Reconsidering Reparations by Olúfẹ́Mi O. Táíwò

Author:Olúfẹ́Mi O. Táíwò
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

What Relationship Repair Views Are

Relationship repair views the task of reparations to be fixing damaged relationships: typically between the aggrieved party (and/or those who inherit their identity) and the aggrieving party (and/or those who inherit that identity). Authors making these arguments often frame relationship repair views as a response to the difficulties with harm repair arguments, including the nasty philosophical problem of identifying the right contrast class.

Relationship repair views often assume a different conception of harm than the view based on welfare that harm repair arguments tend to use. Whatever else slavery and colonialism are responsible for, they involved significant moral wrongdoing. Wrongdoing involves a violation of justified moral expectations. Wrongdoing can be considered a kind of moral harm, but it doesn’t depend on the welfare comparisons that bogged us down in the previous section. If your friend promises to take you to a movie and never shows up, she has wronged you, even if it would’ve turned out that you didn’t like the movie anyway.81 People can also be harmed by the imposition of conditions that they would not rationally will or are reasonably alienated from.82 Racial discrimination and disrespect as experienced by much of the Black world, to the extent that these owe their character to slavery and colonialism, qualify as moral harm, even in the case of Black folks whose material standard of welfare is high.

Relationship repair is rooted in this way of thinking about harm; it can include things that would show up as harm on a welfare-based account, but the baseline is a set of absolute moral principles that, unlike a welfare baseline, do not require defining and measuring specific historical phenomena. The various wrongdoings of slavery damaged the moral relations that should sustain political and moral community between differently positioned inheritors of the moral legacy of slavery. Reparation, then, is about fixing these relationships.

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