Felix Lambrecht

In a recent article, Alexander Motchoulski offers a novel relational egalitarian view of reparations for historical injustice. Motchoulski argues that we ought to prefer the relational egalitarian view to available harm and inheritance theories because it avoids epistemic uncertainty. I argue that Motchoulski’s theory involves ambiguity that limits it in avoiding this epistemic uncertainty. I offer an amendment to Motchoulski’s theory that insulates it from this ambiguity and epistemic uncertainty.

In a recent article, Alexander Motchoulski offers a novel _relational egalitarian view_ of reparations for historical injustice. Motchoulski argues that we ought to prefer the relational egalitarian view to available harm_ _and inheritance_ _theories because it avoids epistemic uncertainty. I argue that Motchoulski’s theory involves ambiguity that limits it in avoiding this epistemic uncertainty. I offer an amendment to Motchoulski’s theory that insulates it from this ambiguity and epistemic uncertainty.

Reparative justice for historical injustice concerns what present agents and societies must do to remedy past wrongs. Examples of historical injustice include the Holocaust, colonial violence and land expropriations, and chattel slavery in the United States. There is widespread intuition that these kinds of past wrongs require some form of reparation. However, because of the time that has passed between past wrongs and the present, explaining why reparative justice for these wrongs is possible encounters philosophical issues, including the nonidentity problem, the supersession thesis, issues of causal indeterminacy, question of personal identity, and questions of group responsibility. These issues have created many debates among philosophers about the ideal account that can best explain how reparative justice for historical injustice is possible. In this paper, I carve up the conceptual terrain of these debates. I present the different positions one could take for each major philosophical issue in concerning historical injustice, and I discuss their merits and drawbacks. To conclude, I sketch an account that offers what I take to be the most promising way forward for an account of reparations for historical injustice that best incorporates the insights from these debates.

Philosophers have recently argued that epistemic injustices require epistemic reparations. I draw attention to a particular kind of epistemic injustice: Epistemic moral remainders. Epistemic moral remainders are epistemic harms victims of epistemic injustices experience even if the goods the epistemic injustice interfered with have been restored. Available theories of epistemic reparations have tended to focus on establishing how reparations can restore the goods that the epistemic injustice interfered with. However, victims who experience epistemic remainders seem to be owed something even when the epistemic goods the injustice interfered with have been restored or are impossible to restore. So, we must supplement our theories of epistemic reparations to explain epistemic remainders. I develop a novel theory of reparative justice that can do this. I do so by turning to our fundamental principles of general reparative justice. Doing so, however, reveals a tension. Theories of reparative justice must choose between addressing the particular goods a wrong interfered with or the harms that result from a wrong. I offer a novel hybrid theory of reparations that avoids this tension. And, I use this hybrid theory to develop a theory of epistemic reparations that explains epistemic remainders.

There is a debate between Proponents and Skeptics about the epistemic value of travel. Proponents argue that there are normative reasons that speak in favour of travel based on the kinds of knowledge, beliefs, or other epistemically relevant features that we might acquire through travelling recreationally. Skeptics deny that travel provides distinctive epistemic value such as to give us normative reasons that speak in favour of it. In this paper we explore this debate. Our first goal is to clear up what is at stake. We argue that Proponents and Skeptics are arguing about whether travel has epistemic value that plays a moral justificatory function. There are the large moral costs to travel (e.g., environmental damage, over-tourism). So, there needs to be some normative reason that speaks in favour of travel that makes travel morally permissible. The debate about the epistemic value of travel is (partly) a debate about whether travel can provide value that could justify travel and make it permissible despite these costs. Our second goal is to provide an account of the epistemic value of travel that could at least potentially serve this justificatory function. We argue that leisure travel puts agents into a position in which they must consciously modify their default signal/noise processing. Put simply, travel provides epistemic value because it changes something about the agent and the way the agent processes information. Our account ultimately offers a middle point for both Proponents and Skeptics of the epistemic value of travel: It vindicates Proponents while still taking onboard the objections Skeptics offer.

Philosophers have offered many arguments to explain why historical injustices require reparations. This paper raises an unnoticed challenge for almost all of them. Most theories of reparations attempt to meet two intuitions: (1) reparations are owed for a past wrong and (2) the content of reparations must reflect the historical injustice. I argue that necessarily no monistic theory can meet both intuitions. I do this by showing that any theory that can meet intuition (1) necessarily cannot also meet intuition (2). This result suggests that a theory of reparations must either sacrifice one of the two intuitions or be pluralist. I argue that we ought to prefer the pluralist theory over the monistic theory. I sketch the pluralist theory, and I defend it by considering an objection about the way it can resolve conflicts.

There is widespread intuition that historical injustices require some form of redress. Despite this intuition, redress for historical injustice encounters significant philosophical problems. In this article, I defend the possibility of redress from one particular philosophical problem: the supersession thesis the supersession thesis. According to the supersession thesis, 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 the supersession thesis 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 the supersession thesis 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 the supersession thesis 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 the supersession thesis. This means that if we want a model of redress that overcomes the supersession thesis, it must be based on wrongs, not on injuries.

Niels de Haan (2023) defends the possibility of holding collectives morally responsible against a challenge posed by the problem of self-induced moral incapacity. Self-induced moral incapacity seems to introduce a responsibility gap that corporate agents might exploit to avoid responsibility. De Haan argues that the problem does not introduce responsibility gaps because collective moral agents become responsible for actions they committed while they were incapacitated once they reacquire moral capacity. I argue that de Haan’s argument is incomplete. Simply because a group reacquires moral capacity does not also necessarily mean that the group retains attributability for the wrongs in question. This means we must supplement de Haan’s argument with an Attributability Proviso: To overcome the problem of self-induced moral incapacity it must be the case that the group reacquires moral capacity and that we can still attribute the earlier actions to the group despite the changes that it has gone through.

There is widespread intuition that historical injustices require reparations. This paper considers one philosophical problem for reparations: the Nonidentity Objection. The Objection states that present agents are not owed reparations for historical injustices because without the historical injustice they would not exist. I show the Objection only challenges the possibility of reparations for historical injustice if we adopt a particular model of reparative justice that takes someone experiencing harms to be a necessary condition for reparative justice. Instead, if we adopt a different model of reparative justice based on relational wrongdoing, we can avoid the Objection. I defend my solution by considering the Nonidentity Objection in detail. I show that it challenges harm-based models of reparative justice regardless of the account of harm that the Objection uses. And I demonstrate that common objections to wrong-based solutions to the general nonidentity problem do not apply in the case of historical injustice. I conclude by sketching challenges my wrong-based model faces and argue that despite these challenges we ultimately have reason to prefer it over harm-based ones.

This paper discusses the pluralist theory of reparations for historical injustice offered by Daniel Butt (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24(5):1161–75, 2021). Butt attempts to vindicate purely past-regarding corrective duties in response to Alasia Nuti’s historical-structural model of reparations. I agree with Butt that reparative justice requires both past-regarding and future-looking structural duties. And I agree with him that Nuti’s model leaves out purely past-regarding duties. I argue, however, that Butt does not offer a genuinely pluralist account. I present minimal necessary conditions for past-regarding (corrective) justice and demonstrate that the past-regarding duties Butt advocates do not meet these conditions. The past-regarding duties Butt offers collapse into the kinds of distributive (structural) duties from which he attempts to separate them. Yet, I suggest these shortcomings are instructive and sketch a path forward for a genuinely pluralist account of reparations. A genuinely pluralist account must follow this path in order to vindicate the intuitions that motivate both past-regarding duties and the structural injustice model.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is booming, and AI ethics is booming with it. Yet there is surprisingly little attention paid to what the discipline of AI ethics is and what it ought to be. This paper offers an ameliorative definition of AI ethics to fill this gap. We introduce and defend an original distinction between novel and applied research questions. A research question should count as AI ethics if and only if (i) it is novel or (ii) it is applied and has gained new importance through the development of AI. We argue that a lack of such a definition contributes to six disciplinary problems: ethics washing and lobbying, limited applicability, dilution of the field, conceptual bloating, costs of AI ethics, and an internal dispute. Based on our definition, we construct a methodological framework for AI ethics and show how it helps address these problems.

Contemporary liberal states must provide an answer to the “question of cultural diversity”, requiring a principled way to determine which minority cultural practices a state must accommodate and support. (Liberal egalitarian) multiculturalism answers this question neatly by creating a dichotomy between national minorities and ethnic minorities (the national/ethnic “dichotomy”). Where national minorities are entitled to extensive and far-reaching cultural rights, ethnic minorities are entitled to significantly fewer cultural rights and accommodations. This dichotomy is enacted through a distributive logic that allocates cultural rights to achieve equal individual autonomy. But the dichotomy is also influenced by the ways these groups were incorporated into the state. Their modes of incorporation are different and, thus, they have different requirements to achieve equally autonomous lives. Critics have challenged multiculturalism by questioning this dichotomy. They have suggested that the dichotomy does not adequately capture differences in kinds of minority groups and their entitlements. This paper defends the dichotomy by offering a supplementary principle to liberal egalitarian multiculturalism: the reparative multicultural principle. This principle allocates cultural rights as part of reparative entitlements for historical and ongoing injustices committed against minority groups. Supplementing multiculturalism in this way more accurately captures the idea of the historical mode of incorporation that inspires the dichotomy and can help resolve some the objections to multiculturalism.