2 ms·

> Where exactly is social justice against individual justice? "This person should get the job because of social justice" means "That person should not get the

> Where exactly is social justice against individual justice? "This person should get the job because of social justice" means "That person should not get the job". You have discriminated against that person because of innate attributes they have no control over. That's obviously unjust. > Social justice does tend to focus especially on the rights of historically (or currently) discriminated against minorities. Yes, but groups are a terrible idea for those kinds of things. A wealthy black Nigerian emigrated to the US in the 70ies and had a son. That son now qualifies as a minority that should get affirmative action, while e.g. some white kid whose ancestors were slaves (indentured servitude is considered a form of slavery) would not. If you only look at group-membership, you are not looking at individuals, and you're not looking for individual justice. > And the same must somehow apply for entire groups of people who have been discriminated against for far longer time. Where do we start? And who are those groups? Are "Africans" such a group? The Barbary Slave Trade had Northern Africans regularly pillage towns in Southern Europe, kidnap Europeans and then sell them as slaves on slave markets throughout the Ottoman Empire. Do I as an European who had (to the best of my knowledge) no kidnapped slave anywhere in my ancestry, now get reparations from some Moroccan person? Or do we just trade claims and nobody gets anything? You'll notice that the wrongly imprisoned person themselves will get money (laughably little, I may add; it's insult to injury, really). Not some random person that accidentally shares their skin color, gender, ethnicity, political or religious convictions. Germany (and especially German companies using slave labor) paying money to Holocaust survivors or their family makes sense to me. Germany paying money to a jew who lived in Canada since 1900, hasn't lost anyone in the Holocaust and hasn't suffered more because of the war than any other Canadian? Less so, I suppose? To someone who isn't ethnically Jewish, lived in Canada since 1900, hasn't lost anyone etc pp, BUT converted to Judaism in 1945? Is he part of the group that should receive group reparations or not? I'm sure you're seeing where I'm going with this: groups aren't easily identifiable, aren't clear-cut, and if you really want justice, you'll probably have to go back a long time. Should Germany say "yeah, sorry about all that Holocaust business, but here's an IOU we have from the Romans for their invasion 2000 years ago, please collect your reparations from them"? You're getting nowhere with group justice. Focus on individual justice, you can make a much better case for it, and you're not creating new victims every time you try to right a wrong.

tsimionescu 6y ago
The US could well do the same. Pay reparations to each individual slave and their families, tracing genealogy. Or, given that slavery may be too far in the past, pay reparations to each individual person that was discriminated against through Jim Crow, and maybe some level of immediate descendants (children? Grand-children? Some reasonable line could be decided). Of course, direct individual reparations are hard to do, which is why other, less expensive and less targeted measures have been preferred.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > The US could well do the same. Pay reparations to each individual slave and their families, tracing genealogy. That's not really suggested, I believe. From what I know, suggestions are "must have officially identified as black before some date", not "must be able to trace his family back to slavery". And, after multiple generations, each descendant would receive relatively little. For "simple" (compared to slavery) discrimination AND divided by multiple descendants, you'll arrive at relatively small sums, I'm afraid. Saying to somebody "I'm really sorry about what your grandfather went through, but here's a check over $5000, that makes us even" will sound like an insult (and is likely a bad trade if you're giving up affirmative action and other benefits).
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Why would there be so many descendants? There are probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of people still alive who lived through the Jim Crow era. This is not some distant past. How much reparations are due to these people alone in terms of lost opportunities, missing funding, moral damages etc?

tsimionescu 6y ago

The US could well do the same. Pay reparations to each individual slave and their families, tracing genealogy. Or, given that slavery may be too far in the past, pay reparations to each individual person that was discriminated against through Jim Crow, and maybe some level of immediate descendants (children? Grand-children? Some reasonable line could be decided). Of course, direct individual reparations are hard to do, which is why other, less expensive and less targeted measures have been preferred.

luckylion 6y ago
> The US could well do the same. Pay reparations to each individual slave and their families, tracing genealogy. That's not really suggested, I believe. From what I know, suggestions are "must have officially identified as black before some date", not "must be able to trace his family back to slavery". And, after multiple generations, each descendant would receive relatively little. For "simple" (compared to slavery) discrimination AND divided by multiple descendants, you'll arrive at relatively small sums, I'm afraid. Saying to somebody "I'm really sorry about what your grandfather went through, but here's a check over $5000, that makes us even" will sound like an insult (and is likely a bad trade if you're giving up affirmative action and other benefits).
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Why would there be so many descendants? There are probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of people still alive who lived through the Jim Crow era. This is not some distant past. How much reparations are due to these people alone in terms of lost opportunities, missing funding, moral damages etc?