Harvard hired researcher to uncover slavery ties, fires him for finding slaves
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"The DNA of Iceland's First Known Black Man, Recreated from Living Descendants"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16188715
"A Trail Gone Cold"
That doesn't make sense on its surface, what's the mechanism here? This is mentioned twice without any explanation
In those lines, I might as well pressure the British government to compensate me, personally, because they decided to shove one part of my family tree into a train carriage to suffocate to death.
On top of that, to reduce resistance, families were broken up. One brother would be sent to Canada, another Australia, never to meet again.
This is, of course, not as severe as slavery. Once adults, after a decade or more of hard labour, their contract was often satisfied. Yet my point is that the past was a more brutal time. This is how white, British children were treated by the British. And not one descendant of home children (such as my grandfather was) has ever been compensated. There is no effort to help track down families broken apart.
And look at what happened to orphans in Catholic care? Priest raping children, and it being kept quiet for decades by the police and Catholic church.
If reparations aren't being given to cases like these, then why would they be given to other cases a centuries old?
NOTE, I'm not saying "fair or not". I'm saying that is that the past is a different world. And expecting today's people to pay for what their great-great grandfather's did, isn't a thing that's often entertained.
If we start getting into reparations, I feel I should also have my property returned from when the British took it from my Scottish ancestors. Or maybe Italy should be paying, for the time the Romans invaded and they took some land back then?
When does it end? Where does it end?
This comment may not be liked by many, but what I'm trying to point out is that the past was not today, mores were different, and it wasn't just one race that was treated poorly.
Everyone treated everyone poorly compared to today.
Probably too little and too late but still a strange example to give if your point is that reparations are unthinkable.
From what I can tell, the argument is that: if your great-great grandfather became extremely wealthy off of slavery, and was then paid by the government to free their slaves, and then eventually you inherit that wealth... well... if the wealth from crimes against humanity can be inherited, why isn't the responsibility to undo the harm not also inherited?
Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?
Who argued to apply it selectively?
> Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?
It's not about morality, it's seeing what part or your current wealth is due to obscene and unjustifiable (often even for the time) acts.
No one argues to have you do time for your ancestors, but if part of your wealth is due to those acts, what would be wrong about giving it back?
I mean, I agree with your conclusion, but I don't think trying to paint this as some kind of purely rational act is either necessary or helpful.
It is moral to try to redress past wrongs—especially when those past wrongs have created massive current wrongs and inequities.
It is moral to take from those who have built their wealth on the backs of the suffering of the many, and to give to those who suffered to make it possible.
Morality doesn't need to be a dirty word, nor does it need to be something we're not allowed to look to to guide our collective actions.
Don't threaten me with a good time! Jokes aside, I'm generally pro-redistribution to begin with (I'm somewhat of a dirty communist) and I think trying to finagle exactly how much someone's wealth should be redistributed based on the weaving and waning of economic activity over two centuries to be rather a waste of time. Better to just redistribute based on wealth. But if this were something that happened only thirty years ago, I'd absolutely be calling for "morality based redistribution", as you put it, because it is then something that can actually be achieved.
It's also talking about real agreements for an entity to exchange money in the future, for a bond tied to the value of the currency... Not some vibes based moral justification.
The debt was taken on to pay reparations to slave owners. About £6 Billion in modern terms, 4.5 billion of which was borrowed.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. Can you elaborate?
If you say we are not paying the current holder of a bond we created to pay slave owners in the past, then you damage your current credit rating. (In the worst case, potentially hurting organisations that let you have good terms for socially beneficial causes, refusing to pay back a charity that helps end slavery for example).
Why a debt was created is irrelevant to the current holder, can't you understand why a government default is bad?
Deciding to default on an old debt like that would be the equivalent of deciding any coin minted in 1993 is no longer valid, suck it up whoever currently has one in their pocket.
To be clear, you are the one trying to draw this parallel without any solid foundation to make it.
When you look the moral problem, there is a discontinuity that doesn't exist for abstract financial instruments. People make moral choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability. This is a different case and needs to be made without trying to use financial instruments as a starting point.
And I honestly fail to see the distinction you're making: you insist that financial obligations are different because, to paraphrase: "there's a paper trail and defaulting is bad". But slavery and its legacies also has a paper trail, likewise with human life and misery, and not resolving this is also bad. You have yet to provide an argument that fundamentally CANNOT also be applied to reparations: you've only given arguments over how we merely don't apply them to reparations. This kind of definition game, that 'reparations aren't considered that way because we don't consider them that way', reminds me of when there's outrage over police murdering someone and people insisting it's not murder because murder is an unlawful killing.
So, I ask you, without resorting to mere definition, what is the difference between "People make moral choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability" (reparations) and "People make financial choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability" (debt)?
Morality pertains to how individuals should behave. There is no need for me to consider the actions of others I had no control over in order to act morally.
You are trying to compare abstract concepts in a way that weakens your point. Nations are not individuals. Similarly, individuals do not inherit debt.
That is a matter of trust, it's not an obligation for the state. We are a society of people, and for us to perpetuate civil society, wrongs must be corrected, yes? Why is the respect for debt more important than the respect for humanity?
> There is no need for me to consider the actions of others I had no control over in order to act morally.
What does this have to do with anything? Slavery is not a matter of "if you don't like it, don't do it", it was a positive right protected and enforced through the state's monopoly on violence. That's what law is. Likewise with the legacies of slavery. It's not mere morality, it's existential to civil society.
If the state passes legislation to fund reparations based on past harm, that is no different to any other appropriations spending. And yes, the choice to pass such legislation is largely based on morality since there was no prior legal obligation to do so... but so was not absolving themselves of that slave-owner debt. The UK Parliament is sovereign, it could have willed away that debt with a simple majority, but it chose not to for 200 years. That too is a decision based on morality, and a telling one: that humanity is less important than debts being paid.
> Nations are not individuals.
Nations are not literally individuals, but state personhood is a thing, akin to corporate personhood. I'm not entirely sure what your point is here.
> Similarly, individuals do not inherit debt.
You're doing the whole "don't therefore can't" thing again. I have a vague recollection of debt inheritance in history's past. 'We don't do that because we don't do that' is not an argument.
I also don't understand why you think there is a direct relationship between the debts and what they were originally created for...
You clearly do not understand the concept of state or corporate personhood if you are trying to extend individual morality to apply.
Civil society is also a strange direction to go in, from trying to make the relationship to debts. To engage, the term only makes sense as a way for current people to interact, a "wrong" in context requires both a specific victim and an offender... It cannot be applied to historical actions as it gives no information to how current people should interact.
I would go as far as saying reparations for one arbitrarily chosen historic injustice undermines civil society; as it's impossible to claim one point in history is more valid than another, making any attempt a deeply unfair exercise.
You cannot do ANYTHING without consequence, why would that be a criterion for anything? And ownership is a legal fiction, hence why Russia was able to seize all those passenger planes, likewise with Western nations seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs. Ownership, particularly of intangible things like debt, is not some universal truth or force of nature like gravity: it's an emergent property of the system we have set up. One of the reasons why the UK is (or was) the centre of finance was because of its robust legal system that puts an extreme emphasis on property rights. And that's a deliberate decision. The idea that such a decision is amoral is ridiculous.
> There is not a real concept of trust like between individuals
Yes, there absolutely is? In fact, it is the currency of international relations. International law isn't even really a thing: international law is domestic law; it only exists to the extent that a country respects the Rule of Law. It's why certain countries that blatantly violate international law face no legal consequence. It's why the response to the violation of international law are sanctions, not a higher courts overruling them: there is no higher court. And even when there are hypothetical higher courts, like the ECJ, again it only works so far as the member state is willing to play along, which is partly why Hungary is in such hot water with the EU. I'd even go so far as to say that nations rely on trust more than people do. The fact that you don't think trust even a concept with nations is wild and makes me doubt whether you understand the concept of international relations at all. And all this is also true within a nation: if you cannot trust your state institutions, those institutions are worthless.
---
I do not think it is worth conversing further since this is clearly unproductive.
Trust between nations is a concept that exists, but it's not the same thing as trust between individuals.
Trust inside a state is even more interesting, how can I possibly trust a state that arbitrarily redistributes money based on one topical historic injustice? Either it should be consistent and analyse all lineages for all wrongs, or accept that it's only a structure for allowing current people to interact civilly.
You have taken the idea that reparations are right, and are now trying to draw a line between reparations and other abstract concepts that are already accepted to try to be an advocate.
The flaw is that moral arguments that apply to individuals do not apply to nations, without some solid reasoning you have not made. So you cannot extend the idea that an individual should make good some injury to reparations.
> Trust between nations is a concept that exists, but it's not the same thing as trust between individuals.
And here's an example of the above: you reject my claim that trust between nations and trust between individuals are comparable and within the same category because it's not literally the exact same thing. Okay, let's follow your logic: trust between people and their institutions are not the same concept; trust people family members and friends are not the same concept; trust people have in their tools or craft is not the same concept. It is not useful or relevant to compare any of this because if it's not literally the exact same thing in the exact same context, it's irreconcilably different.
> You have taken the idea that reparations are right
Not quite. I am arguing for reparations as a form of devil's advocacy (relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44364746). What I've been doing in this thread is questioning your (and others') unwavering loyalty to finance obligations regardless of whether they span centuries to where there's no overlap whatsoever between those who agreed to the obligations, those who are paying for it, and those who are receiving it. You do not bat an eye at this, and you seem somewhat exasperated at needing to explain it, asserting the apparent obviousness of it. But when it comes to material human suffering and the legacies of injustice that can still be felt and witnessed today, the idea of attempting to remedy this does not compute.
---
Put simply, you are so entirely entrenched in this "don't therefore can't" mentality that you cannot comprehend alternatives. It's like when people cannot comprehend hypotheticals: What if you didn't work here? But I do. Yes, but what if? But I do work here. Societies could, if they wanted to, see past injustice as something contemporary society has an obligation to resolve... we don't do this because we've chosen not to, not because it's impossible to do so. And the choice to do so or not is a moral decision. Ditto with choosing to prioritise financial obligations over remedying human suffering. I'm sorry that you are unable to see this. I'm not going to entertain this conversation further.
You are also still trying to assign the idea of a specific debt being somehow more relevant than a specific pound coin. Due to the way nations create and balance currency exchanges this doesn't work.
It's simply not true to say we are paying for an old debt at a national level. The creation of a debt at a national level is similar to the creation of currency, this is immediately balanced by how people we trade with view the currency. This is all resolved at the time it's created...
You seem to think a nation is just a very long lived person, taking out specific loans from other people, but again; it's an abstract group that uses a floating currency to settle large trade agreements over time.
Because these agreements are made in currencies that are also abstract, it works.
These are all material concepts, not moral ones.
A collection of individuals all have their own moral choices to make, the "group" is just a convenience, it does not make moral choices. You cannot extend the idea of morality past the individual without a good justification.
Especially in the scale of a nation (where membership is non voluntary), the current members did not make any moral decisions that occures in the past, so trying to assign culpability to the current nation is flawed.
This is why these ideas are not compatible.
An idea for why something should be done can be immoral (from the perspective of a particular moral framework), but it can't be amoral: should always presupposes an explicit or implicit value system.
> as it allows us to use the tool of currency to facilitate trade.
Why, without invoking any moral value, should be care about the ability to do that, much less weigh it more favorably than the effects of not being constrained by old debts?
People don't have debts or credits they didn't sign up for. You're failing to tell the difference between something the British government hundreds of years ago signed the British Empire up in perpetuity to pay to enforce on the world a totally new value system, and someone born today suddenly being assigned a credit or debit based on things from hundreds of years ago.
b.) They were killed in the 1920s, way after Britain decided to compensate its slavers.
c.) The whole payment to slaves till 2015 is not real, it's just a quirk of how the payments were structured via annuities - in fact the payments were done by the 1840s.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2022/the-colle...
d.) The slaves themselves never received any compensation.
Harvard tried to do it (to virtue signal, I mean) and eventually found out that the maths for their little publicity stunt would get them bankrupt. They then proceeded to try and stop the all thing.
That’s the story here.
It's like saying they should in part renege on some current 2008 financial crisis debts.
Should Alcapone's children refund any inheritance?
Do you extend this further and tax them for their privileged upbringing? This is absurd, and goes against our liberal principles of fairness. Not equity, fairness.
If that's the case, why do you feel that society as a whole should do so but shouldn't bear the cost of reparations to the descendents of slaves?
I haven't looked into it, but there is also a good chance the bonds have changed hands since.
Reneging on debt is a very real decision taken today (not in the past). Practically speaking it signals to bondholders you can't be trusted to keep your word. Hardly honourable, not that they'd worry about this point of view, it's cold hard calculation, will you renege when you proceed on your next ideological crusade, this signals yes.
You try help someone based on their CURRENT circumstances, not based on their relationship with someone who died 200 years ago.
Completely ridiculous, what about those whose parents were drug addicts, or were kept out of school, or were just purely unlucky to be brought up in and surrounded by poverty. You'll find there are many, more contemporaneous, reasons for suffering and that there are many people suffering that do not have any previously persecuted ancestors.
Address their current situation without bias or favouritism.
You claim I'm being disingenuous and then say this as if I haven't been this entire time referring to historic injustices AND THEIR ONGOING LEGACIES. Nah, y'all just prefer to selectively ignore that part.
You can measure someone's current suffering, resolve that (and it can be done in a much more fair manner).
Sure, you don't see countries with a very, very long history of slavery like most Arab nations, or India, or most of the descendants of African kingdoms, paying debt they contracted to end slavery, because they couldn't care less about ending it, and even went to war against Britain to continue practicing it.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Brita...
I think the idea is that those people were put at inherent disadvantage due to unfair treatment of their long gone predecessors. Or at least that’s my understanding of it.
The validity of this claim, type and amount of corrective action (and from some viewpoints - its very appropriateness or necessity), as well as the relative importance of the subject - those can all be a matter of debate, but are any of those so obvious they render the whole idea crazy?
Apparently it's really common in Denmark to be a descendant of slaves in a similar way.
I think it's obviously ludicrous that my son should be entitled to corrective action for this. Yes, his ancestor was subjected to an injustice, but it completely drowns in the sea of other injustices or unfair advantages his ancestors have had.
If you want to sum up the historical injustice and unearned privilege someone's ancestors had, it's much better to look at their bank account than their pedigree. DoS-restitution suggests that but for transatlantic slavery, the present distribution of resources would have been just. The further back you are willing to go in asserting the right to restitution, the more forcefully you are asserting it.
As a practical matter, you have to have some level of material comfort and/or solid family relationships to be able to document your ancestry. That already biases it away from those who would need it most.
But my question was not about whenever far descendants of slaves need (or need not) to be compensated somehow. It was about the "completely bonkers" bit. Possibly, it was a mistake to reiterate the idea to ensure it is consistently understood - the third paragraph (specifically, the emphasized part) of my comment was the point, not the second one.
We have an insanely complex system composed of multiple societies that may or may not exhibit some behaviors because of some antecedent events. Yet, GP didn't say e.g. "but it completely drowns" (essentially, claiming statistical insignificance) or that their understanding of possible corrective action has questionable effects (like @modo_mario's neighbor comment about universities), but rather that the whole thing has no rational basis to it ("bonkers") whatsoever ("completely").
This is something that I don't think I understand and that concerns me. Not whenever someone needs a preferential treatment for some injustices of the past (not that the latter doesn't concern me, but way less significantly).
Yes, it's completely bonkers. Starting by the fact that these descendants have now a much higher living standard than if their ancestor was left in the respective African country they originated from, where they were sold by their own neighbouring tribes to Arab slavers that then sold them off to be carried to the new world.
So, no it has no rational basis because, 1st, if you compare this people off with the alternative (their ancestors never left Africa centuries ago), they would be much worse off today. And 2nd, why are you expecting the last link of the slave trade to pay for compensation, but not the people that actually made them slaves and the people that traded them to Europeans?
Shall Nigeria start paying compensations to these people? After all, many of their ancestors were enslaved by Nigerian tribes? Shall Arab nations start paying compensations to them as well?
Shall Romans start paying me compensations for invading what is now my country? What about Arabs (yes, they were also here), should they?
By all means, I wholeheartedly agree that some arbitrarily-selected single factor that was present a long while ago is extremely questionable to be any meaningfully relevant, given that there were so many other things affecting it all. I also totally agree that there's a host of other issues and questions.
However, I fail to see immediate unsoundness in the basic premises that would make it bonkers, in a way I understand the word in this context ("not mentally sound, with an element of derogatory").
Generally speaking, momentarily going outside of scope of slavery - the idea that if some group was put at significant disadvantage, that could negatively affect them and their ancestry, is - at the very least - not obviously unsound, right? I think I've read that there are experiments that demonstrate this could be a thing, so I hope I'm not misinformed here.
So - back to slavery - exploring whenever it's the case for slave descendants is not obviously invalid. There could be arguments around the methodology, e.g. you have made a point about the reference group. But if we go as far as actually devising an experiment and looking at the outcomes (those who left are worse off, assuming it's true) does not it make it sound enough to not be bonkers? I mean, for this to be just crazy the core premise must be flawed, and it's not - even if it can be shown to be false. Especially so if this sparks further debate about methodology.
And then if someone is disadvantaged for any reason, it can be valid to ponder the idea whenever it should (or shouldn't) be addressed somehow, right? At least I fail to see how this question could be somehow fundamentally flawed either.
Summarized, I hear your arguments and they look valid to me (and I agree!), but I still fail to see how the fundamental premises that led to such line of thought are "bonkers", even if they're false.
It will also always be a mess even if you do compensate. See at the fights about who gets native american tribe status and benefits. On one hand you have people actually struggling with the faults of the past. On the other hand there's groups of people who genuinely believe it's them that bear the costs of the past with less measurable ancestral ties than the average african american looking to benefit decrying what happened.
People are quick to stand in line for money.
How long is a piece of string?
All projects come to an end. Maybe funding ran out, maybe it's cowardice in the context of the Anti DEI move, but this isn't the same as what the headline implies.
Correct, you need to read the actual article to find justification for the headline, not limit yourself to a generic "everything ends"
For example, re funding running out
> Even though Cellini was eventually given a budget for 2025, albeit a fraction of what he had asked for, the university would soon halt his work entirely.
Unfortunately, appeasement didn’t work this time, either.
So, you didn't read anything to support your assertion at all? You just made it up, whole-cloth, from your political assumptions?
What remains in the south are the descendants of the slaves, and the ironically scape goated guilt.