“How many of us could truly claim, ‘Even if railways and motor cars had never been invented, I would still have been born’?”
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 1984
After King Charles’ tour of the Caribbean and the Commonwealth leaders’ summit, the question of reparations for slavery has once more entered the political discussion. It’s tempting, given the idea’s utopian tendencies as well as the potentially huge cost to the British taxpayer, to dismiss it out of hand. But this is not an argument and it is critical to be precise about what our objections are.
The common response, echoed by Kemi Badenoch, is that slavery happened “generations before any of us were born”. Whilst this may help to absolve current British citizens of any moral responsibility for the wrongdoing itself, it doesn’t provide adequate grounds for not paying compensation. We still hold states to treaties signed decades, even centuries, before the current generation was born; similarly, I am expected to contribute, through taxes, to paying down a national debt accumulated from before I could vote.
The central problem with reparations regards the identification of the victims. Assuming we can justify Britain’s own responsibility to fulfil reparative obligations, who is entitled to the compensation? Caribbean states cannot claim reparations on the basis they were themselves wronged. Jamaica became independent in 1962, Barbados and Guyana in 1966 and the Bahamas in 1973. Britain abolished slavery in these colonies in 1834. Whilst states can claim on behalf of victims, you cannot wrong a state that doesn’t exist and, therefore, a justification independent of state-based claims is needed.
Just as Britain could not wrong any of these states before they could become states, nor could they have harmed the descendants of victims before they were conceived. Indeed, even if it sounds callous, these descendants would not have been born if it weren’t for the slave trade. Given how the tiniest alteration in original circumstances would lead to different offspring, the historic harm of slavery cannot be committed against people who wouldn’t have existed without it.
Claims based upon being made worse off by slavery, then, cannot justify reparative obligations. Even if a way around this problem is found, too much historical contingency is involved to say with any degree of certainty that descendants are worse off. Without slavery, we don’t know whether Caribbean countries, or certain Caribbean citizens, would be better or worse off. It simply had too much of an effect; we would be living in a different reality.
Even if it sounds callous, these descendants would not have been born if it weren’t for the slave trade.
The major remaining avenue is as part of a collective including as families, as common cultures and as nations. Each of these presents their own problems as they subordinate the individual to the collective. The strongest collective claim is found in nations which distinguish themselves by sharing continued institutions, land and culture. If a nation is harmed, its proponents argue, then compensation is owed to the continuing members of that nation. For example, if the Barbadian nation was harmed by the British Empire then Britain should compensate it.
Nations distinguish themselves from states as they do not necessarily possess the institutional apparatus of governance that defines a state. The key moral difference is that states derive moral legitimacy from the consent of the governed, whilst nations do no such thing. There is no reason to assume that a nation as a group deserves moral status: states have a legal, political and moral grounding with clear sovereignty.
The exceptional nature of the state, as a collection of hypothetically consenting individuals, allows it to be treated as a corporate agent. In contrast, nations are grounded upon culture, inheritance and ethnicity. The lack of unified agency, clearly bounded membership and, most importantly, hypothetical consent means that nations cannot claim reparations. Even if a nation was owed reparations, it does not automatically entitle individuals to payments.
Of course, there are limitations to this argument: it doesn’t address reparations to states or individuals who have been directly wronged. Nor does it deal with arguments concerning continuing harm. Yet making the case against reparations is practical as well as philosophical. There is only so long Britain can ignore the calls of the Commonwealth if it cannot summon even the faintest sliver of a genuine argument against them. Pragmatism will be exhausted. The argument has longevity:
Why should we pay you?