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.
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).
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?
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.
How long is a piece of string?
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.