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I imagine that the rights you're talking about would never have been recognized in such a world. Maybe I'm just being cynical, but it was hard enough to get th

I imagine that the rights you're talking about would never have been recognized in such a world. Maybe I'm just being cynical, but it was hard enough to get those rights recognized in the realm of argument, I imagine putting a giant pile of money on the other side would make it functionally impossible to change anything. Putting financial penalties on admitting your mistakes doesn't usually make people more compassionate. If it did, the world of corporate law would be a utopia.

AaronFriel 6y ago
I don't think individuals involved in the government should always be liable, it should be the government itself in these institutional cases. If a police department, a county clerk, or a school repeatedly violates someone's rights, I don't think it's fair to say "Well, we 'fixed' the problem for anyone who comes after those folks." For one thing, due to qualified immunity with police brutality the problem never actually goes away. No one is every held responsible. For another, when cases actually can go all the way up to a court of appeals or the United States Supreme Court, the remedy is usually "don't do that". There's a pernicious form of cruelty that many of the same people politically aligned with denying people rights also believe that equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, is the best way to organize society. Yet, when it's recognized that opportunities have been systemically denied and stolen from certain classes of people, those people offer no recompense. We can and should change that. If we really, genuinely do believe in equality of opportunity then reparations for civil rights violations are necessary. We cannot have equality of opportunity when the playing field has been tilted by centuries of generational and institutional harms.
- ByteJockey 6y ago
  > I don't think individuals involved in the government should always be liable, it should be the government itself in these institutional cases. Yes, I get that. I'm not talking about individual liability, I'm talking about institutional budgets. I'm saying that if acknowledging rights generally costs a large sum of money (in your hypothetical, in payments to people who have had their rights infringed upon) you will see less of it, as pressure gets put on legislators and judges to save money. To take the recent example of gay marriage, I would expect the phrase "we can't let them marry, there's a budget crunch going on" to be used unironically. I think that what you're advocating for would end up with less of what you seem to actually want (you seem to want people's rights to be respected).

AaronFriel 6y ago

I don't think individuals involved in the government should always be liable, it should be the government itself in these institutional cases. If a police department, a county clerk, or a school repeatedly violates someone's rights, I don't think it's fair to say "Well, we 'fixed' the problem for anyone who comes after those folks." For one thing, due to qualified immunity with police brutality the problem never actually goes away. No one is every held responsible. For another, when cases actually can go all the way up to a court of appeals or the United States Supreme Court, the remedy is usually "don't do that". There's a pernicious form of cruelty that many of the same people politically aligned with denying people rights also believe that equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, is the best way to organize society. Yet, when it's recognized that opportunities have been systemically denied and stolen from certain classes of people, those people offer no recompense. We can and should change that. If we really, genuinely do believe in equality of opportunity then reparations for civil rights violations are necessary. We cannot have equality of opportunity when the playing field has been tilted by centuries of generational and institutional harms.

ByteJockey 6y ago
> I don't think individuals involved in the government should always be liable, it should be the government itself in these institutional cases. Yes, I get that. I'm not talking about individual liability, I'm talking about institutional budgets. I'm saying that if acknowledging rights generally costs a large sum of money (in your hypothetical, in payments to people who have had their rights infringed upon) you will see less of it, as pressure gets put on legislators and judges to save money. To take the recent example of gay marriage, I would expect the phrase "we can't let them marry, there's a budget crunch going on" to be used unironically. I think that what you're advocating for would end up with less of what you seem to actually want (you seem to want people's rights to be respected).