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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

The same claims are made around the world by people who no resources or prestige, sometimes they win things, sometimes they don't.

Examples include Palestinians, descendants of slaves in the US, Native Americans, indigenous peoples around the world.

Just about everybody has a history of their ancestors taking things in ways which weren't "legal" AND having things taken from them. It is hard to come up with a consistent moral and legal philosophy to deal with these kinds of things. Do I owe reparations to the British isles and Normandy because most of my ancestors were Vikings (or to myself because many of my ancestors would also have been victims)? Should I give the family farm back to the Native Americans who were kicked off the land? Does Rome still deserve much of Europe?

It's super difficult to determine these things, especially when the people who have had things taken from them are dead and maybe several generations back.

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> It is hard to come up with a consistent moral and legal philosophy to deal with these kinds of things.

It is impossible, because you quickly run into contrafactual history.

Let's say the descendants of Scandinavian vikings owe repairs to descendants of people living in Normandy, because the vikings raped and pillaged.

Except, they also settled. And became Normans. And invaded England. Changed the English language forever, changed the ruling class of England. Changed the history of Europe forever. Maybe the Norman conquest was ultimately a good thing for England? Maybe the Anglo-Saxons would have been wiped out by some other conqueror if the Normans hadn't come?

There are millions of people who live today because history happened the way it happened. If the vikings hadn't raped and pillaged and settled in Normandy, those millions of people would never have been born. So do they owe money to the descendants of the vikings as thanks for their existence?

Exactly.

It was, let's say 1000 years ago and most people affected descended from both perpetrators and victims. You could go as far as saying this kind of violence was important and necessary for the development of civilization; if every human respected property rights for the last 10,000 years we would live in a very different world.

So a 1,000 year old crime is wiped out in the present. When does that stop? How soon to now should the statute of limitations be?

300 year old Native American issues? 150 year old American slavery issues? 100 year old Israel/Palestine issues? 50 year old American discrimination issues?

If I go out and steal something today, obviously there is a legal remedy. How far back does it go? Does it flow through generations?

It seems impossible but there has to be a line or some distinction between historic issues which are necessarily "done" and present issues which deserve justice.

People are deciding these issues but I haven't heard or seen a justification for one way vs the other.

Look into the argument between Robert Nozick and Jeremy Waldron over historical justice.

Waldron tries to solve the problem that you and your parent comment are laying out by changing the basis of property rights from the Lockean idea (we mix our labour with something to make it our property) to a new idea, that property is based on the organisation of a person's life around a particular object. Intuitively, this gives credence to the idea that the nice fountain pen I found on the ground four years ago is now nearly totally mine, and that the person who lost it has much less claim over it, particularly if they only bought it a few months before losing it.

It also makes sense of our intuition that I ought to give it back if it has been in their family for three generations. Four years of my life organised around the thing does not stand up to his deeper attachment and ownership of the object.

Obviously, there are traps inherent to the subjectivity of these judgements here, but it does provide a nice philosophical answer to the historical issues.

Sites that continue to be sacred probably ought to be handed back because they continue to play a central role in the lives of indiginous people. But the CBD of Sydney, for instance, has a far stronger claim by those who own the land and have built several hundred thousand lives around the property. Generic indiginous claims to the land there don't hold water any more.

Made even more difficult by the fact that the current generation did not "do the deed" so to speak. In your example of Palestinians or Native Americans - the "occupiers" were born here, this is their home now, the original conquering generation is very much gone, what solution can there be?

> In your example of Palestinians... the "occupiers" were born here, this is their home now, the original conquering generation is very much gone

Nothing could be further from the truth.

https://www.amnestyusa.org/lets-be-clear-israels-long-runnin...

Much of that conflict is about things that were done generations ago. True, recent and current actions also fit the bill, but it is disingenuous to claim that the settlement activity is the primary mover of the situation.

One thing that link throws around is the word "illegal". There are customs and treaties, but there is not a world government to enforce the rule of law for these treaties. Many of the definitions like "occupied territory" are up for debate as well. It just doesn't come down to a clear set of rules and an authority to enforce them.

>One thing that link throws around is the word "illegal". There are customs and treaties, but there is not a world government to enforce the rule of law for these treaties

The inability to enforce a law does not make a crime legal. The occupied territories are a violation of international law, even if they are never punished for them.

Calling something a crime when there is no rule of law to enforce it and no legal authority with jurisdiction is simply a contradiction in terms.

The UN has both, and has called the settlements crimes many times. A punishment could be handed down if certain states allowed it to happen.

> It's super difficult to determine these things, especially when the people who have had things taken from them are dead and maybe several generations back.

Doesn't seem to apply here. The comment above yours points out:

> It is easy to brush these away as long past history, but for example these properties were confiscated from the hands of the current prince's father.

This is simply solved with intermarriages. Make 2 people 1.

Happened throughout history. When it didn't, led to conflict.

This is related to how I take issue with many of the "progressive" things people are talking about with identity.

If you want people to be liberated from discrimination and oppression the best thing to do is change the general mindset to unity "we're both human" instead of reinforcing differences and creating new categories for people and then trying to enforce rights that only people in a certain classification can have.

The best summary of this I saw was the sign for a coffee shop bathroom. It had a list of genders: men, women, and a few others I don't quite remember. The problem I have with this is the bathroom was one room with a toilet and sink. There was obviously no need to be "inclusive", just put a sign up that says "restroom" and that's it. Nobody needs to be included or excluded, progress is made by making the shallow distinctions which get discriminated against – making those irrelevant to day to day life.

Because progressive is exactly the self centred mindset as the middle classes that fought for communist ideals for the working class they'd barely rubbed shoulders with.

It's less about the people you are supposedly trying to help and more about the power you're trying to wrestle away from some elite.

Nazi's did along racial divides, communists along class divides. Both failed and so time to try some other divide. This one is even more insidious because it's not even clear sometimes where the divide is.

Conflating a rich family's claim to their medieval land holdings with the above mentioned struggles is totally flippant and disrespectful.

Why? The morality depends on the size of the group? or the present wealth of the group?

Flippant - you summarised a whole series of complicated issues in two small paragraphs which demonstrated flippancy conflating very different issues.

Disrespectful - these complicated issues involve people who have been and continue to be disadvantaged by these issues, your flippancy is disrespectful.

Mostly what you have to say there is that I'm flippant and disrespectful because I was being flippant and disrespectful.

The only explanation there is that I'm talking about "issues involve people who have been and continue to be disadvantaged"

Those rich folks have been "disadvantaged" by being deprived of things they have claims on. Obviously they are already quite advantaged, but you can't deny they have less advantage without the things they're claiming.

So, it only matters that one group has fewer resources therefore they have a moral advantage?

I think you are being flippant and disrespectful by calling me names instead of providing substantial counterpoints.

It is a tad ironic, that I have been "flippant" and "disrespectful" to your argument (not you, mind you, unless you are your argument) you wrote out in 1 minute with minimal thought.

Yet at the same time, you can't see how you have been "flippant" and "disrespectful" to the complicated issues (with real people who are affected by this) you pulled together in your 2 paragraph comment.

Ignoring all detail when there have been 10000s of academic books written trying to explain and understand these issues from all viewpoints.

You don't really seem to have anything of substance to say so I'll just wish you a good day.

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