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.

Janna Thompson has outlined ‘the apology paradox’, which arises whenever people apologize for an action or event upon which their existence is causally dependent. She argues that a sincere apology seems to entail a wish that the action or event had not occurred, but that we cannot sincerely wish that events upon which our existence depends had not occurred. I argue that Thompson’s paradox is a backward-looking version of Parfit’s (forward-looking) ‘non-identity problem’, where backward- and forward-looking refer to the perspective (...) of an agent apologizing for or contemplating an action. The temporal perspective of the agent gives us the tools with which to dissolve the air of paradox which surrounds these problems. Each is best grasped from one temporal perspective, but the para- doxes arise when we attempt to examine it simultaneously from another. The evaluations appropriate to the apology paradox and the non-identity problem are therefore time-indexed. (shrink)

Slavery harmed the slaves but not their descendants since slavery brought about their existence. The descendants gain the slaves’ claims via inheritance. However, collecting the inheritance-based claim runs into a number of difficulties. First, every descendant usually has no more than a portion of the slave’s claim because the claim is often divided over generations. Second, there are epistemic difficulties involving the ownership of the claim since it is unlikely that a descendant of a slave several generations removed would have (...) retained the claim of inheritance given the loss of wealth and disinheritance that often characterizes families. There are also problems in determining the amount of inheritance. This is in part because of the problems of calculating in the effects of offsets, especially crime-related offsets, which are owed by a significant portion of the descendants. Even if this inheritance claim can be established with sufficient confidence certain entities may not be asked to pay it. The federal government does not owe compensation since as a historical matter it permitted but did not cause enslavement. The beneficiaries of slavery do not owe compensation since merely receiving the benefit of an unjust activity does not by itself generate a debt of compensation. When combined these problems constitute an overwhelming case against reparations. (shrink)

Important lessons must be learned from the Bristol inquiryI was disturbed when I first read the following in an October 1998 issue of the Medical Journal of Australia."In June 1998, the Professional Conduct Committee of the General Medical Council of the United Kingdom concluded the longest running case it has considered [this] century. Three medical practitioners were accused of serious professional misconduct relating to 29 deaths in 53 paediatric cardiac operations undertaken at the Bristol Royal Infirmary between 1988 and 1995. (...) All three denied the charges but, after 65 days of evidence over eight months , all three were found guilty." "The doctors concerned are Mr James Wisheart, a paediatric and adult cardiac surgeon and the former Medical Director of the United Bristol Healthcare Trust; Mr Janardan Dhasmana, paediatric and adult cardiac surgeon; and Dr John Roylance, a former radiologist, and Chief Executive of the Trust." "The central allegations were that the Chief Executive and the Medical Director allowed to be carried out, and the two paediatric cardiac surgeons carried out, operations on children knowing that the mortality rates for these operations, in the hands of these surgeons, were high. Furthermore, the surgeons were accused of not communicating to the parents the correct risk of death for these operations in their hands.1"Mr Wisheart and Dr Roylance were subsequently struck off the medical register. Mr Dhasmana was disqualified from practising paediatric cardiac surgery for three years. The doctors required police protection as they left the General Medical Council hearing as furious parents shouted “murderer” and “bastard”.2Why did this occur?Dr Stephen Bolsin has presented a …. (shrink)

I argue that institutions charged with giving justice must understand responsibility in terms of norms governing what people are entitled to expect of each other. On this conception, the sort of responsibility that is of interest to private law or distributive justice is not a relation between a person and the consequence, but rather a relation between persons with respect to consequences. As a result, nonrelational facts about a person’s actions and the circumstances in which she performs them will never (...) settle the questions of responsibility that matter to institutions charged with giving justice. I show the significance of this way of thinking about responsibility by contrasting it with prominent conceptions of responsibility which suppose that its moral significance derives from the ways in which an individual person acts in the world. I demonstrate its power by focussing on cases in which responsibility is widely agreed to run out in ways that non-relational conceptions of responsibility cannot explain. (shrink)