What Is It to Make Reparations?

This chapter outlines what it means to make reparations, beginning first with a simple case of a one-person-against-one-person contemporaneous wrongdoing. The five elements of repair in such a case are: acknowledgment, restitution, compensation, apology, and a promise of non-repeat. This account is intuitively plausible and mirrors accounts in the literature on reparations. This five-element view of reparations is then used later in the book to consider specific examples of making repair for the past. This chapter also addresses two difficulties in the case of repair for historic injustice: first, that the original perpetrators are all dead and, second, in cases of group-against-group wrongs, the relationship of potential victims to the wronged group is not always clear. This chapter reviews the literature on reparations to set the stage for the rest of the book and in doing so sets up a way to answer those two core problems.