Abstract

There is widespread intuition that historical injustices require some form of redress. Yet despite this intuition, redress for historical injustice encounters significant philosophical problems. In this paper, I defend the possibility of redress from one particular philosophical problem: The Supersession Thesis (ST). According to ST, 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 ST 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 ST 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 ST 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 ST. This means that if we want a model of redress that overcomes ST it must be one based on wrongs and not injuries.