Did they forget to ask Biology department about this whole descendants number thing? I though they are a University, maybe they couldn't estimate the number outright, but at least some tiny thought at the back of their mind should have told them that even 1 person from 300 years ago can leave a lot of descendants. That's what 15-20 generations? Each potentially doubling in numbers.
belorn · 4h ago
There is a rather interesting historical person called Hans Jonatan (19th century) who was an escaped slave from a Danish colony, fled to the danish fleet, fought in the Battle of Copenhagen, and then fled to live in Iceland. Because of the very small amount of immigration from people with West African ancestry to Iceland, Hans has been the subject of fairly extensive Genetic study that found around 800 descendants.
eviks · 9h ago
> “At one point the fear was expressed that if we found too many descendants, it would bankrupt the university,” he said.
That doesn't make sense on its surface, what's the mechanism here? This is mentioned twice without any explanation
probably_wrong · 8h ago
My understanding is that they intended to pay reparations to the descendants. But if they truly identified 10k descendants at $1k each they would need $10M alone for an amount that, depending on their personal circumstances, ranges from "an insult" to "not much".
pyrale · 8h ago
We have values. But only as long as they are inexpensive.
WithinReason · 8h ago
Isn't that how that always is?
woleium · 8h ago
not that i am defending the university, but “expensive” is somewhat removed from “an existential risk”. Such straw men tend to be easier to knock down.
pseudocomposer · 5h ago
Is the argument here that Harvard, an institution (not a human being), deserves to exist more than descendants of slaves (human beings all) deserve reparations?
happytoexplain · 5h ago
It's tough because it's apples to oranges, morally, but I think it's a reasonable position to argue.
Simulacra · 4h ago
Welcome to Harvard
eviks · 8h ago
But they are the ones setting that value per person , so there is 0 risk of bankruptcy - they can always adjust the value to fit whatever the non-bankrupting total they're comfortable with is!
isaacfrond · 8h ago
The article nowhere mentions individual compensation to descendants by Harvard. I suspect the bankruptcy comment is an institutional fear of financial liability tied to large-scale identification of descendants.
lovelearning · 51m ago
Performative virtue signaling is not always easy.
fakedang · 9h ago
Insanity that Harvard, apparently one of the gathering places for some of the best minds in the world, to think that tracking down and compensating people who are very removed from the realities of slavery. They could've thought of revitalizing black neighborhoods in tandem with HBCUs, carried outreach to black majority high schools by alumni, the works, but nope, they thought this would be a better investment of their funds. No wonder wealthy donors are so hesitant to donate to a pack of rabid morons.
In those lines, I might as well pressure the British government to compensate me, personally, because they decided to shove one part of my family tree into a train carriage to suffocate to death.
Defletter · 8h ago
You say that like governments, like the British government (since you brought them up), didn't finish paying off its debt to slave owners in 2015 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...) for debt created decades before the American civil war over slavery. Are you okay with this? And if so, why is paying off this debt okay when slavery is so far removed, but the concept of reparations isn't?
typewithrhythm · 8h ago
That is not a debt to slave owners, that is a debt taken on to pay for the costs of abolishing slavery.
It's also talking about real agreements for an entity to exchange money in the future, for a bond tied to the value of the currency... Not some vibes based moral justification.
ZeroGravitas · 8h ago
> That is not a debt to slave owners, that is a debt taken on to pay for the costs of abolishing slavery.
The debt was taken on to pay reparations to slave owners. About £6 Billion in modern terms, 4.5 billion of which was borrowed.
No, it wasn't "reparations". It was a commercial transaction to legally buy slaves and set them free.
Defletter · 8h ago
Correct, the slave owners were already "compensated" for their crimes against humanity 200 years ago, so the debt being completed was the loan the UK took out to do so. But you are missing the point: the argument being made here (and in other comments) is that slavery was soooo loooonng aggoooo that considering reparations is at best virtue signalling, and at worst moronic. And yet you and others do not bat an eye at debt lasting that long. And let's be clear, I am fully supportive of OP's advocacy for funding black neighbourhoods and other such programmes. I am specifically aiming at this whining sophistry (which I'm not claiming OP made, but just in general) about slavery being ancient history so reparations are ridiculous, but debt lasting that long is totally fine and normal.
typewithrhythm · 7h ago
Because a debt like that is essentially a chunk of currency, that is passed between entitys; it doesn't matter when a debt a government was issued, the current holder is another contemporary entity or person.
Why a debt was created is irrelevant to the current holder, can't you understand why a government default is bad?
Defletter · 7h ago
Can't you understand why attempting to resolve past wrongs is good? Why are finance obligations so important that they MUST persist throughout the centuries, but attempting to fix the legacies of human suffering is just "vibes based moral justification"? Why are numbers more important than people?
typewithrhythm · 6h ago
You dont seem to understand; the debt is owned and exchanged by contemporary people, why or when that debt was created is irrelevant, because the body (government) that owes it has many other debts created over time. You can not pick and choose which ones to repay without causing everyone who you currently owe money to be alarmed.
Deciding to default on an old debt like that would be the equivalent of deciding any coin minted in 1993 is no longer valid, suck it up whoever currently has one in their pocket.
To be clear, you are the one trying to draw this parallel without any solid foundation to make it.
When you look the moral problem, there is a discontinuity that doesn't exist for abstract financial instruments. People make moral choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability. This is a different case and needs to be made without trying to use financial instruments as a starting point.
Defletter · 6h ago
And the institution of slavery and its legacies were and are experienced by contemporary people. In fact, penal chattel slavery was an ongoing thing well into the 20th century in the US.
And I honestly fail to see the distinction you're making: you insist that financial obligations are different because, to paraphrase: "there's a paper trail and defaulting is bad". But slavery and its legacies also has a paper trail, likewise with human life and misery, and not resolving this is also bad. You have yet to provide an argument that fundamentally CANNOT also be applied to reparations: you've only given arguments over how we merely don't apply them to reparations. This kind of definition game, that 'reparations aren't considered that way because we don't consider them that way', reminds me of when there's outrage over police murdering someone and people insisting it's not murder because murder is an unlawful killing.
So, I ask you, without resorting to mere definition, what is the difference between "People make moral choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability" (reparations) and "People make financial choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability" (debt)?
typewithrhythm · 5h ago
Debt is a mechanic we use to settle long term concrete transactions, particularly between complicated abstract entitys like nations. To be able to enter into new long term agreements, we must respect existing agreements.
Morality pertains to how individuals should behave. There is no need for me to consider the actions of others I had no control over in order to act morally.
You are trying to compare abstract concepts in a way that weakens your point. Nations are not individuals. Similarly, individuals do not inherit debt.
Defletter · 3h ago
> To be able to enter into new long term agreements, we must respect existing agreements.
That is a matter of trust, it's not an obligation for the state. We are a society of people, and for us to perpetuate civil society, wrongs must be corrected, yes? Why is the respect for debt more important than the respect for humanity?
> There is no need for me to consider the actions of others I had no control over in order to act morally.
What does this have to do with anything? Slavery is not a matter of "if you don't like it, don't do it", it was a positive right protected and enforced through the state's monopoly on violence. That's what law is. Likewise with the legacies of slavery. It's not mere morality, it's existential to civil society.
If the state passes legislation to fund reparations based on past harm, that is no different to any other appropriations spending. And yes, the choice to pass such legislation is largely based on morality since there was no prior legal obligation to do so... but so was not absolving themselves of that slave-owner debt. The UK Parliament is sovereign, it could have willed away that debt with a simple majority, but it chose not to for 200 years. That too is a decision based on morality, and a telling one: that humanity is less important than debts being paid.
> Nations are not individuals.
Nations are not literally individuals, but state personhood is a thing, akin to corporate personhood. I'm not entirely sure what your point is here.
> Similarly, individuals do not inherit debt.
You're doing the whole "don't therefore can't" thing again. I have a vague recollection of debt inheritance in history's past. 'We don't do that because we don't do that' is not an argument.
typewithrhythm · 2h ago
You cannot will away an old debt without consequence because a current entity owns it, now, in the present. This is not a morality based decision. You are again trying to conflate abstractions that pertain to individuals and ones that pertain to nations. There is not a real concept of trust like between individuals, only a financial cost for not honouring debts.
I also don't understand why you think there is a direct relationship between the debts and what they were originally created for...
You clearly do not understand the concept of state or corporate personhood if you are trying to extend individual morality to apply.
Civil society is also a strange direction to go in, from trying to make the relationship to debts. To engage, the term only makes sense as a way for current people to interact, a "wrong" in context requires both a specific victim and an offender... It cannot be applied to historical actions as it gives no information to how current people should interact.
I would go as far as saying reparations for one arbitrarily chosen historic injustice undermines civil society; as it's impossible to claim one point in history is more valid than another, making any attempt a deeply unfair exercise.
Defletter · 1h ago
> You cannot will away an old debt without consequence because a current entity owns it, now, in the present.
You cannot do ANYTHING without consequence, why would that be a criterion for anything? And ownership is a legal fiction, hence why Russia was able to seize all those passenger planes, likewise with Western nations seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs. Ownership, particularly of intangible things like debt, is not some universal truth or force of nature like gravity: it's an emergent property of the system we have set up. One of the reasons why the UK is (or was) the centre of finance was because of its robust legal system that puts an extreme emphasis on property rights. And that's a deliberate decision. The idea that such a decision is amoral is ridiculous.
> There is not a real concept of trust like between individuals
Yes, there absolutely is? In fact, it is the currency of international relations. International law isn't even really a thing: international law is domestic law; it only exists to the extent that a country respects the Rule of Law. It's why certain countries that blatantly violate international law face no legal consequence. It's why the response to the violation of international law are sanctions, not a higher courts overruling them: there is no higher court. And even when there are hypothetical higher courts, like the ECJ, again it only works so far as the member state is willing to play along, which is partly why Hungary is in such hot water with the EU. I'd even go so far as to say that nations rely on trust more than people do. The fact that you don't think trust even a concept with nations is wild and makes me doubt whether you understand the concept of international relations at all. And all this is also true within a nation: if you cannot trust your state institutions, those institutions are worthless.
---
I do not think it is worth conversing further since this is clearly unproductive.
corimaith · 6h ago
The ancient Chinese perspective is that the long-term stability and trust in the reliability of the system is more important than individual heroics.
Defletter · 3h ago
Why are reparations considered "individual heroics", and why is a society fixing its past injustices not considered part of, if not integral to, long-term stability and trust in the reliably of the system? Don't you want a system where, if you were harmed, you will be remedied?
philipallstar · 7h ago
> And yet you and others do not bat an eye at debt lasting that long
People don't have debts or credits they didn't sign up for. You're failing to tell the difference between something the British government hundreds of years ago signed the British Empire up in perpetuity to pay to enforce on the world a totally new value system, and someone born today suddenly being assigned a credit or debit based on things from hundreds of years ago.
Defletter · 7h ago
That is a distinction without a difference: my tax money went to paying off that loan. Whether it was a debt established 200 years ago that we we're still paying off, or assigned a new debt based on something that happened 200 years ago makes no difference: I still had to pay for it. It's a legal fiction, all of it. Quibbling over whether it's this category or that makes no difference to me having to pay for it.
Teever · 8h ago
> That is not a debt to slave owners, that is a debt taken on to pay for the costs of abolishing slavery.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. Can you elaborate?
typewithrhythm · 7h ago
If you say we are not paying a debt to slave owners, then slave owners do not receive money.
If you say we are not paying the current holder of a bond we created to pay slave owners in the past, then you damage your current credit rating. (In the worst case, potentially hurting organisations that let you have good terms for socially beneficial causes, refusing to pay back a charity that helps end slavery for example).
suzakus · 8h ago
The slave owners were paid lifetimes ago. The repayments are to the inheritors of the debt that was taken on to pay said slave owners.
bbarnett · 8h ago
Read up on the 'home children'. Hundreds of thousands of orphaned children were contracted(sold), indentured, to the colonies. Some faced harrowing, near starvation conditions and were beaten, tortured, and so on.
On top of that, to reduce resistance, families were broken up. One brother would be sent to Canada, another Australia, never to meet again.
This is, of course, not as severe as slavery. Once adults, after a decade or more of hard labour, their contract was often satisfied. Yet my point is that the past was a more brutal time. This is how white, British children were treated by the British. And not one descendant of home children (such as my grandfather was) has ever been compensated. There is no effort to help track down families broken apart.
And look at what happened to orphans in Catholic care? Priest raping children, and it being kept quiet for decades by the police and Catholic church.
If reparations aren't being given to cases like these, then why would they be given to other cases a centuries old?
NOTE, I'm not saying "fair or not". I'm saying that is that the past is a different world. And expecting today's people to pay for what their great-great grandfather's did, isn't a thing that's often entertained.
If we start getting into reparations, I feel I should also have my property returned from when the British took it from my Scottish ancestors. Or maybe Italy should be paying, for the time the Romans invaded and they took some land back then?
When does it end? Where does it end?
This comment may not be liked by many, but what I'm trying to point out is that the past was not today, mores were different, and it wasn't just one race that was treated poorly.
Everyone treated everyone poorly compared to today.
ZeroGravitas · 8h ago
FYI various Catholic organisations are paying reparations to their victims (some for slavery, some for abuse of children).
Probably too little and too late but still a strange example to give if your point is that reparations are unthinkable.
Defletter · 8h ago
> And expecting today's people to pay for what their great-great grandfather's did, isn't a thing that's often entertained.
From what I can tell, the argument is that: if your great-great grandfather became extremely wealthy off of slavery, and was then paid by the government to free their slaves, and then eventually you inherit that wealth... well... if the wealth from crimes against humanity can be inherited, why isn't the responsibility to undo the harm not also inherited?
flask_manager · 6h ago
Because selectively applying this line of reasoning to one moral injustice is making someone a victim by unfairly applying a standard to them alone.
Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?
Defletter · 6h ago
> Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?
Don't threaten me with a good time! Jokes aside, I'm generally pro-redistribution to begin with (I'm somewhat of a dirty communist) and I think trying to finagle exactly how much someone's wealth should be redistributed based on the weaving and waning of economic activity over two centuries to be rather a waste of time. Better to just redistribute based on wealth. But if this were something that happened only thirty years ago, I'd absolutely be calling for "morality based redistribution", as you put it, because it is then something that can actually be achieved.
g-b-r · 6h ago
> Because selectively applying this line of reasoning to one moral injustice is making someone a victim by unfairly applying a standard to them alone.
Who argued to apply it selectively?
> Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?
It's not about morality, it's seeing what part or your current wealth is due to obscene and unjustifiable (often even for the time) acts.
No one argues to have you do time for your ancestors, but if part of your wealth is due to those acts, what would be wrong about giving it back?
danaris · 2h ago
...what is "obscene" and what is "justifiable" are about morality.
I mean, I agree with your conclusion, but I don't think trying to paint this as some kind of purely rational act is either necessary or helpful.
It is moral to try to redress past wrongs—especially when those past wrongs have created massive current wrongs and inequities.
It is moral to take from those who have built their wealth on the backs of the suffering of the many, and to give to those who suffered to make it possible.
Morality doesn't need to be a dirty word, nor does it need to be something we're not allowed to look to to guide our collective actions.
RickJWagner · 2h ago
What remains of slavery in the northeast are the economic byproducts.
What remains in the south are the descendants of the slaves, and the ironically scape goated guilt.
wtcactus · 10h ago
The idea of giving all the descendants of someone that lived hundreds of years ago some form of compensation because 1/32nd (or much lower) of their ancestors was harmed in some way, is completely bonkers for me. Virtue signaling at it’s best.
Harvard tried to do it (to virtue signal, I mean) and eventually found out that the maths for their little publicity stunt would get them bankrupt. They then proceeded to try and stop the all thing.
That’s the story here.
Defletter · 8h ago
I agree, the fact that the UK government was still paying off slave-owner debt in 2015 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...) instead of freeing itself from that debt because the idea of giving the descendants of slave owners who were "harmed" in the loss of their "property", is completely bonkers.
KoolKat23 · 8h ago
That's more to do with the method in which it was resolved, it was ended in place of government debt. They can't simply renege on government debts purely due to its origin.
It's like saying they should in part renege on some current 2008 financial crisis debts.
Teever · 8h ago
Would you be opposed to the British government mandating that the descendants of slavers need to repay this debt? Why or why not?
KoolKat23 · 2h ago
Yes I would oppose it, how do you decide what is what at this juncture?
Should Alcapone's children refund any inheritance?
Do you extend this further and tax them for their privileged upbringing? This is absurd, and goes against our liberal principles of fairness. Not equity, fairness.
Defletter · 8h ago
I mean, they can renege, Parliamentary Sovereignty and all that jazz. The choice not to renege is indeed a choice.
KoolKat23 · 2h ago
Of course it is. Tell me who wants to buy a governments bonds when they renege on their obligations.
I haven't looked into it, but there is also a good chance the bonds have changed hands since.
Defletter · 1h ago
Not saying it's a good idea but the choice will always be there, and the decision not to do it is nonetheless still a choice. And so coming full-circle back to reparations, why don't we want societies to correct past wrongs? Why is honouring two-century old debt so world-shatteringly important, but fixing two-century old injustice (and its ongoing legacies) scoffed at?
bitshiftfaced · 6h ago
These bonds were a consolidated, tradable asset. They were likely traded many times over the centuries. They could end up in things like pension funds after 200 years.
drdaeman · 9h ago
How is it completely bonkers?
I think the idea is that those people were put at inherent disadvantage due to unfair treatment of their long gone predecessors. Or at least that’s my understanding of it.
The validity of this claim, type and amount of corrective action (and from some viewpoints - its very appropriateness or necessity), as well as the relative importance of the subject - those can all be a matter of debate, but are any of those so obvious they render the whole idea crazy?
vintermann · 8h ago
I found out my son is a descendant of slaves. I am not, but his mother is from a family with a few upper class connections, and in one of them there was a Danish slave ship captain, who married a "free woman of color" on St. Croix and moved to Norway. "The Creole Woman" was a family legend told to me by his great-grandmother, but I checked, and it was completely true.
Apparently it's really common in Denmark to be a descendant of slaves in a similar way.
I think it's obviously ludicrous that my son should be entitled to corrective action for this. Yes, his ancestor was subjected to an injustice, but it completely drowns in the sea of other injustices or unfair advantages his ancestors have had.
If you want to sum up the historical injustice and unearned privilege someone's ancestors had, it's much better to look at their bank account than their pedigree. DoS-restitution suggests that but for transatlantic slavery, the present distribution of resources would have been just. The further back you are willing to go in asserting the right to restitution, the more forcefully you are asserting it.
As a practical matter, you have to have some level of material comfort and/or solid family relationships to be able to document your ancestry. That already biases it away from those who would need it most.
modo_mario · 6h ago
The world is filled with such qualms.
People are quick to feel slighted and counterreact. For example if the uni decided to make it more financially manageable by letting those decendants in easier suddenly it starts mirroring the stories of asian and white students needing higher scores to get in that caused an outrage. Giving money because of some modern day one drop rule ends up no different.
It will also always be a mess even if you do compensate.
See at the fights about who gets native american tribe status and benefits. On one hand you have people actually struggling with the faults of the past.
On the other hand there's groups of people who genuinely believe it's them that bear the costs of the past with less measurable ancestral ties than the average african american looking to benefit decrying what happened.
Simulacra · 4h ago
People are quick to feel slighted and counterreact.
People are quick to stand in line for money.
PeterStuer · 8h ago
Would you then not just focus on helping currently disadvantaged people, rather than some ancestry chase that might or might not be presently relevant?
KoolKat23 · 8h ago
Sorry, it's completely bonkers.
How long is a piece of string?
eviks · 9h ago
How would it bankrupt them when they're the ones setting the compensation???
Yizahi · 6h ago
They would probably need to pay a little more than 5$ Comcast/Hewlett-Packard style, and if there were even 10 slaves back then, today it would be 30000 descendants. If there were 1000 slaves back then, it would be 3 million people today. Paying each even a measly thousand would require 3 billion dollars just for compensations, without any other investments or programs.
eviks · 5h ago
They wouldn't even have to pay out to individuals, instead they could pay to "communities"! Again, they're the ones setting up the structure of the compensation
Simulacra · 4h ago
Yet, it drives people to the polls. Year after year, empty money promises - no matter how asinine - drive voters.
ggm · 10h ago
I read about this elsewhere and the sentiment was "this is a very hot take" because overall Harvard remains committed to recognising, documenting and taking account of its slavery ties, it's not in denial.
All projects come to an end. Maybe funding ran out, maybe it's cowardice in the context of the Anti DEI move, but this isn't the same as what the headline implies.
eviks · 9h ago
> this isn't the same as what the headline implies.
Correct, you need to read the actual article to find justification for the headline, not limit yourself to a generic "everything ends"
For example, re funding running out
> Even though Cellini was eventually given a budget for 2025, albeit a fraction of what he had asked for, the university would soon halt his work entirely.
CaliforniaKarl · 9h ago
Where was it that you read about this?
labster · 9h ago
The story is from The Guardian, they have a certain point of view. I like it most of the time, but in this story it’s simpler to assume that spending money on slavery reparations and DEI activity suddenly became a political liability this January, rather than any very theoretical monetary liability in reparations.
Unfortunately, appeasement didn’t work this time, either.
IAmBroom · 3h ago
> it’s simpler to assume
So, you didn't read anything to support your assertion at all? You just made it up, whole-cloth, from your political assumptions?
labster · 2h ago
Believe it or not, people who read newspapers get a lot of background information on lots of topics. One such topic was that US corporations, en masse, started dropping DEI policies around the beginning of Trump’s term in acts of anticipatory compliance. It was suddenly very unfashionable to be looking to the slavery reparations business. Now, we could ascribe Harvard’s actions to being in line with the larger trends. Or, we could take the researcher’s idea that the end of the study was about how good and productive the researcher was and how bad and unrepentant Harvard is. They would never be forced to pay reparations to these people, but the costs of being on Trumps bad side has already cost Harvard hundreds of millions. I think it’s simpler to assume the former is true. My own politics are kind of irrelevant here.
blitzar · 10h ago
PhD and Postdoc students for starters.
No comments yet
sharpshadow · 7h ago
The first settlers created Harvard University in 1636, while slaves also started to be common during that century. That are over 200 years of slavery until 1865.
Havard benefited for more than half its existence from slaves.
corimaith · 6h ago
Every culture that exists today over the bones of vanquished peoples long lost to history.
sharpshadow · 5h ago
The point here is that it’s not vanquished but in the archives. Havard as one of the oldest institutions started with the first settlers, probably, very likely, has one of the most extensive histories of slave ownership.
That doesn't make sense on its surface, what's the mechanism here? This is mentioned twice without any explanation
In those lines, I might as well pressure the British government to compensate me, personally, because they decided to shove one part of my family tree into a train carriage to suffocate to death.
It's also talking about real agreements for an entity to exchange money in the future, for a bond tied to the value of the currency... Not some vibes based moral justification.
The debt was taken on to pay reparations to slave owners. About £6 Billion in modern terms, 4.5 billion of which was borrowed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
Why a debt was created is irrelevant to the current holder, can't you understand why a government default is bad?
Deciding to default on an old debt like that would be the equivalent of deciding any coin minted in 1993 is no longer valid, suck it up whoever currently has one in their pocket.
To be clear, you are the one trying to draw this parallel without any solid foundation to make it.
When you look the moral problem, there is a discontinuity that doesn't exist for abstract financial instruments. People make moral choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability. This is a different case and needs to be made without trying to use financial instruments as a starting point.
And I honestly fail to see the distinction you're making: you insist that financial obligations are different because, to paraphrase: "there's a paper trail and defaulting is bad". But slavery and its legacies also has a paper trail, likewise with human life and misery, and not resolving this is also bad. You have yet to provide an argument that fundamentally CANNOT also be applied to reparations: you've only given arguments over how we merely don't apply them to reparations. This kind of definition game, that 'reparations aren't considered that way because we don't consider them that way', reminds me of when there's outrage over police murdering someone and people insisting it's not murder because murder is an unlawful killing.
So, I ask you, without resorting to mere definition, what is the difference between "People make moral choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability" (reparations) and "People make financial choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability" (debt)?
Morality pertains to how individuals should behave. There is no need for me to consider the actions of others I had no control over in order to act morally.
You are trying to compare abstract concepts in a way that weakens your point. Nations are not individuals. Similarly, individuals do not inherit debt.
That is a matter of trust, it's not an obligation for the state. We are a society of people, and for us to perpetuate civil society, wrongs must be corrected, yes? Why is the respect for debt more important than the respect for humanity?
> There is no need for me to consider the actions of others I had no control over in order to act morally.
What does this have to do with anything? Slavery is not a matter of "if you don't like it, don't do it", it was a positive right protected and enforced through the state's monopoly on violence. That's what law is. Likewise with the legacies of slavery. It's not mere morality, it's existential to civil society.
If the state passes legislation to fund reparations based on past harm, that is no different to any other appropriations spending. And yes, the choice to pass such legislation is largely based on morality since there was no prior legal obligation to do so... but so was not absolving themselves of that slave-owner debt. The UK Parliament is sovereign, it could have willed away that debt with a simple majority, but it chose not to for 200 years. That too is a decision based on morality, and a telling one: that humanity is less important than debts being paid.
> Nations are not individuals.
Nations are not literally individuals, but state personhood is a thing, akin to corporate personhood. I'm not entirely sure what your point is here.
> Similarly, individuals do not inherit debt.
You're doing the whole "don't therefore can't" thing again. I have a vague recollection of debt inheritance in history's past. 'We don't do that because we don't do that' is not an argument.
I also don't understand why you think there is a direct relationship between the debts and what they were originally created for...
You clearly do not understand the concept of state or corporate personhood if you are trying to extend individual morality to apply.
Civil society is also a strange direction to go in, from trying to make the relationship to debts. To engage, the term only makes sense as a way for current people to interact, a "wrong" in context requires both a specific victim and an offender... It cannot be applied to historical actions as it gives no information to how current people should interact.
I would go as far as saying reparations for one arbitrarily chosen historic injustice undermines civil society; as it's impossible to claim one point in history is more valid than another, making any attempt a deeply unfair exercise.
You cannot do ANYTHING without consequence, why would that be a criterion for anything? And ownership is a legal fiction, hence why Russia was able to seize all those passenger planes, likewise with Western nations seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs. Ownership, particularly of intangible things like debt, is not some universal truth or force of nature like gravity: it's an emergent property of the system we have set up. One of the reasons why the UK is (or was) the centre of finance was because of its robust legal system that puts an extreme emphasis on property rights. And that's a deliberate decision. The idea that such a decision is amoral is ridiculous.
> There is not a real concept of trust like between individuals
Yes, there absolutely is? In fact, it is the currency of international relations. International law isn't even really a thing: international law is domestic law; it only exists to the extent that a country respects the Rule of Law. It's why certain countries that blatantly violate international law face no legal consequence. It's why the response to the violation of international law are sanctions, not a higher courts overruling them: there is no higher court. And even when there are hypothetical higher courts, like the ECJ, again it only works so far as the member state is willing to play along, which is partly why Hungary is in such hot water with the EU. I'd even go so far as to say that nations rely on trust more than people do. The fact that you don't think trust even a concept with nations is wild and makes me doubt whether you understand the concept of international relations at all. And all this is also true within a nation: if you cannot trust your state institutions, those institutions are worthless.
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I do not think it is worth conversing further since this is clearly unproductive.
People don't have debts or credits they didn't sign up for. You're failing to tell the difference between something the British government hundreds of years ago signed the British Empire up in perpetuity to pay to enforce on the world a totally new value system, and someone born today suddenly being assigned a credit or debit based on things from hundreds of years ago.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. Can you elaborate?
If you say we are not paying the current holder of a bond we created to pay slave owners in the past, then you damage your current credit rating. (In the worst case, potentially hurting organisations that let you have good terms for socially beneficial causes, refusing to pay back a charity that helps end slavery for example).
On top of that, to reduce resistance, families were broken up. One brother would be sent to Canada, another Australia, never to meet again.
This is, of course, not as severe as slavery. Once adults, after a decade or more of hard labour, their contract was often satisfied. Yet my point is that the past was a more brutal time. This is how white, British children were treated by the British. And not one descendant of home children (such as my grandfather was) has ever been compensated. There is no effort to help track down families broken apart.
And look at what happened to orphans in Catholic care? Priest raping children, and it being kept quiet for decades by the police and Catholic church.
If reparations aren't being given to cases like these, then why would they be given to other cases a centuries old?
NOTE, I'm not saying "fair or not". I'm saying that is that the past is a different world. And expecting today's people to pay for what their great-great grandfather's did, isn't a thing that's often entertained.
If we start getting into reparations, I feel I should also have my property returned from when the British took it from my Scottish ancestors. Or maybe Italy should be paying, for the time the Romans invaded and they took some land back then?
When does it end? Where does it end?
This comment may not be liked by many, but what I'm trying to point out is that the past was not today, mores were different, and it wasn't just one race that was treated poorly.
Everyone treated everyone poorly compared to today.
Probably too little and too late but still a strange example to give if your point is that reparations are unthinkable.
From what I can tell, the argument is that: if your great-great grandfather became extremely wealthy off of slavery, and was then paid by the government to free their slaves, and then eventually you inherit that wealth... well... if the wealth from crimes against humanity can be inherited, why isn't the responsibility to undo the harm not also inherited?
Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?
Don't threaten me with a good time! Jokes aside, I'm generally pro-redistribution to begin with (I'm somewhat of a dirty communist) and I think trying to finagle exactly how much someone's wealth should be redistributed based on the weaving and waning of economic activity over two centuries to be rather a waste of time. Better to just redistribute based on wealth. But if this were something that happened only thirty years ago, I'd absolutely be calling for "morality based redistribution", as you put it, because it is then something that can actually be achieved.
Who argued to apply it selectively?
> Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?
It's not about morality, it's seeing what part or your current wealth is due to obscene and unjustifiable (often even for the time) acts.
No one argues to have you do time for your ancestors, but if part of your wealth is due to those acts, what would be wrong about giving it back?
I mean, I agree with your conclusion, but I don't think trying to paint this as some kind of purely rational act is either necessary or helpful.
It is moral to try to redress past wrongs—especially when those past wrongs have created massive current wrongs and inequities.
It is moral to take from those who have built their wealth on the backs of the suffering of the many, and to give to those who suffered to make it possible.
Morality doesn't need to be a dirty word, nor does it need to be something we're not allowed to look to to guide our collective actions.
What remains in the south are the descendants of the slaves, and the ironically scape goated guilt.
Harvard tried to do it (to virtue signal, I mean) and eventually found out that the maths for their little publicity stunt would get them bankrupt. They then proceeded to try and stop the all thing.
That’s the story here.
It's like saying they should in part renege on some current 2008 financial crisis debts.
Should Alcapone's children refund any inheritance?
Do you extend this further and tax them for their privileged upbringing? This is absurd, and goes against our liberal principles of fairness. Not equity, fairness.
I haven't looked into it, but there is also a good chance the bonds have changed hands since.
I think the idea is that those people were put at inherent disadvantage due to unfair treatment of their long gone predecessors. Or at least that’s my understanding of it.
The validity of this claim, type and amount of corrective action (and from some viewpoints - its very appropriateness or necessity), as well as the relative importance of the subject - those can all be a matter of debate, but are any of those so obvious they render the whole idea crazy?
Apparently it's really common in Denmark to be a descendant of slaves in a similar way.
I think it's obviously ludicrous that my son should be entitled to corrective action for this. Yes, his ancestor was subjected to an injustice, but it completely drowns in the sea of other injustices or unfair advantages his ancestors have had.
If you want to sum up the historical injustice and unearned privilege someone's ancestors had, it's much better to look at their bank account than their pedigree. DoS-restitution suggests that but for transatlantic slavery, the present distribution of resources would have been just. The further back you are willing to go in asserting the right to restitution, the more forcefully you are asserting it.
As a practical matter, you have to have some level of material comfort and/or solid family relationships to be able to document your ancestry. That already biases it away from those who would need it most.
It will also always be a mess even if you do compensate. See at the fights about who gets native american tribe status and benefits. On one hand you have people actually struggling with the faults of the past. On the other hand there's groups of people who genuinely believe it's them that bear the costs of the past with less measurable ancestral ties than the average african american looking to benefit decrying what happened.
People are quick to stand in line for money.
How long is a piece of string?
All projects come to an end. Maybe funding ran out, maybe it's cowardice in the context of the Anti DEI move, but this isn't the same as what the headline implies.
Correct, you need to read the actual article to find justification for the headline, not limit yourself to a generic "everything ends"
For example, re funding running out
> Even though Cellini was eventually given a budget for 2025, albeit a fraction of what he had asked for, the university would soon halt his work entirely.
Unfortunately, appeasement didn’t work this time, either.
So, you didn't read anything to support your assertion at all? You just made it up, whole-cloth, from your political assumptions?
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