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Comment by typewithrhythm | Hacker News Reader

You dont seem to understand; the debt is owned and exchanged by contemporary people, why or when that debt was created is irrelevant, because the body (government) that owes it has many other debts created over time. You can not pick and choose which ones to repay without causing everyone who you currently owe money to be alarmed.

Deciding to default on an old debt like that would be the equivalent of deciding any coin minted in 1993 is no longer valid, suck it up whoever currently has one in their pocket.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.

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And the institution of slavery and its legacies were and are experienced by contemporary people. In fact, penal chattel slavery was an ongoing thing well into the 20th century in the US.

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)?

Debt is a mechanic we use to settle long term concrete transactions, particularly between complicated abstract entitys like nations. To be able to enter into new long term agreements, we must respect existing agreements.

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.

> To be able to enter into new long term agreements, we must respect existing agreements.

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.

You cannot will away an old debt without consequence because a current entity owns it, now, in the present. This is not a morality based decision. You are again trying to conflate abstractions that pertain to individuals and ones that pertain to nations. There is not a real concept of trust like between individuals, only a financial cost for not honouring debts.

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 will away an old debt without consequence because a current entity owns it, now, in the present.

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.

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I do not think it is worth conversing further since this is clearly unproductive.

Your fundamental problem is you are taking ideas that apply to individuals and are trying to apply them to abstract groups. You are doing it again with the idea of trust.

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.

Your fundamental problem is that you presume and assert that "ideas that apply to individuals" cannot also apply to groups, communities, and institutions. You realise such things are, ultimately, just collections of individuals, right? Institutions are not freak forces of nature either, they are created by people, for people, to act on behalf of people; the institutions act as individuals (hence why you can sue an institution like it's a person) and is comprised of people. Obviously, there are things institutions can do that an individual cannot and vice versa (eg: an institution cannot marry), but this clean and objective divide you continue to insist upon is simply untrue.

> 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.

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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.

I gave several real, amoral, and tangible examples to explain why we should respect old debts in the current day, as it allows us to use the tool of currency to facilitate trade. No moral arguments are needed here.

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.

> I gave several real, amoral, and tangible examples to explain why we should respect old debts in the current day,

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?

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