The Historical Dimension of Justice

Abstract

Bertrand Russell once asked how we could tell that the world had not been created five minutes ago with all its historical “evidence” and all our apparent memories intact. The customary answer to Russell’s question is that we are indeed unable to know this, but that here, as elsewhere, our inability to defeat the skeptic has no practical significance. However, from the moral point of view, the truth of Russell’s hypothesis would make a great difference indeed. If there were no past, then our prisons would be filled with individuals who had not committed crimes and so did not deserve to be treated differently from the rest of humanity; persons with property would not be able to trace their claims to possessions to any legitimate acts of acquisition; and all claims to compensation for past wrongs would be dissolved in a single stroke. The resulting moral universe would perhaps have an attractive simplicity; but it would emphatically not be ours. Morally speaking, the past matters.