Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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