility argues that incorporated groups are agents, yet begs this question: if states are corporate agents, then why should citizens be liable to pay for its past mistakes and injustices? Several theorists supplement the corporate account to argue that democratic citizens agree to take on the liabilities of the state through authorization or intentionality. I argue that this route is mistaken, that citizens are obliged to pay for many of the state’s obligations without citizen agreement. Yet I also suggest that motivating citizens to pay for a state’s past mistakes will often be hard to do, partly for reasons that Jeremy Waldron explains. Still, I argue that Waldron is too quick to suggest that the passage of time means that states do not have an obligation to repair any past injustices. I argue that states may have an obligation to redress historical injustices, but that there is often a motivational gap for doing so. Both states and citizens have a bias to the present and future, which is difficult, though not impossible, to overcome.

KEYWORDS:

• Historical injustice
• enduring injustice
• authorization
• Waldron
• corporate responsibility

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the audience at the 2018 Conference on “The Temporal Orientation of Justice,” at the University of Graz, Timothy Waligore, Alex Kirshner, and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I use the term citizen, but my argument also applies to long-term residents of a state; however, several of the authors I discuss here mean only citizens in their arguments.

2. Waldron (1992, p. 9n7) suggests in a footnote that a tribe might decide to end its system of communal property. While this is a hypothetical possibility, we know that when the United States insisted Native American tribes change from communal to individual ownership (through the Dawes Act), a large portion of this land ended up in the hands of whites, while tribal members floundered in many ways (Prucha, 1986). This disastrous policy was eventually overturned.

3. See their very brief comments on non-democracies (Pasternak, 2013, p. 380; Stilz, 2011, p. 207; Thompson, 2006, p. 163).

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Notes on contributors

Jeff Spinner-Halev

Jeff Spinner-Halev is the Kenan Eminent Professor of Political Ethics in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Enduring Injustice (Cambridge University Press). He is currently working on the idea of equality and respect.