European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Part 7 docx

What is more, these harms are not confined to the past but are ones that continue to result from the practices ofcontemporary international politics.. Said argues thatthis knowledge affe

of international society in relation to the moral purpose of advancingworld order values.

The ethics of constructing others

Anthony Pagden cogently argues that the ‘need to make some sense

of the beliefs and the ethical lives of others’ sometimes ‘resulted in an

attempt to construct “others” better suited to the observers, own

partic-ular ethical life’.1 Others are, as we have seen before, counter imagesconstructed in ways that define us by what we are not.2The construc-tion of this image involves imagination and may not accord with reality.Nevertheless, the ‘other’ that is constructed is assumed to exist and

to be representative of a culture Once the ‘other’ – ‘this or that real

“savage” or “barbarian” ’ – has been set up as a counter image andgiven a cultural identity ‘his or her moral existence becomes a matter

of real concern’ This leads Pagden to assert that ‘[t]he discoveries bymodern Europe of a huge range of “other” worlds, of which Americawas merely the first, if also the most striking, has made this the mostdeeply troubling, the most unsettling of modern cultural and ethicaldilemmas’.3The construction of people, which often fails to understandthem in their own terms, complicates cross-cultural understanding InEuropean encounters with non-Europeans it meant that ‘conquest andannihilation was the only way in which cultures could deal with thedifferences between them’.4There has thus always been a lot riding onthe way others are constructed

My concern here is with the nature of the ethical dilemma that is part

of and results from constructing others The essence of the dilemma isthat we cannot avoid constructing others but in so doing we may dothem a variety of harms What is more, these harms are not confined

to the past but are ones that continue to result from the practices ofcontemporary international politics This has been brilliantly demon-strated by Greg Fry in a searching critique of Australian images of theSouth Pacific Fry is concerned with the implications and consequences

of Australian media, officials and academics asserting the right to speak

1 Pagden, European Encounters, p 184.

2 Ivar B Neuman and Janet M Walsh, ‘The Other in European Self-definition: an

adden-dum to the literature on international society’, Review of International Studies, 17 (1991), 327–48, and Ivar B Neuman, ‘Self and Other in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 2: 2 (1996), 139–74.

3 Pagden, European Encounters, p 185. 4 Ibid., p 187.

for the peoples of the South Pacific and to lead and manage them.5Hisinterest is that one region, but his analysis is one that applies equally

to all situations involving the construction of others It should be dantly clear from earlier chapters that the construction of non-Europeanothers by Europeans has frequently meant that the latter ascribed to theformer characteristics that degraded and represented them as less thanfully human The images constructed by Europeans have been ones thatdisempower non-Europeans and are used to justify practices of domi-nation

abun-Fry opens his critique by pointing out that Australian images of SouthPacific peoples are two-edged Not only do they provide an insight intothe minds of those who hold them, they also ‘affect the lives of the peoplethey depict’:

It has mattered for Pacific islanders when, at various times over thepast two hundred years, influential Australians have viewed themcollectively as savages, noble savages, children, or full human beings,and whether the region was depicted as a defence shield, a frontier,empty or unstable Each of these lenses allowed or encouraged differentAustralian behaviour towards Pacific islanders: from colonial controland exploitation, to protection, development, and the encouragement

of self-determination.6

In explaining and developing this argument Fry draws on Edward Said’scritique of orientalism.7

Said argues that the depiction of others is integral to the structure

of power that binds those others into an inferior role and status Theway others are depicted or represented is part of the ‘knowledge’ thatrationalises the exercise of power His ‘method for assessing whetherknowledge practices might be regarded as inherently subordinating is

to examine the unacknowledged epistemological premises’ embedded

in them Consequently, Fry focuses on the concern Said has with ‘first,the tendency to create a mythical collective identity – the Orient – and

a mythical essentialised person – the Oriental – which it then becomespossible to characterize, and second, the tendency to consistently pro-mote belittling, negative images of those identities’ Said argues thatthis knowledge affects those depicted ‘not just because it informs andjustifies colonial or neo-colonial practices through providing the lenses

5 Greg Fry, ‘Framing the Islands: Knowledge and Power in Changing Australian Images

of “the South Pacific” ’, The Contemporary Pacific, 9: 2 (1997).

6 Ibid., p 306 7 Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

through which Europeans see the orient, but because it begins to betaken on as a self-image by those so depicted’.8

Fry is careful not to uncritically accept Said’s analysis and draws tion to three different traps that the unwary can be led into by Said Thefirst is that of mirroring Orientalism with the concept of ‘Occidentalism’and speaking of ‘the West’ as if it were a single entity With the sup-port of James Clifford9 and Nicholas Thomas,10 Fry argues that this

atten-‘simply does not reflect the complexity of Western approaches to thenon-Western world’ It is not the case that all ‘Westerners’, or in thecase of the Pacific, all Australians, should be seen as supporting struc-tures of knowledge and power concerned with domination Second,Said’s critics have expressed concern about ‘his ambivalence on thequestion of whether a critique of Orientalist practices implies that there

is a true Orient which is missed by the distorting lenses of Europeanpreconceptions’.11What is interesting about this for Fry is the implica-tion that those who believe European lenses are distorting, themselves

‘think there can be one true reality’ The third trap or set of issues tified by Fry is Aijaz Ahmad’s argument that ‘the critique of Westernrepresentations of the non-European world becomes a new form of de-pendency theory, an attempt to place the blame for wrongs firmly onthe outside world rather than sheet responsibility home to local elites’.Taking care to avoid these traps Fry proceeds to uncover and rebutfour epistemological premises suppressed in a series of influential me-dia, policy and academic representations of the South Pacific Each ofthe premises he examines points to the way harm can result from theconstruction of others Fry himself is particularly interested in the eth-ical judgements that can be made about the exercise of power inher-ent in the practices associated with each The first is the way mythicalpersons who are supposedly representative of all who resemble themare constructed and assumed to exist Instead of, for instance, PacificIslanders being seen as diverse peoples, they are essentialised and seen

iden-as one; diversity is suppressed Pacific Island states are treated iden-as if theywere all alike and all facing the same problems What is presented asknowledge actually ‘bears little resemblance to the experience of any so-ciety, [and] this has implications for the claim to truth’.12 Second, with

8 Fry, ‘Framing the Islands’, pp 310–11.

9 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

10Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture. 11 Fry, ‘Framing the Islands’, p 312.

12 Ibid., p 313.

regard to whether others are consistently dehumanised or belittled Fryfinds a mixed record but concludes that, with regard to the South Pacific

at least, there has been a return to ‘subordinating images’.13 Third, hedeals with ‘the relationship that the framers of the knowledge definebetween themselves and the frame’ His argument concerning this isthat ‘the construction of a division between a superior “us” and an in-ferior “them” is accentuated by the degree to which there is a denial ofshared humanity on the part of the framer, in the sense of a prepared-ness of placing its own experience and problems up for depiction along-side the others about which it is constructing knowledge’ Finally, Fryconsiders ‘preconceptions concerning certainty of knowledge ’ He

is troubled in particular about ‘the extent to which Australian tations claim to provide the one true reality of Pacific Island experiencerather than a perspective built on particular epistemological and ideo-logical preconceptions’.14

represen-To recap, Fry’s major argument is that the practices associated witheach of these premises adversely affect the lives of the people they con-cern They influence, even determine, both how those who frame the im-ages behave towards those framed and the self-image of those framed.Each of the premises identified by Fry can be linked to either potential

or actual harm; and because of this the construction of others is sarily an act that has ethical implications Stereotyping and the denial ofdiversity leads to the unjust treatment of some, if not a great many, indi-viduals and whole social and cultural groups It can involve the denial

neces-of rights and results in the perpetuation neces-of false images used to tify oppression and domination People are harmed by the false imagesand the denial of rights based on them Similarly the dehumanisation

jus-of others has historically harmed those seen as ‘uncivilised’, ‘savage’ orless than fully human Such terms undermine the self-esteem of indi-viduals so categorised and can be used to justify the denial of rights

In extreme cases, the dehumanisation of others leads to cultural if notphysical genocide The presumption of superiority, including the ways

of knowing of those who believe themselves to be superior, discounts

or denies the belief systems of those named as inferior peoples It is afurther justification for a variety of harms Last, claims to know realitycompound the harm to others by disempowering them from determin-ing the nature of the conditions that affect their lives

13 Ibid., pp 313–14 14 Ibid., p 314.

At stake in all of these is an underlying question of human dignity.Given that we cannot escape constructing others, the onus is on us tomake sure we understand each other as well as possible If the past andpresent harms associated with constructing others are to be dealt withand addressed there must be an effort to understand others in their ownterms However, in the final analysis this may be an impossible goal

to attain Apart from anything else, encounters between cultures caninvolve a clash of values that may be an insurmountable barrier to fullcomprehension of the other Finally, in concluding this section it should

be recognised that the construction of others need not be negative butcan have positive outcomes Just as others have been constructed inways that denigrate, dehumanise or demonise them, it is possible toconstruct others in ways that praise, value and empower them

Collective responsibility and historic injustices

Whether present generations have any responsibility for past wrongs tofirst nations is a complex and sometimes bitterly contested question Itcan be approached from a number of standpoints, with some of themshaped by the historic circumstances of the country in which the ques-tion is being debated In this section I propose to canvass four differentapproaches without in any way wanting to suggest that these are theonly ones The first is Tzvetan Todorov’s discussion of responsibility

as the obligation to understand others The second is one provoked byrecent developments in Australia in which Rob Sparrow grounds a de-fence of collective responsibility on a view of history that can be applied

to other contexts and issues The third is Chandran Kukathas’ denial ofcollective responsibility as part of his concern to articulate a liberal the-ory of responsibility Finally, Jeremy Waldron’s argument that historicinjustices can be superseded is canvassed

Towards the end of The Conquest of America, Todorov refers to what

he calls the ‘half prophecy and half curse’ Las Casas uttered when heasserted that the Spaniards had a collective responsibility for the deathand destruction they had inflicted on the Indians of the Americas Itwas, he said, a responsibility for all time and not just the past or thepresent Todorov takes Las Casas’ pronouncement as a cue for himself,suggesting that Spain can be substituted by ‘Western Europe’ It is notonly Spaniards who have a collective responsibility but also the peo-ples of all other European powers that formerly controlled overseas

colonies – Portugal, France, England, Holland, Belgium, Italy andGermany All of these states, he suggests, have collective responsibil-ity for their former colonised peoples.15 What he means by ‘collectiveresponsibility’ is not entirely clear and needs clarification.

The idea that the Spaniards have a collective responsibility toAmerindians for all time is meant to convey, first, that it is not just theConquistadors and colonists who had direct contact with the Indianswho had this responsibility It was the whole of the Spanish people – orthe whole of the people of any other European former colonial power.The claim is that each and every Spaniard was responsible for actionstaken in the name of Spain Second, it was not just the responsibility ofall Spaniards at a particular time in the past but remains a responsibilityfor Spaniards today and for those yet to be born Third, it is not just theSpaniards who have this responsibility but ‘Western Europe’, which re-ally amounts to the membership of international society at the outset ofthe twentieth century Curiously he appears not to be concerned aboutthe responsibilities of non-European colonisers, but that need not detain

us here

Todorov’s claims concerning responsibility would clearly be dinary if they referred to dispossession, to intentional killing or to thedeaths caused by the introduction of diseases such as smallpox, but theyconcern the more diffuse and continuing problem of knowing others.His concern is with the ability of Europeans to use knowledge of others

extraor-to manipulate them, coupled with a paradoxical failure extraor-to attempt extraor-tounderstand those very same others in their own terms As he puts it,the other remains to be discovered:

Since the period of the conquest, for almost three hundred and fiftyyears, Western Europe has tried to assimilate the other, to do awaywith an exterior alterity, and has in great part succeeded Its way oflife and its values have spread around the world; – This extraordinarysuccess is chiefly due to one specific feature of Western civilisationwhich for a long time was regarded as a feature of man himself, its de-velopment and prosperity among Europeans thereby becoming proof

of their natural superiority: it is paradoxically, Europeans’ capacity tounderstand the other.16

This passage comes after an extensive analysis intended to demonstratethat Cort´es used language to gain knowledge of Indian beliefs which hethen used to manipulate Indians, Montezuma in particular, into thinking

15 Todorov, Conquest of America, pp 245–6. 16 Ibid., pp 247–8.

that events were unfolding in conformity with the signs essential totheir view of the world Todorov’s concern is then that ‘Western Europe’has a responsibility not to use knowledge as power for the purpose ofoppression and domination; a responsibility not to simply assimilate theother and so obliterate difference but to truly discover and to understandthe other in his or her own terms The introduction to his later book,

On Human Diversity,17 suggests that his concern is closely connectedwith his personal experiences of otherness and the systematic abuse ofknowledge and power in his homeland

One reason for understanding others in their own terms is that itmay be necessary for sustaining international society David Blaneyand Nameen Inayatullah18compare Todorov’s work with that of AshisNandy in relation to the challenge cultural pluralism poses for interna-tional society They point out that in a world of many cultures there maynot be agreement about the ‘common assumptions, values, ways of life,and modes of communication’ presupposed by the idea of internationalsociety There is then the problem of how agreement can be reached, andtheir suggestions are drawn from ‘Todorov’s idea of “nonviolent com-munication” and Nandy’s notion of a “dialogue of visions”.’ Both

of these are concerned with the process of ‘othering’ by means of which

‘a self understands the relationship between itself and some other’ and

it is ‘an understanding with practical implications’.19Their argument isthat while both Todorov and Nandy offer richly rewarding insights intocross-cultural understanding and ‘othering’ their narratives are ‘not sit-uated within a complex of global cultures’ They then show how thesenarratives can be constructively situated in the framework of interna-tional society For them the possibility contained in Todorov and Nandy

is one that does not surrender to ‘incommensurablity, disabling of versation and international society’, but is instead a conversation ‘in theface of difference and in confrontation with power and domination’.20

con-Together Todorov and Nandy provide ways of understanding self–otherrelations that ‘make possible a conversational process in which partici-pation by the postcolonial and non-European periphery does not requireits inevitable subordination to the European core’.21Through a dialogue

17Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Harvard University Press, 1993).

18 David I Blaney and Nameen Inayatullah, ‘Prelude to a Conversation of Cultures in

International Society? Todorov and Nandy on the Possibility of Dialogue’, Alternatives 19

(1994), p 24.

19 Ibid., p 41 20 Ibid., p 42 21 Ibid., p 42.

that does not assume ‘Western’ superiority it is possible to achieve aconversation between cultures and, if Blaney and Inayatullah are right,the degree of mutual understanding needed to sustain internationalsociety.

In essence, the responsibility that concerns Todorov is that of ing in dialogue with ‘the other’ in order to understand those who aredifferent in their own terms and that means avoiding repeating the sameform of past injustices The second sense of responsibility to be discusseduses an Australian example and requires some background

engag-At the beginning of the twenty-first century in Australia the tion of responsibility for past injustices arises not only in relation toland rights but also the so-called ‘stolen generations’ This refers to thepractice of routinely removing half-caste babies and children from theirfamilies over a period that extended from the early 1900s down to thelate 1960s The intention underpinning this practice is debated but there

ques-is compelling evidence that during the 1930s in the Northern Territoryand Western Australia it amounted to genocide At that time it was be-lieved that ‘full blood’ Aborigines were a doomed race and that if theywere prevented from intermarrying with whites they would die out Byremoving half-caste children from their families aboriginality could bebred out of them, resulting in an end to the ‘problem’ of Aborigines.22Regardless of whether or not genocide was intended, thousands of chil-dren were removed from their families.23 Many were never reunitedwith their families and are today able to testify to the pain and sufferingthey have endured As one result of an inquiry into the Stolen Genera-tions released in 1997,24both Aboriginal leaders and concerned whiteAustralians continue to call for an apology from the prime minister ofAustralia for the wrongs done to Aboriginal people throughout whiteoccupation So far, Prime Minister Howard and his government haverefused to go further than to express regret for past harms

22 Robert Manne, ‘The Stolen Generation’, Quadrant, 42 (January–Februrary 1998), pp 53–

63.

23 Australia was not the only country to have removed children from their families In aid of assimilation indigenous Canadian children were also subjected to forcible removal and taken to residential schools set up and run by the churches Like their Australian counterparts they were prohibited from using their own language and were deprived of their cultural heritage As in Australia the effects on the individuals and their families was profound See Maggie Hodgson, ‘Rebuilding Community after Residential Schools’,

Bird, Land and Macadam (eds.), Nation to Nation, pp 92–108.

24 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1997).

An important question in the debate about this is whether Aboriginal Australians can be held ‘collectively responsible’ for thepast wrongs done to Aboriginal people Robert Sparrow argues fromthe nature of history to persuasively argue that they can.25Essential tohis argument is the idea that we are not able fully to comprehend thepresent It is only at some time in the future that historians are able tolook back, separate the important from the unimportant and better un-derstand complex events Historical knowledge is in this sense a socialconstruction Not only that, in looking back to our present, future histo-rians will not distinguish our present from our past as we do They areinstead more likely to see our present and past as just the one contiguouspast In his words, ‘the distinction between our past and our present isnot necessarily a historically significant one – From the perspective ofthe future, our past and present are both merely the past The backwardsgaze of the future may well treat much of what we regard as the past aspart of our present.’26

non-A second crucial element of the argument is that not only is non-Australia’spast racist and replete with injustices towards Aboriginal Australians,there has been no fundamental change in the contemporary treatment

of them by non-indigenous Australians Their life expectancy is erably lower, as are their levels of income, health and education At thesame time, they have a higher rate of unemployment, they represent agreater proportion of those in prison,27suffer more alcoholism and aremore likely to commit suicide It remains ‘essentially continuous with aracist history’28with respect to dispossession, extermination and forcedassimilation So long as present day injustices are tolerated and there

consid-is no decconsid-isive break from past practices, ‘our actions will be associatedwith those who have gone before’ Those ‘who look back will not see

us independently of our history’.29By implication we have the capacity

to bring about a fundamental change and it is by not doing so that wewill be seen by future historians as sharing responsibility for historicalinjustices with those who have gone before us

Sparrow anticipates that for some this merely prompts the question

of why we should care about how we will be seen by future generations

25Robert Sparrow, ‘History and Collective Responsibility’, Australasian Journal of ophy, 78: 3 (2000).

Philos-26 Ibid., p 348.

27 For a comparison of indigenous rates of incarceration in Australia, Canada and New

Zealand see chs 9, 10 and 11 of Haverman (ed.), Indigenous People’s Rights.

28 Sparrow, ‘History and Collective Responsibility’, p 350 29 Ibid., p 350.

His answer to this appeals to the effects of our actions on the future pled with the ethical character of those actions ‘The future’, he argues,

cou-‘represents the continuation of our ethical projects.’ If the earlier ment that the future determines ‘the nature of past and current events’ isaccepted, then it ‘transform[s] our understanding of our current ethicalpredicament’.30 The knowledge that we are likely to be judged in thesame light as those of our forebears who were responsible for injusticesshould bring us to the realisation that unless we effect a decisive break

argu-we will share collective responsibility for historic injustices

Kukathas focuses on who has or otherwise should be assigned, sponsibility for historic injustices within states In order to answer this

he contrasts individualist and collectivist views of responsibility and jects collective responsibility as not only problematic but ultimately un-desirable Early on he states the individualist position that past wrongsare not the fault of people living today and since it is not their fault theybear no responsibility for such wrongs The individualist position deniesany responsibility for past injustices and in setting out the argumentsthat can be deployed in support of this position Kukathas rehearses

re-a number of concerns similre-ar to those exre-amined by Jeremy Wre-aldron,which are discussed below Kukathas next sets out objections to denyingthe significance of the past and pays attention to the symbolic impor-tance of demands to address past injustices, with specific reference toAustralian Aborigines ‘For many Aborigines, justice in contemporaryterms is inextricably linked with an acknowledgement of the past Anddoing justice now requires recognising and repudiating past injustice.’31

The third part of his argument articulates the case for collective sibility and points out that in an example such as the Stolen Generationsmentioned above this requires bringing about a meeting of minds be-tween the victims of injustice and the descendants of the perpetrators

respon-of it Fourth, he mounts a case against collective responsibility Central

to this is the argument that collective responsibility presupposes thatAboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia are represented by two un-differentiated communities, but that it is difficult, if not impossible, toestablish that they are undifferentiated There is no Aboriginal nation

as such but instead a mix of urban and rural Aboriginal peoples withdisparate interests and this is mirrored by non-Aboriginal communities

30 Ibid., p 349.

31 Chandran Kukathas, ‘The Politics of Responsibility: How to Shift the Burden’, lished paper (1999), p 9.

unpub-Even if there were undifferentiated communities, the more importantpoint, for Kukathas, is that

there is no sense in which collectivities or communities can relate to oneanother, since communities themselves are not agents Communitiesmay relate to one another through agents – whether these be persons

or institutions – but they cannot do so without them

Furthermore, if a community is to be held responsible there has to

be some agent (or agents) who can be identified as responsible.32The force of this argument, in Kukathas’ reasoning, is that the collectivistapproach ‘does little to tell us who should be responsible and why’,but more importantly that it shifts the burden on to society as a whole.Societies and communities, in his view, ‘cannot act and, so, cannot actresponsibly’.33

Later on, he argues that while communities and societies cannot beheld responsible, associations with an authority structure can ‘Associ-ations are groups which comprise individuals whose relations are or-dered in such a way as to require them to take decisions on behalf ofthe group as a whole.’34Examples of associations are thus churches andthe states, which have indeed been responsible for many past injustices.This leads him to state that responsibility does lie with institutions andnot individuals, though ‘individuals can be held responsible for not per-forming their institutional duties, or obstructing others from carryingout theirs’ At this point the argument has denied collective respon-sibility, accepted that associations can be responsible but denied thatindividuals other than those acting as agents of associations can be held

‘directly responsible for the sins of the past or their consequences’.35

In the final part of his argument Kukathas asserts that responsibility

is essential to a good society and repeats that responsibility must belocated in agents The burden of his argument now shifts to concernabout the state as an agent If it is the agent, then responsibility shifts

to the state, but the state is an agent of society generally This meansthe responsibility is shifted back to society, which is precisely what hasbeen ruled out earlier in the argument Laying responsibility at the feet

of society would, he points out, reopen the individualist question of whycitizens should be held responsible Furthermore, as a liberal concernedwith freedom and paring back the power of the state, Kukathas arguesfor ‘denationalizing if not thoroughly privatizing responsibility’ Thus

32 Ibid., p 13 33 Ibid., p 15 34 Ibid., p 17 35 Ibid., p 18.

a society in which responsibility is taken seriously has to be, in someway, a free society For it must be a society in which responsibility –like power – is not concentrated but dispersed It must not be a society

in which it is easy for some [to] pass on responsibility to others, or for

a few others to arrogate it to themselves To some extent, to be able totake over responsibility is to be able to take power.36

The problem with this is that it is difficult, in the foreseeable future,

to envisage a shift to individual responsibility that would result in thesettlement of existing resentments and grievances arising from past in-justices To defer dealing with these until there are a sufficient number ofindividuals willing to identify themselves as responsible agents would

be to do nothing Locating the burden of responsibility in the mannerpreferred by Kukathas is essentially an ideal that may be unattainable.Waldron’s concern is not so much with whether there is collectiveresponsibility for historic injustices as with whether there should bereparation for them, particularly with respect to the dispossession ofland ‘People, or whole peoples, were attacked, defrauded, and expro-priated; their lands stolen and their lives ruined’,37 but what, if any,reparation is owed? At the outset Waldron links the identity of individ-uals and communities alike to remembrance of past acts Individualsestablish a sense of themselves by reference to past acts For communi-ties this is even more important, for they outlast individuals and have

a longer memory ‘To neglect the historical record is to do violence tothis identity and thus the community that it sustains And since com-munities help generate a deeper sense of identity for the individualsthey comprise, neglecting or expunging the historical record is a way

of undermining and insulating individuals as well.’38Waldron acceptsthat reparations are an important way of recognising that past injusticesoccurred, and are a way of apologising Even if the form of reparation issymbolic it may be none the less important ‘Since identity is bound upwith symbolism, a symbolic gesture may be as important to people asany material compensation.’39 His purpose is to draw attention to thedifficulties that may attend giving in to demands for reparations.Waldron identifies and deals in turn with three different approachesthat cast doubt on the wisdom of reparations: counterfactual reasoningabout what might have happened if the injustices had not occurred;the possibility that injustices fade with time; and that over time the

36 Ibid., p 20 37 Waldron, ‘Superseding Historic Injustice’, p 4.

38 Ibid., p 6 39 Ibid., p 7.

circumstances that made an act unjust can change The first of theseconcerns ‘what would have happened if some event (which did occur)had not taken place’.40 What, for example, would the tribal owners ofland have done with it had it not been wrongfully appropriated? ‘Howwould they have exercised their choice?’ The purpose of such interro-gation is to discover if the descendants of those who suffered injusticewould now be better off than they are and the descendants of those whoperpetrated the injustice worse off ‘The counter-factual approach [thus]aims to bring the present state of affairs as close to the state of affairsthat would have obtained if some specifically identified injustice had notoccurred.’41 Waldron argues that this involves working through what

he calls a ‘contagion of injustice’ In other words, a chain of connectedclaims of justice that cannot be satisfied without a comprehensive redis-tribution of what is being contested His conclusion is that in the finalanalysis it is probably impossible to reconstruct the past in a way thatwould be fair to those living at present

The second of the approaches argues from the effects of the passage

of time on entitlement to land Here the starting point is the assumptionthat expropriation is a continuing injustice Even though the originalowners who were expropriated may be long dead it is argued that thetribes or groups to which they belonged live on and ‘[i]t is this enduringentity that has been dispossessed’ This also leads to difficulties, espe-cially over whether entitlement survives and whether the passage oftime diminishes the moral importance of rights to land One argumentconcerning this is that after several generations ‘certain wrongs’ come

to be seen ‘as simply not worth correcting’ After a long period of time, itmight be difficult to establish exactly who had what rights Further, theuse of land over time may establish the rights of claimants other than the

‘original’ occupants In working through these arguments Waldron citesLocke’s labour theory of property We cannot, Waldron argues, ‘dismissout of hand the possibility that an expropriator may also in time replacethe original embedded labor of the person she expropriated with some-thing of her own’.42In closing his discussion of this approach he observesthat ‘[h]istorical entitlements are most impressive when moral entitle-ment is conjoined with present possession’,43and he draws attention tothe extra credence accorded to claims involving sacred sites Notwith-standing these exceptions his conclusion is that the passage of time doesgenerally tend to diminish property rights

40 Ibid., p 8 41 Ibid., p 13 42 Ibid., p 17 43 Ibid., p 19.

Third, there is the proposition that what is an unjust act under oneset of circumstances may under altered circumstances be just Waldronuses the acquisition of land as an example ‘A scale of acquisition thatmight be appropriate in a plentiful environment with a small popula-tion may be quite inappropriate in the same environment with a largepopulation, or with the same population once resources have becomedepleted In a plentiful environment with a small population, an indi-vidual appropriation of land makes no one worse off.’44In support ofthis he cites Locke’s argument, mentioned in Chapter 3:

He that leaves as much as another man can make use of, does as good

as take nothing at all No Body could think himself injur’d by thedrinking of another Man, though he took a good Draught, who had awhole River of the same Water left him to quench his thirst And thecase of Land and Water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly thesame.45

To this Waldron adds that Locke himself recognised that ‘the picturechanged once the population increased to the point where scarcity wasfelt’.46 He thus concludes that ‘[c]hanging circumstances can have aneffect on ownership rights notwithstanding the moral legitimacy of theoriginal appropriation’.47Claims about injustice he maintains, must, beresponsive to changes of circumstance and if they are it seems likely thatpast injustices can be superseded

There are at least four objections to Waldron’s treatment of historicinjustices First, the example of land acquisition and the appeal to Lockejust mentioned perpetuates another form of injustice by ignoring indige-nous beliefs and subordinating them to Western political theory Locke’sargument did not take into account indigenous patterns of land use andbelief systems that might have led to a different view concerning thejustice or otherwise of appropriating native lands

Second, the argument that altered circumstances can result in past justices being superseded is too closely tied to the appropriation of land

in-It is not just a matter of land but also of destroyed or at least degradedcultures, and the loss, as Waldron himself recognises, of identity Withthe loss of land came structures of oppression and domination that arenot, if at all, easily superseded Susan Dodds objects that Waldron’s ar-gument assumes land can be reduced to cash value but that there is no

44 Ibid., p 21.

45 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed M Goldie (London: Everyman, 1993),

Book 2, Section 33, cited by Waldron, ‘Superseding Historic Injustice’, p 21.

46 Ibid., p 21 47 Ibid., p 24.