Analyzes the historic correlation of injustice and moral judgments. Universalizability in analyzing moral judgments; Role of payment of money in the embodiment of communal remembrance; Symbolic reparation.

This paper addresses the question of whether a statute of limitations on injustice is morally justified. Rectificatory justice calls for the ascription of a right to rectification once an injustice has been perpetrated. To claim a moral statute of limitations on injustice is to claim a temporal limit on the moral legitimacy of rights to rectification. A moral statute of limitations on injustice (hereafter MSOL) establishes an amount of time following injustice after which claims of rectification can no longer be (...) valid. Such a statute would put a time limit on the life of moral rights to rectification. Since ascribing a right to rectification for an injustice is a requirement of justice, and since the temporal limit called for by a moral statute of limitations on injustice is a constraint on that requirement, the idea of a statute of limitations on injustice is morally jutified only if we have good reasons for accepting this constraint. In “The Morality of a Moral Statute of Limitations on Injustice” I argued that neither the best arguments then extant in the philosophical literature, nor the arguments I proposed in favor of a MSOL, succeed in providing good reasons for accepting the idea as morally legitimate. I concluded, therefore, that a MSOL is not justified. Several discussions that have emerged since then suggest some support for a MSOL. My aim in this paper is to show that a MSOL remains unjustified by showing that none of the arguments arising from these discussions succeed. (shrink)

Ecological refugees are expected to make up an increasing percentage of overall refugees in the coming decades as predicted climate change related disasters will displace millions of people. In this essay, I focus on those rights ecological refugees may claim on the basis of collective self-determination. To this end, I will focus on a few specific cases that I call cases of ‘ecological refugee states’. Tuvalu, the Maldives, and to a certain extent, Bangladesh are predicted to be ecological refugee states (...) in the near future. These are states whose entire (or close to it) geographical territory is predicted to be lost to rising sea levels; the collective body of the people will itself become an ecological refugee.The question is: what may the people of an ecological refugee state legitimately claim on the basis of their right to self-determination? Should we redraw state borders to accommodate a New Tuvalu? I argue that a plausible position regarding territorial rights is that when (1) a people clearly is (or recently was) self-determining and has a legitimate claim to continue to be self-determining, and (2) the self-determination of a people is existentially threatened because the people lacks territorial rights, that (3) the people becomes a candidate for sovereign over a new territory. The result is that existing state borders may need to change to accommodate something like a New Tuvalu. To generate these results on behalf of ecological refugee states, I examine the principles of the system of territorial states. Because the system of territorial states is a system of exclusive rights over goods, especially land, it is possible that it is subject to the conditions of a Lockean proviso mechanism. This paper is dedicated mainly to adapting a version of the Lockean proviso for use in territorial rights theory. (shrink)