Should America pay reparations to the descendants of American slaves? Perhaps unsurprisingly, American blacks and whites are sharply divided on this question. According to one poll, 74% of black Americans say yes; just 15% of whites agree (https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/28/us/reparations-poll-trnd/index.html). Let’s consider the philosophical arguments on both sides.
An Insanely Awful Argument
Let’s start with the terrible argument:
Whites enslaved Blacks; in general, when you wrongfully harm someone, you owe them compensation; therefore, Whites owe Blacks compensation for enslaving them.
The problem: this argument is obviously, crudely racist (which doesn’t mean a lot of people don’t subscribe to it!). It depends upon reifying races, treating them as moral agents, and then subjugating actual, individual people to the claims of ‘races’.
It’s not that “the white race” wronged “the black race”. Certain individuals wronged certain other individuals. The enslavers are all dead now, as are the people they enslaved; therefore, there is no prospect for the people who actually owed compensation to pay it to the people whom they wronged. Having a similar skin color to someone who committed a crime does not make you guilty of that crime. Obviously.
Aside: We often hear about “white guilt”, which appears to be a real phenomenon – that white people feel guilty for slavery, etc. This is also crudely racist. It is similar to the Nazi view that “Jews” (or the Jewish race) were culpable for killing Jesus, and therefore all Jews should be punished for that. If you see the irrationality of that idea, apply the same point to “whites”.
A Better Argument
There is a much better argument, which I got from David Boonin (in the ms. of Should Race Matter?; but I don't promise that the following restatement doesn't contain errors).
In the better argument for reparations, compensation would be owed to (most?) contemporary African Americans. The harms they would be compensated for would not be the harm of slavery that previous generations suffered. It would be harms that they themselves are suffering today. Contemporary blacks in America have, on average, worse outcomes on a number of dimensions than other Americans – they are poorer, have lower life expectancy, are more likely to be crime victims, less likely to complete college, etc.
Why would the government owe compensation for that? Because,
(a) The U.S. government was largely responsible for slavery. It helped to legally enforce slavery, in addition to state governments. (Of course, the individual slave owners were also responsible, but none of them are around anymore.) It also legally enforced segregation, etc.
(b) The harms suffered by contemporary African Americans that we just listed are probably (partly) the legacy of slavery (and segregation, etc.). If these harms are at least in significant measure an after-effect of wrongful government policies, then the government owes some significant amount of compensation.
Two Weak Objections
Here are two objections that libertarians might be tempted by:
1. The Individualist Objection: The original people in government who helped to enforce slavery are no longer alive. The individuals in today’s government aren’t responsible for slavery, so the government shouldn’t pay for it.
Reply:? The debts incurred by the U.S. government are generally held to survive a change in personnel in the government. Compare the case where a company issues a 30-year bond. 30 years later, the company has to pay it off, even if completely different personnel are in the company then.
2. The Anti-Tax Objection: Maybe the government does have such a debt, but there is no way for it to pay that debt except by stealing the money from innocent taxpayers, which would be wrong.
Reply: Are you sure you want to go that way, Mr./Ms. Libertarian? That means that when the government wrongs someone, the government should not pay compensation, since that compensation would always have to come from stolen money. So ... all lawsuits against the government should be dismissed?
Three Stronger Objections
3. The Non-Identity Problem: No person alive today was harmed by slavery, unless that person’s life is so bad that they would be better off not existing. If slavery had never been introduced to America, the entire history of this continent after that would have been completely different. Different people would have met at different times, etc., so that by now, hundreds of years later, an entirely distinct group of individuals would exist. So as long as your life is overall worthwhile, slavery benefited you. (That is also true of every event that happened a long time ago.)
Possible Reply: One could dispute the implicit account of harm there (x harms you only if x leaves you worse off than you would be if x had not happened). Maybe an event can harm you, say, by initiating a causal chain where the last member of that chain is some intrinsically negative (unpleasant, etc.) experience of yours. That could happen even if at the end you are overall better off than you would be if x hadn’t happened.
Complication: How do you identify what is an intrinsically negative event? It’s not clear one could claim having a lower income than the average white American as an intrinsic harm.
4. Mitigation: After suffering a tort committed by someone else, you, the victim, should still take reasonable steps to mitigate the harm that you suffer. If you fail to do so, then you can’t blame all the harm on the perpetrator. You can only claim compensation for the amount of harm you would have suffered if you had mitigated it as much as reasonably possible. So even if contemporary African Americans are suffering harms caused by slavery, they could only claim compensation for the amount of harm they would be suffering if they minimized the harm as much as reasonably possible. (E.g., by finishing school, taking advantage of funds that support minority students going to college, etc.)
5. Proximate Cause: In tort law, you are only responsible for compensating for harms that you “proximately” caused. This has something to do with the harm being a reasonably direct and foreseeable consequence of your action, and/or being the sort of harm whose risk was what made your action wrongful. This is also plausible as an ethical doctrine.
At the time the U.S. government enforced slavery, it could not reasonably have been expected to anticipate social consequences five generations later. It could not, e.g., anticipate that there would be higher rates of incarceration for drug-related offenses in the year 2020, nor was that possibility part of what made it wrong to enforce slavery in the 1800’s.
Notice that without some version of the proximacy condition, just about every long-lived organization would become liable for just about every bad thing that happens.
Take any distant past event. There’s going to be a causal chain from that event to, say, the event of me writing this blog post now, and it’s going to be true that if that past event didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post. The whole world would be radically different. (See chaos theory, and #3 above.) Since you can say that in general about any present event, you can also say that any wrongful past action is causally connected to any present-day harm.
Presumably, we don’t want to say that any organization that committed any wrongful action a long time ago is liable for every present-day harm. That is why we need a “proximate cause” condition, as maintained in tort law doctrine.