Reparations Will Not Empower Justice
As Kamala Harris declares herself open to paying reparations for slavery in a desperate bid to win more black voters, the debate about redressing historical injustices has been once again reignited. California has passed a raft of new proposals “as part of a reparations legislative package” with policies on education, housing, and criminal justice for the benefit of black people. New York has created a commission to study the harms caused by slavery with a view to paying reparations. In Oklahoma a commission has been set up “to study how reparations can be made.”
Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the Church of England is making plans to fund reparations for slavery.
The Church of England should create a fund of 1 billion pounds ($1.27 billion) to address its historic links to slavery, an advisory panel said Monday. That’s 10 times the amount the church previously set aside.
An independent oversight group established by the church said a 100-million-pound fund announced last year was insufficient compared to the wealth of the church and “the moral sin and crime of African chattel enslavement.”
The arguments in support of paying reparations are based on the principle that slavery is wrong, and therefore someone ought to make restitution and right that historical wrong. But little attention is paid to the question of who should now pay to redress historical wrongs and why that person should be held liable for historical crimes. The applicable principle here is that of individual responsibility—no one is responsible for the crimes of another and, therefore, no innocent person should be forced to pay for historical wrongs. David Gordon, discussing the case of Germany paying reparations for Hitler’s crimes, cites with approval the Welsh philosopher H.D. Lewis who said:
If I were asked to put forward an ethical principle which I considered to be especially certain, it would be that no one can be responsible, in the properly ethical sense, for the conduct of another. Responsibility belongs essentially to the individu
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