Structural transformation and reparative obligation: Reinterpreting the beneficiary pays principle

Unredressed injustices in national and global history raise important normative questions. These questions are highlighted by the growing chorus of voices in public and academic discourse calling for agents, especially those in the Global North, to recognize and redress the major injustices of their past, most notably colonialism, chattel slavery, and segregation.¹ One is the justification question: do (some) present-day agents have moral obligations to redress historical injustice, and if so, on what moral grounds? Another is the content question: assuming that reparative obligations are justified, what exactly do they obligate (some) present-day agents to do?

One prominent view in the philosophical literature responding to these questions is centered on the Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP).² Proponents of the BPP have argued that some present-day agents have a moral obligation to redress historical injustices that they themselves did not commit because they enjoy material benefits—wealth, property, and other such resources—as a result of these injustices. Since these benefits were originally acquired unjustly, their contemporary inheritors ought to relinquish them, not just because they lack any legitimate claim to these resources, but also because by retaining these resources they are perpetuating the effects of injustice. This answers the justification question. The BPP also suggests an answer to the content question. While some present-day agents enjoy material benefits from historical injustices, others correspondingly suffer material harms.³ It is thus morally legitimate to redistribute the relinquished resources of present-day beneficiaries of a historical injustice toward its present-day victims—even if that redistribution can only partially approximate the holdings that present-day victims would have enjoyed had the historical injustice never occurred.⁴ Altogether, the BPP offers an account of one familiar approach to past wrongdoing, namely the provision of material compensation or reparations. Indeed, proponents of the BPP contend that the principle is appealing because it avoids many of the thorny moral and epistemic challenges against reparations for major historical injustices.⁵

But reparations, so understood, is notably removed from a more radical approach to historical injustice proposed by some recent social movements for racial equality and postcolonial global justice. These proposals demand the egalitarian transformation of present-day social structures in order to undo the unjust social, political, and economic legacies of colonialism, slavery, segregation, and so forth.⁶ In alignment with this vision, some philosophical accounts have argued for a structural approach to historical injustice: because many present-day injustices are products of major historical injustices like colonialism and slavery, a full and proper remedy to such historical injustices requires addressing present-day injustices which are their structural legacies.⁷ The structural approach thus argues for significantly expanding the content of present-day agents' reparative obligations to include remedying various structural injustices that exist today.

The structural approach, however, faces theoretical problems regarding the justification and in turn distribution of these reparative obligations. These problems are most clearly on display in Iris Marion Young's foundational account of responsibility for structural injustice. Young argues that present-day agents have a moral obligation to address structural injustices insofar as they participate in the social structures that produce them: because our participation is what sustains the social structures that produce structural injustices, we are responsible for ensuring that these structures are more just going forward.⁸ But this line of reasoning faces two problems as an approach to historical injustice. First, it is unable to explain how installing more just social structures today amounts to redressing historical injustices given that the obligation to enact such structural transformation is justified by present-day agents' participation in unjust social structures—not by a moral appeal to doing something about unredressed historical injustices.⁹ Second, it has implausibly wide-reaching implications for which agents have this obligation, at least from a historical injustice-oriented perspective. On this view, effectively everyone has an obligation to address present-day structural injustices since everyone participates in some way in unjust social structures.¹⁰ This obligation thus extends in equal measure to present-day descendants of both victims and perpetrators of historical injustices, for example, the descendants of both slaves and slave-owners alike. But surely the victims are the ones to whom redress for historical injustice is owed—not the ones who owe redress to others. If it is to avoid these problems, the structural approach needs to provide an alternative answer to the justification question.

This article develops a novel view in the historical injustice debate that aims to incorporate insights from both the reparations approach and the structural approach while avoiding their respective problems. I call this view Radical Reparations. The key innovation is a reinterpretation of the BPP and how some present-day agents can be said to benefit from major historical injustices. Unlike existing BPP-based views, Radical Reparations contends that the relevant benefits are not (just) material resources like wealth and property but (also) positions of power and privilege within contemporary social structures, structures which are the legacies of historical injustices like colonialism and slavery. Agents who receive these benefits have reparative obligations to redress those historical injustices. Since these benefits cannot be simply relinquished and redistributed, however, the content of these reparative obligations takes a different form than material redistribution in Radical Reparations: beneficiaries must transform these power-conferring and privilege-conferring social structures via enacting structural reforms. Beneficiaries thus have backward-looking reparative obligations to support and enact egalitarian structural reforms today. Radical Reparations is thus broadly aligned with the reparations approach on the justification and in turn distribution of reparative obligations among present-day agents by appealing to the BPP, but it is broadly aligned with the structural approach by specifying the content of those obligations in terms of addressing present-day structural injustices. On this hybrid view, the gap between the reparations and the structural approaches is perhaps not as wide as some have argued¹¹: present-day beneficiaries should support structural reforms because they have reparative obligations to address the unjust benefits of major historical injustices. This view, I further suggest, enjoys theoretical advantages over other views that have tried to hybridize the reparation and structural approaches by appealing to the liability of corporate agents, for example, the state, for historical injustices.¹²

The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 critically reviews the reparations approach, focusing on the BPP, and argues that the existing discussion overlooks the different kinds of moral wrongs involved in major historical injustices as well as their lasting structural legacies. Section 3 examines the structural approach and contends that despite its richer understanding of historical injustices, existing accounts lack a sufficiently backward-looking justification for the structural reforms they propose and thus face significant problems as an approach to historical injustice. Section 4 introduces Radical Reparations and argues that it can overcome these problems. Section 5 discusses two objections to Radical Reparations, one from the structural approach and the other from the reparations approach. Section 6 concludes.

Notably, this article presents a conditional argument, for the philosophical and empirical issues surrounding historical injustice are numerous and complex. The justification question—whether present-day agents do in fact have moral obligations to redress historical injustices—is a hotly contested issue, and I cannot review all of the counterarguments here.¹³ Similarly, the content question—what is required to fulfill those moral obligations, assuming that they are morally justified—is in part an empirical question, one that philosophical investigation is not well-equipped to answer with due specificity, especially if structural reform is on the table. The article does not aim to offer a comprehensive answer to these questions. The more modest goal is to defend the following conditional claim: if the BPP is a plausible justificatory principle for assigning reparative obligations to present-day agents, and if major historical injustices like colonialism and slavery have had lasting structural ramifications, then there is a plausible view that brings together the reparations and structural approaches to historical injustice while avoiding their respective weaknesses.

Two questions form the nexus of philosophical discussions of reparations. I will refer to them as Who Pays and Pay What. Who Pays asks: which agents have moral obligations to provide reparations for historical injustices, and relatedly, which agents should be compensated? Who Pays is a difficult question to answer for historical injustices insofar as the original perpetrators are often long gone, which means the usual rationale for assigning reparative obligations (“You did this, so you better fix it!”) is inapplicable to present-day agents. Pay What asks: what exactly is the kind and amount of compensation owed for historical injustices? Pay What is a difficult question for historical injustices because popular accounts of compensation are difficult to apply to injustices that occurred long ago, for various reasons.¹⁴ For reparations to be morally justified and practicable, Who Pays and Pay What (which correspond to the justification and content questions, respectively) must be answered.

Several philosophers, most prominently Daniel Butt and Robert Goodin, have proposed the BPP as an answer to both questions.¹⁵ Its core thesis is that present-day individuals who enjoy the tainted material benefits of historical injustices, including unjustly acquired wealth, property, and other such resources, have reparative obligations to relinquish these resources so that these resources can be redistributed to the victims of historical injustices and their descendants. These reparative obligations are justified because present-day beneficiaries of historical injustices have no moral claim to resources that were initially acquired by unjust means; by retaining these resources, present-day beneficiaries perpetuate the unjust distributive effects of past wrongs. Redressing past wrongs thus requires that beneficiaries relinquish these tainted resources. The BPP thus offers these answers to Who Pays and Pay What: the present-day beneficiaries of historical injustices are obligated to pay for material reparations, and what they are obligated to pay is precisely the amount of material benefits that they have gained as a result of these historical injustices.

These answers invite further questions and challenges. One immediate question is how to determine who exactly has materially benefited from historical injustices and to what extent. This is no easy question for major historical injustices, the economic effects of which were highly complex. Hilary Beckles argues that the spoils of Britain's exploitation of the Caribbean fueled economic development back in Britain, tracing a ripple effect from the slave trade and sugar plantation industry in the Caribbean to major sectors of the domestic British economy, for example, ship manufacturing and metallurgy.¹⁶ The growth of these sectors presumably had ripple effects of their own. Thus, by her lights, even the poorest laborer in Britain benefited to some extent from Britain's exploitation of the Caribbean. Similar points can be made about other major historical injustices like slavery. Such complex economic effects imply that determining who materially benefited from historical injustices with any exactitude is a quite difficult task in most cases. The clearest application of the BPP would seem to be limited to a narrow class of cases, namely ones where the tainted origins of specific properties or resources are well documented and subsequent transfers of those properties or resources have left a clear paper trail.¹⁷

Furthermore, even assuming that the relevant present-day beneficiaries can be identified, appealing to material benefits leaves the BPP wide open to a skeptical challenge as to the broader justifiability of reparations for major historical injustices. Suppose one holds, as many philosophers do, a counterfactual view of benefits (and harms): an agent benefits (or is harmed) from an interaction with another agent whenever their level of welfare is higher (or lower) than it would have been had the interaction not occurred.¹⁸ This view of benefit motivates a well-known objection to reparations, namely that major historical injustices actually benefited some, if not all, members of the “victimized” group, for instance by spurring economic trade and development—as a few historians have claimed about Britain's colonial legacy in India.¹⁹ Reparations in such cases, some argue, are morally unjustified given that these individuals would be materially worse off today than they would have been had these historical injustices never happened.²⁰ Proponents of the BPP might offer various replies: these sorts of claims are based on historically and economically flawed assumptions,²¹ the counterfactual view can be salvaged by using a morally idealized counterfactual,²² the beneficiaries still ought to relinquish tainted resources for publicly beneficial ends even if some victims have materially benefited,²³ and so forth. Whether these replies are successful is a matter for further discussion, but the important point here is that the challenge arises because the BPP appeals to material benefits to justify reparative obligations.

Finally, there is a question about the adequacy of the BPP as a means of redressing historical injustice. The basic issue is that the value of tainted benefits today may not necessarily be equivalent to the harm that descendants of the victims suffer today. For example, a piece of dispossessed Indigenous land might have become barren and unproductive over time due to harmful environmental practices; relinquishing and returning that land, one might argue, would hardly amount to an adequate form of redress to the dispossessed people. This possibility speaks to the broader point that the actions of agents that occurred after the initial unjust acquisition matters for reparations.²⁴ Note that the problem can run in the other direction as well, leading to another skeptical challenge to the justifiability of reparations: it may turn out that the material benefits of some present-day agents stem largely from what they did with these tainted resources, rather than the resources themselves. In such cases, relinquishing those material benefits overcompensates for historical injustice; indeed, this line of reasoning calls into question the very claim that the resources of some present-day agents count as the “benefits” of historical injustice.²⁵

Given these problems, one might conclude that the BPP is not a plausible answer to historical injustice; if, as some have argued, the BPP is the best available version of the reparations approach, then perhaps reparations for major historical injustices are unjustified and impracticable. But, I want to suggest a different, more optimistic diagnosis: these problems with the BPP can be avoided by abandoning certain mistaken assumptions about the nature of historical injustice. More specifically, current accounts of the BPP proceed from an unduly narrow understanding of major historical injustices such as colonialism and slavery as (1) distributive wrongs that (2) lie squarely in the past. There are good reasons to reject both assumptions, as several philosophers who defend a structural injustice-based approach to historical injustice have argued. Understanding those reasons points the way toward a reinterpretation of the BPP that might rescue it from these particular problems.

Consider first the assumption that these historical injustices are essentially distributive in nature, such that the relevant and lingering effects of these injustices to be repaired today are distributions of resources. Given this starting point, the remedy to historical injustice inevitably takes the form of calculating the damages and benefits of each incident of past expropriation, totaling up the damages and benefits and translating them into their equivalent in present-day material holdings, and ensuring that those holdings are used to compensate the victims for the lingering damages of historical injustice. Reparations turns out to be a spreadsheet problem. Historical injustice, on this view, begins with past maldistribution and ends with present-day redistribution.

This focus on the distribution of resources ignores the many significant nondistributive dimensions of historical injustices, as emphasized in many first-hand accounts by victims of their lived experiences under colonialism and racism.²⁶ To name but a few: W.E.B. DuBois describes the Black experience of misrecognition and nonrecognition in a white dominated society as one of “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”²⁷ Frantz Fanon describes the alienation involved in the experience of colonialism through a story about a French child who points to him and exclaims “Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!”—the emptiness of being seen as an “object among other objects” in the world, rather than a person.²⁸ Chief Standing Bear describes the rapid decline of the Sioux culture and the ensuing cultural disorientation of his tribe in the wake of US settler-colonial expansion in the late 19th century.²⁹ Gandhi discusses what he perceives as the moral bankrupting of India by Western civilization and its promises of material wealth, a trade that comes at the cost of spiritual fulfillment.³⁰ These are not worries about distributions of resources; rather, they speak to moral values like self-respect, social standing, cultural survival and recognition, and self-determination, values that continue to significantly inform the demands and complaints of social movements for racial equality and postcolonial global justice.³¹ Assuming that the victims of historical injustices have some authority over the relevant harms of these wrongs, one should worry that historical injustices like colonialism, slavery, and segregation cannot be adequately understood and assessed merely in distributive terms.³²

Consider now the assumption that major historical injustices like colonialism and slavery are straightforwardly past injustices—hence the fixation with the problem of calculating the correct amount of damages that they inflict-ed. This is a far too simplistic view of history. These injustices did not simply disappear one day, leaving behind only a skewed distribution of material resources; old wrongs persist in new forms within present-day structures and institutions which were shaped by these injustices and in some cases literally grew out of them.³³ Take colonialism: Kwame Nkrumah argues that the formal end of European colonialism in the 20th century only inaugurated an era of “neo-colonialism” in which former colonial powers continue to “perpetuate colonialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom’.”³⁴ Or take slavery: Michelle Alexander emphasizes the institutional continuities from American slavery to Jim Crow to present-day mass incarceration (e.g., that some modern day police departments originated as slave patrols), comprising “a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.”³⁵ These views invite a different understanding of major ‘historical’ injustices that urges greater recognition the various ways in which wrongs like colonialism and slavery have had lasting institutional and structural ramifications. If persistent disparities between the descendants of the victims of historical injustice and the descendants of its perpetrators originate not just in ill-gotten resources in the past but also in recurring structural injustices leading up to the present, then simply asking what reparations are owed for, say, slavery alone will miss an inevitable part of the phenomenon that ought to be redressed, even on a purely distributive view of historical injustice. In reality, Black Americans are owed compensation for a number of overlapping racial injustices including, but not limited to, the enslavement of their ancestors.³⁶

In short, due to their assumptions about the nature of major historical injustices, current applications of the BPP fail to do justice to their subject matter. The harms and benefits of major historical injustices extend beyond material distributions; moreover, the institutional and structural legacies of these injustices stretch into the present-day, meaning that it is misleading to think of them as straightforwardly past wrongs. These assumptions lead the BPP to an unduly narrow view of the content of reparative obligations for major historical injustices, namely that present-day beneficiaries ought to relinquish the tainted resources they hold due to past wrongdoing. But what else can be done to redress these historical injustices? This question brings us to an alternative vision of what redressing historical injustice requires: the structural approach.

The structural approach presents a different, more expansive vision of redress for historical injustices. On this approach, the proper response to historical injustice is not redistributing material resources but transforming contemporary unjust social structures. Beyond this basic contention, however, its proponents diverge significantly in the details. This section will critically examine the structural approach by discussing the views of its proponents: Iris Marion Young, Catherine Lu, Alasia Nuti, and Maeve McKeown.³⁷ While they offer important insights into how historical injustice can and should be redressed in ways that go beyond material redistribution (the content question), I argue that all of these views face serious problems concerning why, and in turn which, present-day agents ought to redress historical injustice in these ways (the justification question).

This section proposes a hybrid view that aims to avoid these problems with the reparations approach and the structural approach. I call this view Radical Reparations. Its key innovation is a reinterpretation of the BPP. Recall that the basic contention of the BPP is that present-day agents who enjoy the tainted benefits of historical injustices have reparative obligations to relinquish those benefits to compensate present-day agents who have been harmed by those injustices. Existing accounts have used the BPP to argue for the redistribution and restitution of wealth, property, and other material resources, focusing on the distributive effects of historical injustice. Notice, however, that the principle itself has a wider scope: from a moral perspective, all tainted benefits of historical injustices ought to be relinquished and used to repair the harms these injustices have caused.

This is an important point, for the benefits of major historical injustices are not simply material in kind. As illuminated by the structural approach, historical injustices have shaped contemporary social structures in ways that produce and reproduce unjust outcomes for certain groups. These structural injustices do not affect everyone equally: as Young puts it, structural injustices occur “when social processes put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them.”⁵⁴ In other words, where there is structural injustice, some agents occupy positions of power and privilege within prevailing social structures, while other agents occupy positions that leave them vulnerable to significant harms. These positions can be specified in terms of either individuals or collectivities, depending on how the relevant unjust social structures are analyzed. In the global political economy, for instance, states are arguably the agents that occupy the relevant structural positions, as the Global North/Global South distinction implies. In contrast, in a racially unjust society like the U.S., individuals continue to occupy highly unequal structural positions in virtue of their race, as evinced by the fact that Black Americans “are worse off than whites and the average American on virtually every objective measure of well-being, including health, wealth, education, employment, criminal victimization and involvement, and political participation.”⁵⁵ In either case, present-day agents are differentially positioned in unjust social relations due to the structural legacies of major historical injustices.

I contend that such positions of power and privilege are a structural benefit of historical injustices. Calling a position of power and privilege a “benefit” for the agent who occupies it may strike some as an odd claim, especially for those accustomed to understanding benefits in terms of material resources. But upon reflection, this is a familiar notion: if my boss promotes me to a position of greater autonomy in which I can more freely pursue my own projects, then that promotion benefits me—even if the position does not come with a meaningful raise of salary. An agent can benefit from having a more favorable (because more powerful, autonomous, esteemed, etc.) position within a social structure, independently of whatever additional material resources come with that position. Adopting this conception of benefit suggests a more radical interpretation of the BPP: contemporary agents who enjoy structural benefits, that is, occupy positions of power and privilege, ought to relinquish these benefits for reparative ends. This is the central contention of Radical Reparations.

A useful way to spell out Radical Reparations is to return to the two questions that motivate the reparations approach: Who Pays (i.e., the justification question) and Pay What (i.e., the content question). Because it appeals to the BPP, Radical Reparations gives the same answer to Who Pays as any other BPP-based account: contemporary agents who have benefited from historical injustice have reparative obligations to relinquish said benefits. Pay What is more complicated. Given the nature of structural benefits, relinquishing them cannot be accomplished simply via a one-time redistribution of material resources to the descendant victims of historical injustice. Structural benefits are not material possessions that beneficiaries own and manage as private property. Rather, they are favorable social positions of power and privilege that they enjoy in light of their structural relation to others.⁵⁶ These positions are constituted by and embedded within social structures that confer differential power and privilege to occupying agents.⁵⁷ To relinquish their structural benefits, then, present-day beneficiaries would have to support and enact the relevant structural reforms; there is simply no other way to relinquish structural benefits.⁵⁸ Radical Reparations thus issues the same prescription as the structural approach, namely to address present-day structural injustices through structural reforms. But crucially, unlike the structural approach, this prescription has a backward-looking justification, namely the BPP.

Needless to say, the precise structural reforms necessary to eliminate these structural benefits is a complex empirical question. Let me discuss one illustrative case. It has been argued that despite the formal cessation of colonial rule, former colonial powers have maintained a dominant global position vis-à-vis their former colonies in the post-colonial era through various political, economic, and cultural institutions, which collectively form a system of neo-colonialism.⁵⁹ In its economic function, neo-colonialism describes the continued extraction of human and natural resources from former colonies by fostering relationships of unequal dependence to former colonial powers.⁶⁰ If that is correct, then a one-time material redistribution as a form of compensation for colonialism would be insufficient and indeed ineffective: so long as the exploitative neo-colonial relationship remains, transferring resources from the exploiter to the exploited is like adding more water to a leaking pool. Instead, the priority should be to end this exploitative relationship by reforming the relevant economic institutions, for example, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, that disproportionately favor the interests of former colonial states in the rules of the global economy.⁶¹

That is exactly the kind of proposal that Radical Reparations justifies and prescribes. For former colonial powers to provide adequate redress, they ought to bring an end to neo-colonial structures and allow former colonies to participate in the global economy under more just conditions. They have a reparative obligation to do so because their favorable global economic position is a structural legacy of colonialism, a major historical injustice that has shaped the contemporary global political economy. To relinquish that structural benefit, therefore, they must reform the structures and institutions that create and maintain their favorable position. To be sure, this is easier said than done. How to successfully motivate and carry out such significant structural reforms with minimal transitional costs is an important, complex, and largely empirical question. But the important point is that the BPP, suitably interpreted, supports that sort of structural transformation as a form of reparations.

Let me now explain how Radical Reparations avoid the problems that we saw with the reparations and the structural approaches. Recall that the reparations approach faced three challenges: (1) how to determine the present-day beneficiaries of historical injustice, (2) how to respond to the possibility that descendants of victims have materially benefited overall from historical injustices, and (3) how to respond to the possibility that the supposed ‘benefits’ of historical injustice owe more to the talents and choices of innocent individuals after the initial unjust acquisition of resources. Radical Reparations has an answer to each of these challenges.

Regarding (1), we have seen that pinpointing present-day beneficiaries and victims can be quite challenging because material benefits and harms had complex ripple effects on many agents throughout an economic system. Such effects imply that there is great uncertainty about who benefited from a historical injustice and to what extent (and, moreover, whether those benefits can truly be attributed to past wrongs). Radical Reparations avoids this problem entirely because it appeals to the structural, not material, benefits of historical injustice: the distribution of power and privilege between different social groups over time. Historical continuities in positions of power and privilege are more easily discernible: it is much more difficult to deny that group-based structural inequalities originating in historical injustices persist today than to deny that this individual enjoys more material resources today because their ancestor wronged that individual.⁶² For instance, empirical studies routinely uncover systematic inequalities between racial groups in the United States ranging from infant mortality rates to incarceration to higher education attainment, inequalities that have demonstrably persisted over time.⁶³

These considerations also provide an answer to (2): even if the descendants of victims of historical injustices did in fact materially benefit from these wrongs, that claim does not undermine the fact that some present-day agents have reparative obligations to those groups. In Radical Reparations, the moral grounds of providing redress for historical injustices is not based in calculations of material benefits and harms but rather on the existence of unequal structural positions that benefit some agents while disadvantaging others. To be sure, structural injustices have material implications, but the relevant concern on this view is not the material distributive effects of unjust social structures but rather the structures themselves, more importantly, the inequalities of power and privilege between the agents within these structures.⁶⁴ Whether former colonies materially benefited from colonialism is thus besides the question if, as many have argued, it is true that these countries remain in disadvantaged positions in the global basic structure.

Finally, that the benefits of historical injustice owe more to the talents and choices of innocent individuals following the initial unjust acquisition is a coherent challenge only under the assumption that the relevant benefits are material in kind. When the focus is shifted to the structural benefits attached to structural positions like being white or being a Global North citizen, this challenge lacks plausibility. Individual agents who occupy such structural positions cannot plausibly be said to have created these positions themselves. These positions depend on a backdrop of particular laws, international treaties and agreements, cultural norms, forms of economic exchange, and other structural conditions that individual agents do not control, let alone create. The privileges of being a white individual in a racially unjust society, for example, are not an outcome of that individual's talents and efforts; rather, these privileges are attached to their position in the racial structure of the United States, a structure that has been deeply shaped by historical injustices like slavery and segregation. Such an individual, therefore, cannot be credited for the structural benefits they have received due to their structural position.

Turning now to the structural approach, two main problems needed attention: (1) how to justify the obligation to enact structural reforms in a way that explains why such reforms fulfill the backward-looking project of redressing historical injustice, and (2) how to distribute reparative obligations without eliding the distinction between the individuals to whom reparations are owed and the individuals who owe reparations. Radical Reparations has an answer to both problems.

Regarding (1), Radical Reparations has a straightforward answer: enacting structural reforms today constitutes backward-looking redress because such reforms serve to undo the unjust legacies left behind by major historical injustices, in particular the structural benefits that some agents enjoy as a result of historical injustices. This is no different from the underlying logic of providing material reparations, namely that the point of redistributing material resources from present-day beneficiaries to victims is precisely to eliminate the unjust distributive effects of past wrongs. Radical Reparations shares that basic framework but targets a different set of unjust effects, namely, the ongoing structural effects of historical injustices. Note that this answer is available to Radical Reparations because it justifies reparative obligations through the BPP, which is inherently a backward-looking principle: it says that some present-day agents have reparative obligations because the benefits they enjoy today stem from past wrongs and thus need to be redressed.

Regarding (2), unlike the structural approach, Radical Reparations does not say that contemporary agents have reparative obligations in virtue of their social connection or civic affiliation, justifications that led to counterintuitive results. Only the present-day agents who are beneficiaries of historical injustices have reparative obligations due to their possession of structural benefits. Radical Reparations thus preserves the intuitive thought that reparations are owed to certain agents from other agents in light of continuing patterns of benefit and harm—as opposed to the structural approach in which enacting structural reforms is the shared responsibility of all agents given their mutual participation in unjust social structures or their membership in a structurally indebted corporate agent.

Before turning to objections, let me make two clarifications about Radical Reparations. First, the view is meant to apply only to a particular type of historical injustice, namely those that have had a significant and lasting impact on our social structures and institutions, that is, Nuti's concept of historical–structural injustices. I have offered some reasons to believe that major historical injustices like colonialism and slavery meet this criterion, though that claim needs further support than what I can give here. Second, Radical Reparations does not claim that present-day beneficiaries are the only agents who have a moral obligation to support and enact structural reforms. As proponents of the structural approach have argued, there may be forward-looking reasons why all contemporary agents, not just those who enjoy structural benefits, have a responsibility to address the unjust social structures that produce injustice. Radical Reparations simply argues that in our current social arrangements, some agents have specifically reparative obligations to address the structural legacies of historical injustices given their enjoyment of structural benefits. There can be multiple reasons for why a present-day agent should support structural reforms; Radical Reparations merely contends that a distinctive and backward-looking reason applies to present-day structural beneficiaries of historical injustices. For those agents, structural transformation is as much a backward-looking reparative project as it is a forward-looking transformative project.

As one might expect, Radical Reparations faces objections from both the reparations approach and the structural approach. This section addresses what I take to be the most serious objection from each.

I have argued that Radical Reparations offers a more plausible set of answers to the justification and content questions in the historical injustice debate. On this view, present-day agents who enjoy structural benefits from major historical injustices like slavery and colonialism have reparative obligations to support and enact structural reforms in order to address the unjust structural legacies of these historical injustices.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest