Reparations for Slavery
Where We Are
We saw that Nozick argued that the correct theory of distributive justice will be historical rather than patterned. It will require starting in a just starting place, and then proceeding by just rules, and restoring justice whenever something unjust happens. This week we will be looking at issues that arise from the facts that in the real world, we never did start at a just starting point, and even if we had in some distant past, there are still pervasive injustices that have never been corrected. Our topic for this class is the issue of reparations for slavery.
Reparations
The reading for this week is this article by Ta-Nehisi Coates from the Atlantic, published in summer 2014, which is a particularly forceful and influential recent public defense of the importance of race reparations in the United States. Note that it is substantially longer than most things that we have read this semester, but although Coates develops a clear argument, it is not a philosophy paper and you should find it substantially easier to read than most things that we have read this semester. Many of the philosophy articles that we have read this semester have arguments that can fit into a single paragraph, but Coates' article is a good example of what long-form argumentative writing can look like. Try, as you read it, to see if you can write his argument down in a simpler form.
Current Events
Students at Georgetown voted almost exactly two years ago to pay extra fees each semester to fund a reparation fund to benefit contemporary descendants of slaves sold by the university in 1838. Read about it here.