Abstract
I propose a novel account of the essentially expressive nature of reparations. My account is descriptive of new practices of reparations that have emerged in the past half-century, and it provides normative guidance on conditions of success for reparative attempts. My account attributes to reparative attempts a dual expressive function: a communicative function that requires the gesture to carry a vindicatory message to victims; and an exemplifying function that requires the gesture to model the right relationship that was absent or violated in the wrongdoing to which reparations respond. This account is able to explain the breadth and variety of measures now recognized as reparations; how reparative attempts can fail in two distinct ways; and why material compensation is never sufficient and not always necessary to reparations.
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- 1.
I speak of those “responsible for wrongs or for their repair,” for theoretical and practical reasons. The current practice of reparations for human rights and humanitarian abuses places upon states responsibility to discharge obligations of repair for such abuses, even if the government that must discharge the obligation is a successor to one who was causally responsible by omission, commission, or complicity. I avoid here defending the claim, now embedded in international standards for redress and reparation, that successor governments are responsible for repair of wrongs even if they were not causally responsible for the wrongs. In addition, I believe that there are communal responsibilities of moral repair, some of which are ever-present and have to do with the unique abilities of communities to address victims, perpetrators, and wrongs in particular ways, and others which need to be taken up by default when the perpetrators of wrongs are unknown, unavailable, unable, or unwilling to engage in repair, including specific measures of reparations. See Walker (2006a, 29–34) on the significance of communal responsibilities of repair.
- 2.
For an interesting discussion of the non-standard sense in which the U.S. government’s compensation plan for victims and survivors of 9/11 may be seen as “reparations”, see Issacharoff and Mansfield (2006). See also Brooks (2003, 107) on distinguishing between reparations that “seek atonement for the commission of an injustice” and settlements “in which the government does not express atonement.” Admittedly, common usage, as in newspaper articles, often calls settlements that terminate a course of litigation pursuing compensation for injustice “reparations.” And there can be a political stake in calling payments reparations even when they are not intended as such, or are denied to be reparations, if this implies that the party making amends is in fact conceding wrongdoing. On one such case, see Jennifer Lind’s discussion of Japanese compensation payments to Korea in the 1960s, in Lind (2008, 47). I do not mean here to deny that the term “reparations” is used in both looser and rhetorically opportunistic ways. I mean, instead, to focus on cases, however various in detail, that are clearly intended as acts of acknowledgment and redress. It is by reference to these central or canonical cases that we can better understand the analogies that underlie non-standard uses.
- 3.
See Boxill (1972, 119).
- 4.
Some who see “backward-looking” attempts at reparative justice as practically troubled or lacking in sufficient justification sometimes argue that essentially “forward-looking” distributive approaches should either supersede reparative demands based on past injury or should replace reparative attempts with robust distributive ones that address inequalities or injustices in the present. A much discussed argument for supersession of historical injustice by forward-looking considerations is Waldron (1992). Recent arguments for the distributive route include Pierik (2006) and Wenar (2006).
- 5.
On this dramatic historical shift, see Falk (2006), Teitel (2000, 119–128), Torpey, “Introduction: Politics and the Past,” in Torpey (2006), Barkan (2003, 95–98). Specifically on the post-World War II German case, see Colonomos and Armstrong (2006). I do not here defend state responsibility for reparations, although I believe it is defensible and it is, in any case, the existing standard.
- 6.
- 7.
United Nations, Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law, United Nations Document A/RES/60/147, 21 March 2006.
- 8.
- 9.
Political conceptions include de Greiff (2006 b) and Verdeja (2007). Brooks (2004) rejects a “tort model” of reparations to African Americans. Roht-Arriaza (2004) argues for collective and symbolic reparations for communities. Thompson (2002) argues for “reparation as reconciliation” within or between communities, rather than “reparation as restoration” of the status quo ante. Satz (2007) explores limitations of compensation as repair for political violence. See also Walker (2006c) for a restorative justice framework as a superior alternative to a corrective justice one for some cases of historical injustice.
- 10.
Hamber (2006) distinguishes “reparations,” the particular measures, from “reparation”, the end or effect desired. For Hamber, a psychologist, this aim is a kind of psychological state. I adopt his distinction, but use “reparation” to cover desired effects not only of psychological but of moral and political kinds. For a fuller discussion of the psychological needs of victims, see Hamber (2009).
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
Walker (2006a, 23–28).
- 14.
- 15.
See Hamber (2009). Based on extensive work with victims of political violence in several contexts, Hamber says: “All objects or acts of reparations have a symbolic meaning to individuals – they are never merely acts or objects,” (98). Another common usage in the reparations literature distinguishes between “material” and “moral” reparations. I find this terminology more illuminating, since it allows for the communicative (and in that sense, symbolic) dimension of all reparations while marking the difference between reparations that involve an exchange of monetarily valued goods from those that involve other interpersonal exchanges that convey respect, recognition, compassion, contrition, and so forth. On moral reparations, see United Nations Commission on Human Rights, (1997) “Question of the Impunity of Perpetrators of Human Rights Violations (Civil and Political), Revised Final Report Prepared by Mr. Joinet Pursuant to Sub-Commission Decision 1996/119,” United Nations Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/20/Rev.1, 2 October 1997, paragraph 42. On the conceptual terrain and the established terminology of material and symbolic reparations, see de Greiff (2006b, 452–453).
- 16.
- 17.
Boxill (1972), for example, argues that reparation cannot be equated with compensation, because reparation requires an acknowledgment that what the bearer of reparations is doing is required of him because of a former injustice he has done, and so involves an assumption of the moral equality of the wronged party and a rejection of the imputation of inferiority in the unjust treatment. Corlett (2001) specifically attributes to reparations an “expressive” function, including disavowal of the wrong and of the wrongdoer, sending “messages to citizens…which seek to build and strengthen social solidarity toward justice and fairness” (237). Hamber (2006) holds that all objects or acts of reparation have two levels of symbolism. They represent or express something to the victims, such as an acknowledgment of their suffering or a focus for their grief or sense of loss, and they represent something about those giving or granting the reparations, such as society’s willingness to deal with the past and the victim’s suffering or an admission of responsibility. Radzik’s (2009) view makes communication and the symbolism involved in a tender of material compensation central elements of atonement.
- 18.
Some philosophical accounts of apology that overlap in their main features but are distinguished by more or fewer requirements are found in: Kort (1973), Gill (2000), and Govier and Verwoerd (2002). The most detailed account is Smith (2008). Two thorough and useful nonphilosophical discussions are those of Lazare (2004) and Tavuchis (1991).
- 19.
Hamber explains the psychological functions that memorial objects can have as “bridges” between the inner and outer worlds of victims and survivors, and to “mirror” back the reactions of others (Hamber 2006, 570–71).
- 20.
Minow (1998, 104).
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
Bernstein (2009) argues that shares in microfinance institutions have unique potential truly to benefit and enhance the agency of women, especially poor women in male-dominated societies. On appropriate and effective reparations for sexual violence, see also Duggan and Jacobson (2009), and on many complexities of the little-explored area of reparations for child victims, see Mazurana and Carlson (2009).
- 24.
Exemplification as a kind of reference was introduced by Goodman (1968). An object exemplifies those among its own qualities that it is used to represent; a fabric sample, for instance, is used to represent color, pattern, weave, content, texture, and quality of a kind of fabric, but its serrated edges, nine-inch-square dimensions, or dirty finger smudges are not part of what is represented. Elgin (1983, 71–95) gives a clear and detailed exposition of exemplificational reference. I here use only the very basic idea that we use a particular instance to exhibit certain properties that are to be found in other instances of a kind of thing.
- 25.
Lira (2006) provides detailed explanation of this complex and protracted process of reparations.
- 26.
Danieli (2007).
- 27.
- 28.
Hamber (2009, 103–108).
- 29.
Fisher (2001).
- 30.
Liptak (2009).
- 31.
- 32.
de Greiff (2006a, 10–12).
- 33.
On the potential and dilemma of “transformative” reparations, see Rubio-Marin (2009).
- 34.
- 35.
- 36.
See Walker (2006c) on the ways restorative justice processes involving direct engagement can “leverage” responsibilities. On the pressure to reflect on the political culture of Australia in the debate about an official apology for the policy of removal from Aboriginal communities of mixed race children, see Celermajer 2006.
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Walker, M.U. (2013). The Expressive Burden of Reparations: Putting Meaning into Money, Words, and Things. In: MacLachlan, A., Speight, A. (eds) Justice, Responsibility and Reconciliation in the Wake of Conflict. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5201-6_12
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