Responsibility for Past Injustice: How to Shift the Burden

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 2, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 165-190

  Kukathas, Chandran ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES   (Australia)

Author keywords

aborigines; history; injustice; justice; responsibility

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248049549     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: 17413060     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X03002002002     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. See Arthur Ripsetin, ‘Equality, Luck and Responsibility’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 23(1994): 23.
2. Jeremy Waldron puts a powerful case for ‘moving on’, arguing that a range of considerations makes compensation for past injustice not just impractical, but also implausible. See Jeremy Waldron, ‘Superseding Historic Injustice’, Ethics 103 (1992): 4-28.
3. For an analysis of the notion of ‘fault’, see Joel Feinberg, ‘Sua Culpa’, in Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 187–221, especially pp. 195–221.
4. Why desert matters is a large topic. For a defence of its importance, and an account of its place in moral and political theory, see George Sher, Desert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), especially Ch. 11.
5. For a clear, if somewhat abstract, account of this problem, see George Sher, ‘Ancient Wrongs and Modern Rights’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 10(1980): 11-13.
6. This is the case, for example, among the Kirene people of Senegal. See Maureen Mackintosh, Gender, Class and Rural Transition: Agribusiness and the Food Crisis in Senegal (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1989), pp. 64–6.
7. For an argument defending this view, see David Lyons, ‘The New Indian Claims and Original Rights to Land’ in Reading Nozick: Essays on Anarchy, State and Utopia, edited by Jeffrey Paul (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 355–79.
8. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).
9. See Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), p. 69. ‘The irrationally expensive funerals and wakes on which [19th-century English] labourers insisted as a traditional tribute to the dead and communal affirmation of the living were incomprehensible to a middle class…. The first benefit paid by a trade union and friendly society was almost invariably funeral benefit.’ This is quoted in Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 201.
10. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 195.
11. On this see also Robert Manne, The Culture of Forgetting (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1996).
12. The work of Will Kymlicka has been especially important here since he has attempted to give theoretical expression to the distinctiveness of the claims of indigenous peoples, as contrasted with the claims of other minorities in a culturally diverse society. See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
13. I have argued this a greater length in ‘Without Oppression or Disputation: Aboriginal Identity and the Origins and Growth of the Protest Movement of the 1960s’, B.A. Honours Thesis (Australian National University, 1978).
14. Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Native Title Report July 1996-June 1997 (Commonwealth of Australia, 1997), p. 16.
15. Thus James Anaya argues that ‘The cultural suffocation historically experienced by Native Americans and other indigenous peoples around the world, along with other multiple effects of colonialism, have left indigenous peoples with deep wounds which manifest themselves in social, political, economic, as well as cultural spheres’. See James Anaya, ‘On Justifying Special Ethnic Group Rights: Comments on Pogge’, in Ethnicity and Group Rights, edited by Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka, NOMOS XXXIX (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 229.
16. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), especially Ch. 2.
17. Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 120.
18. See on this Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
19. Scruton, Meaning of Conservatism, p. 202. Scruton adds: ‘They can no more resist the “why”? of reason, than a parent can resist the withering reproaches of his child’.
20. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
21. Patrick Dodson and Frank Brennan, ‘The Way Forward’, Eureka Street 7(1): 27.
22. For an especially helpful discussion of this point, with illustrative examples, see Robert E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of our Social Responsibilities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 134–44.
23. See Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. I have criticized this view in Chandran Kukathas, ‘Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Oppression’, in Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity, edited by Andrew Vincent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 132–53, especially 141-9. But see also Iris Marion Young, ‘Deferring Group Representation’, in Ethnicity and Group Rights, edited by Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka, NOMOS XXXIX (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 349–76.
24. Richard Mulgan, ‘A Race Relations Lesson from Across the Tasman’, Australian Quarterly 68(2): p. 85.
25. Barry Hindess, Politics and Class Analysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 110.
26. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable, p. 138.
27. C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Ringwood: Penguin, 1974), p. 96.
28. See C.D. Rowley, A Matter of Justice (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1981), p. 165.
29. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, p. 159.
30. The example comes from Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Native Title Report July 1996-June 1997, p. 26.
31. Renée A. Hill, ‘Compensatory Justice: Over Time and Between Groups’, Journal of Political Philosophy 10(4): 414.
32. This has been argued by Rowley, Destruction of Aboriginal Society. For a more general analysis of this aspect of state activity, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
33. On this see Scott Bennett, Aborigines and Political Power (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989).
34. It must, however, be conceded that victory in the courts did not come immediately. Earlier appeals were unsuccessful, notably the Gove Land Rights case in 1970. For a brief discussion, see C. Kukathas, ‘Cultural Rights in Australia’, in New Developments in Australian Politics, edited by B. Galligan, I. McAllister and J. Raven (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 167–79, especially pp. 168–70.