Volume 30, Number 6
October 2025
ARTICLE

Supersession-Proof Reparations: Harms, Wrongs, and Historical Injustice

Volume 30, Number 6, October 2025, Pages 941–977
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v30i6.3246
PDFPDF

Abstract

There is widespread intuition that historical injustices require some form of redress. Despite this intuition, redress for historical injustice encounters significant philosophical problems. In this article, I defend the possibility of redress from one particular philosophical problem: the supersession thesis. According to the supersession thesis, circumstances may have changed between the historical injustice and the present such that present demands of justice override or “supersede” demands of redress for the historical injustice. I argue that the ways we can respond to the supersession thesis inform the kind of model of redress that we ought to adopt in cases of historical injustice. A recent strategy to defend the possibility of redress from the supersession thesis is to distinguish between claims of restitution and reparation. However, if we use a popular model of redress that makes injuries a necessary condition to generate a claim to redress, using this distinction to avoid the supersession thesis encounters two further problems: the nonidentity problem and the causal problem. I argue that if we instead adopt a model on which claims to redress are generated by the wrong of the injustice, then we avoid these problems and can overcome the supersession thesis. This means that if we want a model of redress that overcomes the supersession thesis, it must be based on wrongs, not on injuries.
Copyright © 2025 Felix Lambrecht
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

Supersession, Reparations, and Restitution

Caleb Harrison

Reparations, Relational Equality, and Causation

Felix Lambrecht

The Best Available Parent and Duties of Justice

Jordan David Thomas Walters

The Moral Harms of Homelessness

Bradley Hillier-Smith

Beyond Ought-Implies-Can: Impersonal Obligatoriness Implies Historical Contingency

Peter B. M. Vranas

You Aren’t Really Black, You Aren’t Really White: Racial Denials and Epistemic Injustice in the Black-White Multiracial Community

Erica Preston-Roedder

Nonhuman Animals and Epistemic Injustice

Andrew Lopez

Expecting Equality: How Prenatal Screening Policy Harms People with Disabilities

Athmeya Jayaram

Deepfakes, Deep Harms

Regina Rini and Leah Cohen

Forgiveness and the Significance of Wrongs

Stefan Riedener

Interests, Wrongs, and the Injury Hypothesis

Richard Healey

Portico