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You'll have to admit that your argument only holds if you pick your time frame of reference precisely, and conveniently, to just after land grab was no longer "
by nautilius 5y ago
You'll have to admit that your argument only holds if you pick your time frame of reference precisely, and conveniently, to just after land grab was no longer "acceptable". I don't think an arbitrarily and conveniently defined cut-off date makes it a morally defensible argument, if it even ever was acceptable (the morality of this was even discussed at the time of the landgrab). It's like the burglars saying, "well of course if you had bought your stuff a week later, you'd be safe. But, tough luck!"
It's not like that was 1000 years ago; There are people today that were alive when that happened, or knew people who lived through it.
- throwaway894345 5y agoTo be clear, I don’t think there’s a good ethical framework for determining who has rightful claim to a given plot of land. I agree that it’s convenient for me that the least arbitrary “cutoff” is the relatively stabilization of borders (which itself is pretty nebulous). I’m not wed to it, but it certainly seems more defensible than “whoever was there when history arrived”. The whole enterprise seems intractable. Or as another commenter put it: > the whole thing is a big fucking mess.
- nautilius 5y agoOh yeah, it's a mess, we surely agree on that ;-)