Should we pay for the errors of our ancestors?

Question

Just came across a post from a Jesuit claiming

Historical revisionism is one of the worst, and dangerous, mistakes one can make.

It appears to be with regards to the latest news of Jesuits in US pledging USD100M in reparations to descendants of slaves.

As @MauroALLEGRANZA pointed out in the comments

the issue is not about the "historical judgment" that slave trade was a "bad thing". I assume that this is quite uncontroversial; thus, the issue maybe is: "is Jesuit proposal of a posthumous reward legitimate?" In other words: must we pay for the error of our fathers?

Therefore, I wonder if should we pay for the error of our "fathers" and the implications of that?

Answer 1

You are mixing two questions here. There is the quote about historical revisionism and there is the reparation (compensation) payment by the Jesuit order they feel compelled to.

The intersection between these problems is the ethical question of how to deal with "historical guilt", ie. obviously unethical acts committed by people that are long dead but in relation to us either because we share organisational or ancestral bonds.

What the first quote is about is demanding a bare minimum: We should not revise (ignore, negate) history just because it features episodes that are unpleasant, since that way, the past mistakes are forgotten but not undone. In other words: We should at a minimum acknowledge and learn from the mistakes of the past, since not doing that is indeed "one of the worst, and dangerous, mistakes one can make". This includes the general attitude that past atrocities had or should have no bearing on the present life.

The other ethical problem is another beast. Generally, it is acknowledged that people deserve compensation for crimes committed against them. This includes compensation by organisations (or their legal successor), as shown eg. by the need of handing back works of arts to the families of the original Jew owners by German state museums. Or the (ongoing!) German compensation of the church for its dispossession during the Emperor's times (over 200 years ago).

The moral duty of present individuals to compensate present decendents of past victims of crimes, on the other hand, is disputable. It has some grounding in above reasoning: It is a way to show that you, individually, acknowledge and are willing to act on, ie. positively prevent these past mistakes made by others. It is important to point out here that it is not the only way to do so. There are some border cases eg. of past (individual) slave traders or past company owners who used forced labour in Nazi Germany, ie. ancestors whose atrocities still have direct consequences for their family (inherited wealth), while having negative consequences (because of traumata that have consequences over generations) for the descendants of those who suffered. There are good reasons to assume that there is a direct moral duty to compensate between individual descendants there, but that is still debatable.

What we speak about here, though, is an organisation that acknowledges the moral guilt of a predecessor organisation not only in word, but in deed. Whether there is, as a matter of fact, a moral or even legal duty for that is not even relevant here. One party has made clear that they feel they should be compensated, the other decided that they indeed feel the same. The only question that remains is "how much" but that, with all due respect, seems not to be a genuinely moral problem anymore, considering the sums we are talking about.

Answer 2

In the financial world, it is well-accepted that the heir inherits from his predecessor, both assets as well as any liabilities up to the limit of those assets. In the modern legal world, one does not inherit punishment.

This outlines a framework and limits for compensating for the errors of our forefathers.

Clearly in this framework, one is expected to pay for the errors of one's fathers, but only out of the gains received from those activities. But one should not be punished for it, nor have to pay from the fruits of one's own effort. To the extent possible, reparations should be from the value derived from one's own forefathers, even if it is difficult to ascertain these amounts.

A natural consequent question is then to whom should this payment or reparation be made. Since those original victims are not around, and you haven't done anything to the victim's descendants directly, do the victim's current descendants deserve anything 'for free'?

The same framework provides an answer - if we consider the victim's (economic, social and cultural) inheritance which would have naturally devolved to the victims' descendants today, can it not be said that you have been a beneficiary of what was stolen from them?

So descendants of your forefather's victims should be able to claim a right to reparation from you, but only to the extent that you have gained from your forefather's actions.

It might be impossibly difficult to put a number to what an individual person gained or lost, but at an aggregate level (e.g. for a country as a transfer of GDP) it should be calculable. The mathematical answer might be astonishingly high, for example if one considers the net present value of the colonial-era drop in Indian GDP, the UK's owed reparations to India could dwarf their own current GDP tens, if not hundreds of times over.

Answer 3

If you benefit from an unresolved injustice, then, YES. BUT, there is a lot of political correctness and/or revisionism about what history is/was. Were black people victims of injustice if they chose to work, for example, rather than go back to Africa?

The Truth is, there is no way to tell what is Just without doing the work of getting on top of the soul itself, as mentioned in Genesis 1:27,28. That is what I did for the planetary prophesy. Without that, you will be awash in opinions and false data from people holding onto their illusions of innocence and fear of being wrong OR caught up in other people's feelings of injustice without really knowing why they're being victimized. Are blacks victims because of their skin color or is it really a broader issue of poverty and skin color is irrelevant?