Contributing to Historical-Structural Injustice via Morally Wrong Acts

Alasia Nuti’s important recent book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress (2019), makes many persuasive interventions. Nuti shows how structural injustice theory is enriched by being explicitly historical; in theorizing historical-structural injustice, she lays bare the mechanisms of how the injustices of history reproduce themselves. For Nuti, historical-structural patterns are not only shaped by habitual behaviors that are or appear to be morally permissible, but also by individual wrongdoing and wrongdoing by powerful group agents like states. In this article, I extend Nuti’s rich analysis, focusing on two questions that arise from her theory of historical-structural injustice: (1) Beyond being blameworthy for wrongful acts themselves, are culpable wrongdoers blameworthy for contributing to structural injustice? (2) Does historical moral ignorance mitigate moral responsibility for past injustice? Regarding (1), I distinguish between the local and societal structural effects of wrongdoing. Though I think this distinction is well-founded, it ultimately leads to tensions with structural injustice theory’s idea of ordinary individuals being blameless for reproducing unjust structures. Regarding (2), I argue that even though it is natural for the question of historical moral ignorance to arise in considering past wrongdoing, at least in the case of powerful group agents, we should not overlook forms of cruelty which present-day moral concepts are not needed to condemn.

The Birth and Early Demise of a Liberal Interpretation of Ireland’s Early Modern Past

Lecky, an Irish Protestant landowner, and liberal commentator on Irish affairs considered historians to be responsible to adjudicate between opposing views, having appraised the evidence. On this basis he condemned the English for harshness that provoked rebellion in 1641, insisted that no massacre had been involved, and that the Cromwellian confiscation had been falsely justified. However, he considered this injustice so ancient as to be irreversible, and he represented the government’s land reform measures as compensation for past injustice. Lecky’s call for moderation made no impression on the authors of Catholic county histories written to refute the elite narratives by insisting the landowners and Protestant were a foreign, malign presence in each county, and that memory was a surer guide to truth than documentary evidence. Protestant authors who insisted that a massacre in 1641 was well documented also decried Lecky’s views.

Re-Imagining Ireland’s Early Modern Past

Historians—Protestant and Catholic—associated with the Nation newspaper who were identified as members of Young Ireland constructed a romantic narrative of Ireland’s history in English verse that lauded heroes who had created an Irish nation by resisting English intrusion. This successful venture was designed to cultivate national sentiment among people with limited schooling. The more serious intellectual endeavour of Young Ireland was to sponsor a reasoned prose narrative of Ireland’s past to honour all—regardless of origin or denomination—who had fashioned an inclusive Irish nation. This proved less successful because it required their Catholic members to suppress memories of past injustice. Also, Catholic Church authorities, suspicious of the liberal agenda of Young Ireland, encouraged a counter-narrative that would dwell on past sufferings and celebrate those who had become martyrs for Catholicism rather than heroes of some imaginary Irish nation state.

“Past injustice and present prejudice”: Reducing racial bias and increasing sympathy by framing historical racism as recent

Racial privity judgments – or the perceived causal connection between historical racial discrimination and current suffering among Black Americans – predicts sympathy for the victims of past injustices and perceptions of contemporary racial inequality. Four studies investigated the ideological roots of privity judgments; focusing on subjective temporal perceptions associated with privity judgments (e.g., subjective perceptions that past discrimination occurred more, versus less, recently). Study 1 revealed that liberals perceived historical instances of racial discrimination as having occurred more recently than conservatives, and that temporal perceptions of recency were associated with less anti-Black bias. Studies 2–4 manipulated temporal perceptions of recency by framing past discrimination as having occurred more recently. Results revealed that increasing perceived temporal recency resulted in reduced anti-Black bias and greater sympathy for present-day victims of racial discrimination across political ideology. Discussion surrounds how framing historical information as subjectively recent has implications for prejudice reduction.

The Politics of Debt and Europe's Relations with the 'South'

While debt has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. Throughout history, different understandings of debt have therefore gravitated between reciprocity and domination, making it a key concept for understanding the dynamics of both social cohesion and fragmentation. The book considers the social, spatial and temporal meanings of this ambiguity and relates them to contemporary debates over debts between North and South in Europe, which in turn are embedded in a longer global history of North-South relations. The individual chapters discuss how debts incurred in the past are mobilised in political debates in the present. This dynamic is highlighted with regard to regional and global North-South relations. An essential feature in debates on this topic is the difficult question of retribution and possible ways of “paying” – a term that is etymologically connected to “pacification” – for past injustice. Against this backdrop, the book combines a discussion of the multi-layered European and global North-South divide with an effort to retrieve alternatives to the dominant and divisive uses of debt for staking out claims against someone or something. Discovering new and forgotten ways of thinking about debt and North-South relations, the chapters are divided into four sections that focus on 1) debt and social theory, 2) Greece and Germany as Europe’s South and North, 3) the ‘South’ between the local, the regional and the global, and 4) debt and the politics of history.

Duties to the Dead

Is it ever possible to mitigate any of the past injustice that was done to the living but who are no longer alive? Much has been written on what might be owed to the living on account of past injustices. Much less focus has been paid to the question of what might be owed at the bar of justice to the dead. This chapter advances an argument that does not rely on the possibility of posthumous benefit or harm. It argues that it is possible to mitigate some injustice done to those who are no longer alive. As a result, the living will sometimes have duties to the dead to mitigate some of the injustice they suffered while alive.

Autism, Advocacy Organizations, and Past Injustice

Fruitful connections can be made between Disability Studies and post-conflict transitional justice, two areas of scholarship concerned with human rights and the impacts of violence that have rarely been brought into critical dialogue with one another. For over a decade, one of the world's largest and best-known autism organizations, the US-based Autism Speaks, has been subject to criticisms and boycotts by autistic self-advocates and their allies. This article describes the forms of harm attributed to the organization, arguing that these harms can be viewed through the lens of what transitional justice scholar Jill Stauffer calls "ethical loneliness": "the experience of being abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard" (2015b, 1). I argue that Autism Speaks's recent reforms and responses to criticism, in focusing largely on present-day organizational policies and structures, fail to grasp the full temporal dimensions of ethical loneliness or the importance of addressing past injustice.

Non-committal memory: The ambivalent inclusion of Romani suffering under National Socialism in hegemonic cultural memory

This article compares the place of Romani migrants in contemporary Austrian society to their position in memory debates. It analyses official forms of commemoration which had the intentions not only to remember the victims of past atrocities, but also included a normative, moral aspect – namely, the promise that memory of past injustice would somehow be a useful device against racism, injustice and discrimination in the present day. In this understanding, history, especially the history of National Socialism would ideally teach societies valuable lessons about the treatment of minorities, thus also the Romani communities, in the present. While this still is the predominant political discourse about these forms of memory, the author suggests that memory culture can by contrast be described by what he refers to as non-committal memory. He argues, that when looking at Central European examples, it immediately becomes transparent that memory is only applied in abstract discussions while all immediate connections between contemporary discrimination and historical suffering are neglected. Thus, non-committal memory disconnects present and past policies, and delegitimises a comparison between the persecution of past victim groups and the criminalisation of present-day migrants. The author contends that this is visible by the fact that the majority of memorials that honour Romani victims of National Socialism (in Austria, but also across much of Europe) fail to include or contribute to an understanding of the plight of contemporary Romani people, especially Romani migrants. Arguably, this resulted from the strategies by which activists decided to copy memory politics related to Jewish victims of National Socialism as a ‘successful’ model of integration.