Supersession-Proof Reparations: Harms, Wrongs, and Historical Injustice

Abstract

There is widespread intuition that historical injustices require some form of redress. Despite this intuition, redress for historical injustice encounters significant philosophical problems. In this article, I defend the possibility of redress from one particular philosophical problem: the supersession thesis the supersession thesis. According to the supersession thesis, circumstances may have changed between the historical injustice and the present such that present demands of justice override or “supersede” demands of redress for the historical injustice. I argue that the ways we can respond to the supersession thesis inform the kind of model of redress that we ought to adopt in cases of historical injustice. A recent strategy to defend the possibility of redress from the supersession thesis is to distinguish between claims of restitution and reparation. However, if we use a popular model of redress that makes injuries a necessary condition to generate a claim to redress, using this distinction to avoid the supersession thesis encounters two further problems: the nonidentity problem and the causal problem. I argue that if we instead adopt a model on which claims to redress are generated by the wrong of the injustice, then we avoid these problems and can overcome the supersession thesis. This means that if we want a model of redress that overcomes the supersession thesis, it must be based on wrongs, not on injuries.