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Consider two attractive thoughts about reparations for historic injustice - that is, reparations for injustices committed in the past, whose primary victims can no longer be materially compensated. First, these duties are duties to make amends for those injustices and are owed to their primary victims. Second, they are duties to compensate currently existing individuals. These thoughts are in tension. Felix Lambrecht (2025) has argued persuasively that it is best resolved by a two-tier theory of duties to repair historic injustice. This view overlooks the possibility that one way of making symbolic reparation for past wrongdoing is, precisely, to make material compensation to those who are appropriately related to victims of past injustice. I substantiate this possibility by considering Ottobah Cugoano's (1787) views about the reparative duties owed by the people of England.
Cugoano holds that by upholding laws permitting slavery the people of England have become responsible for wrongs done to the enslaved. As a result each individual owes reparative duties, including duties of dissociation from the legal order which permits slavery. I argue that the kind of responsibility Cugoano has in mind here is best understood as individual participatory responsibility; that this responsibility and the dissociative duties which arise from it can - and plausibly do - extend to individuals born after the British Empire ceased to permit slavery including present day individuals; that these duties are owed to past enslaved individuals; and that material compensation to identifiable descendants of these enslaved individuals is an appropriate way of discharging them.
Cugoano, O. (1999/1787) Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species.
Lambrecht, Felix (2025). On the necessity of a pluralist theory of reparations for historical injustice. Philosophical Quarterly 75 (3):978-998.