Structural transformation and reparative obligation: Reinterpreting the beneficiary pays principle

Unredressed injustices in national and global history raise important normative questions. These questions are highlighted by the growing chorus of voices in public and academic discourse calling for agents, especially those in the Global North, to recognize and redress the major injustices of their past, most notably colonialism, chattel slavery, and segregation.1 One is the justification question: do (some) present-day agents have moral obligations to redress historical injustice, and if so, on what moral grounds? Another is the content question: assuming that reparative obligations are justified, what exactly do they obligate (some) present-day agents to do? One prominent view in the philosophical literature responding to these questions is centered on the Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP).2 Proponents of the BPP have argued that some present-day agents have a moral obligation to redress historical injustices that they themselves did not commit because they enjoy material benefits—wealth, property, and other such resources—as a result of these injustices. Since these benefits were originally acquired unjustly, their contemporary inheritors ought to relinquish them, not just because they lack any legitimate claim to these resources, but also because by retaining these resources they are perpetuating the effects of injustice. This answers the justification question. The BPP also suggests an answer to the content question. While some present-day agents enjoy material benefits from historical injustices, others correspondingly suffer material harms.3 It is thus morally legitimate to redistribute the relinquished resources of present-day beneficiaries of a historical injustice toward its present-day victims—even if that redistribution can only partially approximate the holdings that present-day victims would have enjoyed had the historical injustice never occurred.4 Altogether, the BPP offers an account of one familiar approach to past wrongdoing, namely the provision of material compensation or reparations. Indeed, proponents of the BPP contend that the principle is appealing because it avoids many of the thorny moral and epistemic challenges against reparations for major historical injustices.5 But reparations, so understood, is notably removed from a more radical approach to historical injustice proposed by some recent social movements for racial equality and postcolonial global justice. These proposals demand the egalitarian transformation of present-day social structures in order to undo the unjust social, political, and economic legacies of colonialism, slavery, segregation, and so forth.6 In alignment with this vision, some philosophical accounts have argued for a structural approach to historical injustice: because many present-day injustices are products of major historical injustices like colonialism and slavery, a full and proper remedy to such historical injustices requires addressing present-day injustices which are their structural legacies.7 The structural approach thus argues for significantly expanding the content of present-day agents' reparative obligations to include remedying various structural injustices that exist today. The structural approach, however, faces theoretical problems regarding the justification and in turn distribution of these reparative obligations. These problems are most clearly on display in Iris Marion Young's foundational account of responsibility for structural injustice. Young argues that present-day agents have a moral obligation to address structural injustices insofar as they participate in the social structures that produce them: because our participation is what sustains the social structures that produce structural injustices, we are responsible for ensuring that these structures are more just going forward.8 But this line of reasoning faces two problems as an approach to historical injustice. First, it is unable to explain how installing more just social structures today amounts to redressing historical injustices given that the obligation to enact such structural transformation is justified by present-day agents' participation in unjust social structures—not by a moral appeal to doing something about unredressed historical injustices.9 Second, it has implausibly wide-reaching implications for which agents have this obligation, at least from a historical injustice-oriented perspective. On this view, effectively everyone has an obligation to address present-day structural injustices since everyone participates in some way in unjust social structures.10 This obligation thus extends in equal measure to present-day descendants of both victims and perpetrators of historical injustices, for example, the descendants of both slaves and slave-owners alike. But surely the victims are the ones to whom redress for historical injustice is owed—not the ones who owe redress to others. If it is to avoid these problems, the structural approach needs to provide an alternative answer to the justification question. This article develops a novel view in the historical injustice debate that aims to incorporate insights from both the reparations approach and the structural approach while avoiding their respective problems. I call this view Radical Reparations. The key innovation is a reinterpretation of the BPP and how some present-day agents can be said to benefit from major historical injustices. Unlike existing BPP-based views, Radical Reparations contends that the relevant benefits are not (just) material resources like wealth and property but (also) positions of power and privilege within contemporary social structures, structures which are the legacies of historical injustices like colonialism and slavery. Agents who receive these benefits have reparative obligations to redress those historical injustices. Since these benefits cannot be simply relinquished and redistributed, however, the content of these reparative obligations takes a different form than material redistribution in Radical Reparations: beneficiaries must transform these power-conferring and privilege-conferring social structures via enacting structural reforms. Beneficiaries thus have backward-looking reparative obligations to support and enact egalitarian structural reforms today. Radical Reparations is thus broadly aligned with the reparations approach on the justification and in turn distribution of reparative obligations among present-day agents by appealing to the BPP, but it is broadly aligned with the structural approach by specifying the content of those obligations in terms of addressing present-day structural injustices. On this hybrid view, the gap between the reparations and the structural approaches is perhaps not as wide as some have argued11: present-day beneficiaries should support structural reforms because they have reparative obligations to address the unjust benefits of major historical injustices. This view, I further suggest, enjoys theoretical advantages over other views that have tried to hybridize the reparation and structural approaches by appealing to the liability of corporate agents, for example, the state, for historical injustices.12 The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 critically reviews the reparations approach, focusing on the BPP, and argues that the existing discussion overlooks the different kinds of moral wrongs involved in major historical injustices as well as their lasting structural legacies. Section 3 examines the structural approach and contends that despite its richer understanding of historical injustices, existing accounts lack a sufficiently backward-looking justification for the structural reforms they propose and thus face significant problems as an approach to historical injustice. Section 4 introduces Radical Reparations and argues that it can overcome these problems. Section 5 discusses two objections to Radical Reparations, one from the structural approach and the other from the reparations approach. Section 6 concludes. Notably, this article presents a conditional argument, for the philosophical and empirical issues surrounding historical injustice are numerous and complex. The justification question—whether present-day agents do in fact have moral obligations to redress historical injustices—is a hotly contested issue, and I cannot review all of the counterarguments here.13 Similarly, the content question—what is required to fulfill those moral obligations, assuming that they are morally justified—is in part an empirical question, one that philosophical investigation is not well-equipped to answer with due specificity, especially if structural reform is on the table. The article does not aim to offer a comprehensive answer to these questions. The more modest goal is to defend the following conditional claim: if the BPP is a plausible justificatory principle for assigning reparative obligations to present-day agents, and if major historical injustices like colonialism and slavery have had lasting structural ramifications, then there is a plausible view that brings together the reparations and structural approaches to historical injustice while avoiding their respective weaknesses. Two questions form the nexus of philosophical discussions of reparations. I will refer to them as Who Pays and Pay What. Who Pays asks: which agents have moral obligations to provide reparations for historical injustices, and relatedly, which agents should be compensated? Who Pays is a difficult question to answer for historical injustices insofar as the original perpetrators are often long gone, which means the usual rationale for assigning reparative obligations (“You did this, so you better fix it!”) is inapplicable to present-day agents. Pay What asks: what exactly is the kind and amount of compensation owed for historical injustices? Pay What is a difficult question for historical injustices because popular accounts of compensation are difficult to apply to injustices that occurred long ago, for various reasons.14 For reparations to be morally justified and practicable, Who Pays and Pay What (which correspond to the justification and content questions, respectively) must be answered. Several philosophers, most prominently Daniel Butt and Robert Goodin, have proposed the BPP as an answer to both questions.15 Its core thesis is that present-day individuals who enjoy the tainted material benefits of historical injustices, including unjustly acquired wealth, property, and other such resources, have reparative obligations to relinquish these resources so that these resources can be redistributed to the victims of historical injustices and their descendants. These reparative obligations are justified because present-day beneficiaries of historical injustices have no moral claim to resources that were initially acquired by unjust means; by retaining these resources, present-day beneficiaries perpetuate the unjust distributive effects of past wrongs. Redressing past wrongs thus requires that beneficiaries relinquish these tainted resources. The BPP thus offers these answers to Who Pays and Pay What: the present-day beneficiaries of historical injustices are obligated to pay for material reparations, and what they are obligated to pay is precisely the amount of material benefits that they have gained as a result of these historical injustices. These answers invite further questions and challenges. One immediate question is how to determine who exactly has materially benefited from historical injustices and to what extent. This is no easy question for major historical injustices, the economic effects of which were highly complex. Hilary Beckles argues that the spoils of Britain's exploitation of the Caribbean fueled economic development back in Britain, tracing a ripple effect from the slave trade and sugar plantation industry in the Caribbean to major sectors of the domestic British economy, for example, ship manufacturing and metallurgy.16 The growth of these sectors presumably had ripple effects of their own. Thus, by her lights, even the poorest laborer in Britain benefited to some extent from Britain's exploitation of the Caribbean. Similar points can be made about other major historical injustices like slavery. Such complex economic effects imply that determining who materially benefited from historical injustices with any exactitude is a quite difficult task in most cases. The clearest application of the BPP would seem to be limited to a narrow class of cases, namely ones where the tainted origins of specific properties or resources are well documented and subsequent transfers of those properties or resources have left a clear paper trail.17 Furthermore, even assuming that the relevant present-day beneficiaries can be identified, appealing to material benefits leaves the BPP wide open to a skeptical challenge as to the broader justifiability of reparations for major historical injustices. Suppose one holds, as many philosophers do, a counterfactual view of benefits (and harms): an agent benefits (or is harmed) from an interaction with another agent whenever their level of welfare is higher (or lower) than it would have been had the interaction not occurred.18 This view of benefit motivates a well-known objection to reparations, namely that major historical injustices actually benefited some, if not all, members of the “victimized” group, for instance by spurring economic trade and development—as a few historians have claimed about Britain's colonial legacy in India.19 Reparations in such cases, some argue, are morally unjustified given that these individuals would be materially worse off today than they would have been had these historical injustices never happened.20 Proponents of the BPP might offer various replies: these sorts of claims are based on historically and economically flawed assumptions,21 the counterfactual view can be salvaged by using a morally idealized counterfactual,22 the beneficiaries still ought to relinquish tainted resources for publicly beneficial ends even if some victims have materially benefited,23 and so forth. Whether these replies are successful is a matter for further discussion, but the important point here is that the challenge arises because the BPP appeals to material benefits to justify reparative obligations. Finally, there is a question about the adequacy of the BPP as a means of redressing historical injustice. The basic issue is that the value of tainted benefits today may not necessarily be equivalent to the harm that descendants of the victims suffer today. For example, a piece of dispossessed Indigenous land might have become barren and unproductive over time due to harmful environmental practices; relinquishing and returning that land, one might argue, would hardly amount to an adequate form of redress to the dispossessed people. This possibility speaks to the broader point that the actions of agents that occurred after the initial unjust acquisition matters for reparations.24 Note that the problem can run in the other direction as well, leading to another skeptical challenge to the justifiability of reparations: it may turn out that the material benefits of some present-day agents stem largely from what they did with these tainted resources, rather than the resources themselves. In such cases, relinquishing those material benefits overcompensates for historical injustice; indeed, this line of reasoning calls into question the very claim that the resources of some present-day agents count as the “benefits” of historical injustice.25 Given these problems, one might conclude that the BPP is not a plausible answer to historical injustice; if, as some have argued, the BPP is the best available version of the reparations approach, then perhaps reparations for major historical injustices are unjustified and impracticable. But, I want to suggest a different, more optimistic diagnosis: these problems with the BPP can be avoided by abandoning certain mistaken assumptions about the nature of historical injustice. More specifically, current accounts of the BPP proceed from an unduly narrow understanding of major historical injustices such as colonialism and slavery as (1) distributive wrongs that (2) lie squarely in the past. There are good reasons to reject both assumptions, as several philosophers who defend a structural injustice-based approach to historical injustice have argued. Understanding those reasons points the way toward a reinterpretation of the BPP that might rescue it from these particular problems. Consider first the assumption that these historical injustices are essentially distributive in nature, such that the relevant and lingering effects of these injustices to be repaired today are distributions of resources. Given this starting point, the remedy to historical injustice inevitably takes the form of calculating the damages and benefits of each incident of past expropriation, totaling up the damages and benefits and translating them into their equivalent in present-day material holdings, and ensuring that those holdings are used to compensate the victims for the lingering damages of historical injustice. Reparations turns out to be a spreadsheet problem. Historical injustice, on this view, begins with past maldistribution and ends with present-day redistribution. This focus on the distribution of resources ignores the many significant nondistributive dimensions of historical injustices, as emphasized in many first-hand accounts by victims of their lived experiences under colonialism and racism.26 To name but a few: W.E.B. DuBois describes the Black experience of misrecognition and nonrecognition in a white dominated society as one of “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”27 Frantz Fanon describes the alienation involved in the experience of colonialism through a story about a French child who points to him and exclaims “Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!”—the emptiness of being seen as an “object among other objects” in the world, rather than a person.28 Chief Standing Bear describes the rapid decline of the Sioux culture and the ensuing cultural disorientation of his tribe in the wake of US settler-colonial expansion in the late 19th century.29 Gandhi discusses what he perceives as the moral bankrupting of India by Western civilization and its promises of material wealth, a trade that comes at the cost of spiritual fulfillment.30 These are not worries about distributions of resources; rather, they speak to moral values like self-respect, social standing, cultural survival and recognition, and self-determination, values that continue to significantly inform the demands and complaints of social movements for racial equality and postcolonial global justice.31 Assuming that the victims of historical injustices have some authority over the relevant harms of these wrongs, one should worry that historical injustices like colonialism, slavery, and segregation cannot be adequately understood and assessed merely in distributive terms.32 Consider now the assumption that major historical injustices like colonialism and slavery are straightforwardly past injustices—hence the fixation with the problem of calculating the correct amount of damages that they inflict-ed. This is a far too simplistic view of history. These injustices did not simply disappear one day, leaving behind only a skewed distribution of material resources; old wrongs persist in new forms within present-day structures and institutions which were shaped by these injustices and in some cases literally grew out of them.33 Take colonialism: Kwame Nkrumah argues that the formal end of European colonialism in the 20th century only inaugurated an era of “neo-colonialism” in which former colonial powers continue to “perpetuate colonialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom’.”34 Or take slavery: Michelle Alexander emphasizes the institutional continuities from American slavery to Jim Crow to present-day mass incarceration (e.g., that some modern day police departments originated as slave patrols), comprising “a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.”35 These views invite a different understanding of major ‘historical’ injustices that urges greater recognition the various ways in which wrongs like colonialism and slavery have had lasting institutional and structural ramifications. If persistent disparities between the descendants of the victims of historical injustice and the descendants of its perpetrators originate not just in ill-gotten resources in the past but also in recurring structural injustices leading up to the present, then simply asking what reparations are owed for, say, slavery alone will miss an inevitable part of the phenomenon that ought to be redressed, even on a purely distributive view of historical injustice. In reality, Black Americans are owed compensation for a number of overlapping racial injustices including, but not limited to, the enslavement of their ancestors.36 In short, due to their assumptions about the nature of major historical injustices, current applications of the BPP fail to do justice to their subject matter. The harms and benefits of major historical injustices extend material the institutional and structural legacies of these injustices into the that it is to of them as straightforwardly past wrongs. These assumptions the BPP to an unduly narrow view of the content of reparative obligations for major historical injustices, namely that present-day beneficiaries ought to relinquish the tainted resources they due to past But what can be to redress these historical injustices? This question brings to an alternative of what redressing historical injustice the structural approach. The structural approach presents a different, more of redress for historical injustices. On this approach, the proper to historical injustice is not material resources but contemporary unjust social this basic however, its proponents significantly in the This will critically the structural approach by the views of its Iris Marion and While they offer important insights into how historical injustice can and should be in ways that material redistribution content I that all of these views face problems and in turn present-day agents ought to redress historical injustice in these ways justification In her account of responsibility for structural injustice, Young that many contemporary injustices not because of the actions of specific agents but rather due to the of of individuals in existing structures and institutions through their of responsibility fail to provide in these cases because there seem to be no particular agents who are in the sense of being for the social that produce these unjust since these through the participation of a wide of agents. To this responsibility what calls the social on this who participate in the and of structural with unjust a responsibility to to transform those The social Young is rather than its aim is to agents who participate in unjust social structures to in order to structural reforms going rather than and agents for their past wrongs. its a question about this view as an approach to historical injustice. Given that its aim is to more just social structures going how does the social fulfill the backward-looking task of redressing historical injustice, of past Young answers that it does In her view, injustices in which the victims are now can never be the only form of responsibility that present-day agents for historical injustices like slavery is to ensure that these injustices are in we the Historical injustices only the social in an epistemic and Young for successful structural transformation requires to the and how the are how those structures have and where to them may be most In Young's view, redress for historical injustices proper should be in of unjust social structures today. broadly this view in her account of global justice and for colonialism and other major injustices in world history. the social in important for example, argues that agents who fail to fulfill their responsibility to reform unjust social structures are for this and can reparative obligations to victims of past wrongs in which those unjust social structures were thus together the and backward-looking dimensions of responsibility to Young's these Young in that in cases where the victims are the only responsibility of present-day agents is to that these wrongs occurred in order to of and among contemporary members of going proper account redress for major historical injustices such as slavery where the victims are redress for historical injustices should be by the of unjust social structures going responsibility for which is by all contemporary agents who participate in it to the complex structural of many contemporary injustices, the social faces two problems as an approach to historical injustice. The first its which in view or overlooks how unjust structures today can a kind of redress for historical injustice. It is that can be for the victims of past wrongs. major historical injustices like colonialism and slavery have had lasting effects on our social via their on the historical development of social agents a responsibility to reform contemporary social structures so that they are more of this task the of structural legacies of One might that unjust structures today is a way of redressing historical injustices, at least in the following just as material reparations aim to the lingering distributive effects of historical injustices, structural reforms can be seen as a means of the lingering of historical injustices on our social structural reforms can (also) a backward-looking and addressing the structural legacies of historical injustices that unjust for certain today. The problem the distribution of responsibility in the social On the social all agents who participate in unjust social structures have a responsibility to reform them in of their in structural are made between agents who suffer from and contemporary agents who benefit from the unjust social structures which are the structural legacies of historical injustices. Indeed, the of beneficiaries in a structural injustice rather, we should contemporary agents involved in an unjust social as from different kinds of More specifically, who enjoy social positions that are by historically structural injustices are morally by those those who suffer structural that are from past injustices are in a different The social thus what one might call a distribution of all agents, of how they are in unjust social structures, are responsible for structural reforms given their participation in these its advantages for the aim of collectively unjust social structures, I that this distribution is to the backward-looking task of redressing historical injustices. On the social some of the

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