Three Alternative Approaches
摘要
This chapter puts my fair play argument into conversation with several recent accounts of reparative justice. I argue that while each of them makes valuable and important contributions to the theoretical discussion, they also exhibit certain disadvantages which my fair play account is well-positioned to avoid. I begin with Avia Pasternak’s argument that the costs of repairing state wrongdoing may appropriately be passed along to citizens who intentionally participate in political life (Pasternak, Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for Their States’ Wrongdoings? Oxford University Press, 2021). I argue that since her account relies on a forward-looking conception of reparative justice, it fails to meet the moral standard set in the preceding chapter. Next, I consider an important challenge to backward-looking approaches that has moved many reparations theorists to embrace forward-looking accounts grounded in the idea of structural injustice, and consider two further views—Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò (Reconsidering Reparations, Oxford University Press, 2022) and Alasia Nuti (Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, Cambridge University Press, 2019)—that have grown out of this “structural turn.” I observe that Táíwò’s account is also essentially forward-looking, and argue that while Nuti’s account is more complex and aligns with my own view in some important ways, it (along with both Táíwò and Pasternak’s accounts) fails to take seriously the enduring political challenges associated with the problem of whiteness.