What Do We Owe for Wrongs We Didn't Commit? The Puzzle of Black Reparations

Imagine this: Someone steals your bike. You catch them. They have to give it back, and maybe pay you something extra for the trouble. That seems fair. Now imagine the thief died fifty years ago, and their grandchild is riding your bike today. Do you have a right to take it back from the grandchild? What if the grandchild has never even heard of you, and has been riding that bike their whole life? What if the grandchild doesn’t even know the bike was stolen?

This is roughly the puzzle philosophers face when they think about reparations for Black Americans. Everyone agrees that slavery was a terrible wrong. But the people who committed that wrong—the slaveholders—are dead. The people who were directly harmed—the enslaved people—are also dead. So who owes what to whom now? And why?

What Are Reparations, Anyway?

Before diving into the arguments, it helps to be clear about what we’re talking about. The word “reparations” comes from “repair.” When you break something that belongs to someone else, you repair it—you make them whole again. In moral terms, reparations are what a wrongdoer owes to the person they’ve wronged. They’re not a gift or charity. They’re a repayment of a debt.

Importantly, reparations are different from two related ideas:

Restitution means giving back something that was taken. If someone steals your phone and you get it back, that’s restitution. But restitution alone might not be enough. If they smashed your phone and then gave it back, you’d still be owed something for the damage.

Compensation means making up for a loss, whether or not anyone did anything wrong. If a tree falls on your car during a storm, your insurance might compensate you. But nobody wronged you—it was an accident. Reparations, by contrast, always involve wrongdoing.

So reparations are about repairing harm caused by a wrong. And that raises a hard question: If the wrong happened long ago, and the original wrongdoers and victims are gone, can anyone still owe or be owed anything?

The Two Main Arguments

Philosophers who defend Black reparations today have developed two main ways of answering that question. Each tries to show that living Black Americans really are owed something—not as a favor, but as a matter of right.

The Harm Argument

This argument says: The wrongs of slavery didn’t end when slavery ended. Those wrongs set off a chain of harms that continues right into the present. Present-day Black Americans are harmed by the effects of slavery—things like wealth gaps, educational disadvantages, and discrimination that built on the foundations slavery laid. Since they are being harmed now, they have a right to reparations against whoever is causing that harm.

But who is causing it? Not the slaveholders—they’re dead. So the harm argument has to identify some living wrongdoer. Here’s where it gets clever.

Philosopher Robert Fullinwider made a version of this argument that goes like this: After the Civil War, the U.S. government failed to protect the basic rights of freed Black people. It didn’t enforce the laws that were supposed to guarantee them equal citizenship. If the government had done its job, the argument goes, the effects of slavery would have faded over time. Black families would have built wealth, gotten education, and joined the mainstream. The fact that they didn’t—the fact that Black Americans today still suffer from disadvantages—isn’t really slavery’s fault. It’s the fault of the post-Civil War governments that abandoned Reconstruction, allowed Jim Crow laws, and let segregation take over.

On this view, the U.S. government wronged Black Americans after slavery ended. And those wrongs continue to harm living Black people today. So the government owes reparations now.

One objection to this argument is tricky. It’s called the “non-identity problem.” Here’s the idea: If slavery had never happened, the specific Black people alive today would not exist. Different people would have been born. So you can’t say slavery harmed these particular people, because they wouldn’t exist without it. Without slavery, no “them” to be harmed.

But defenders of the harm argument have a response. They point out that the post-slavery wrongs—the failure to protect rights, the refusal to pay what was owed—were committed after many Black people now alive were already born. Those wrongs harmed people who already existed. For example, a Black child born in 1950 was harmed by segregation, which was a wrong committed during her lifetime. She doesn’t need to prove that slavery harmed her. She just needs to prove that the government’s ongoing failure to correct for slavery’s effects harmed her. And that’s much easier to do.

The Inheritance Argument

The second main argument is simpler in its basic idea. It says: The enslaved people had a right to reparations against their enslavers. That right was never honored. When people die, their property—including debts owed to them—passes to their heirs. The enslaved people’s descendants are their heirs. So the right to those unpaid reparations has been inherited by living Black Americans.

This argument avoids the non-identity problem because it doesn’t claim that slavery directly harmed living people. It just says that living people have inherited a claim that belonged to their ancestors, the same way you might inherit your grandmother’s house or her savings account.

But there are objections here too.

One objection is that you can’t inherit a claim against someone who is dead. The slaveholders are gone. Their property has been passed down through generations, mixed in with other wealth, spent and re-earned. It seems impossible to say that any particular living white person owes anything because of what their distant ancestor did.

The response draws on the philosophy of John Locke, who wrote about this problem back in the 1600s. Locke was thinking about war, not slavery, but his logic applies. He said that when a country wages an unjust war, the victims have a right to reparations from the estates of everyone who consented to the war—not just the soldiers who fought, but the citizens who supported it. Those debts reduce what the wrongdoers can pass on to their children. The innocent children don’t become debtors themselves. Rather, what they inherit is less than it would have been, because part of it was already owed to the victims.

In the slavery case, the argument goes like this: Most white Americans before the Civil War knew slavery was wrong and didn’t protest. By Locke’s logic, they consented to it. So the enslaved people had rights to reparations against the entire white population’s assets, not just the slaveholders’. Those debts were never paid. Instead, each generation passed its wealth to the next, but that wealth was already partially owned by the people who had been wronged. The present generation of Black Americans, as heirs of the enslaved, have inherited those ownership claims.

A second objection is that maybe the moral debt has been “superseded”—meaning circumstances have changed so much that the old wrong doesn’t matter anymore. Philosopher Jeremy Waldron gave an example: Imagine two groups sharing a water hole. Originally, Group Q stole the water hole from Group P. But then all the other water holes dry up. Now there’s only one water hole left, and everyone needs it to survive. In these new circumstances, maybe Group Q is actually entitled to share the water. The original injustice has been superseded by necessity.

Applied to the U.S.: Maybe the land and wealth that was stolen through slavery is now needed by everyone. Maybe it would be unjust to take it back. But defenders of reparations point out that even if restitution (giving back the exact same thing) is impossible or wrong, reparations (making up for the harm) might still be owed. If I steal your bike and then it gets destroyed, I can’t give it back. But I can still pay you for what you lost. Similarly, even if we can’t go back to how things were before slavery, we can still pay for the harm it caused.

What Would Reparations Actually Look Like?

Philosophers who argue for reparations generally think they should include both monetary payments and non-monetary forms of justice.

The monetary side is hard to calculate. You’d have to estimate the value of unpaid labor during slavery, plus the harm of human rights abuses (like punitive damages in a lawsuit), plus the lasting effects of segregation and discrimination. Some estimates run into the trillions of dollars. One proposal suggests a 3% tax on all income in the U.S., paid in perpetuity, into a fund managed by a committee elected by Black Americans.

The non-monetary side includes things like removing Confederate monuments from public spaces, revising history textbooks to tell the full truth about slavery and its aftermath, and officially acknowledging the wrongs that were done. These aren’t just symbolic gestures—they’re part of what’s owed. When you wrong someone, part of making it right is admitting you were wrong.

Where the Debate Stands

Philosophers still argue about all of this. Some think the harm argument fails because you can’t prove that present-day Black Americans would be better off if slavery hadn’t happened. Others think the inheritance argument fails because debts don’t really get passed down across centuries. Still others think that even if the arguments are philosophically sound, the practical problems—identifying who owes what, figuring out how to pay without causing new injustices—are too big to solve.

But nobody seriously argues that slavery wasn’t wrong, or that the enslaved people didn’t deserve reparations. The real debate is about whether and how those debts can still be collected today. It’s a debate about time, identity, and what we owe to the past.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Reparations	What a wrongdoer owes to the person they wronged, to repair the harm
Restitution	Giving back exactly what was taken (often part of reparations, but not the whole thing)
Compensation	Making up for a loss, whether or not anyone did something wrong
Harm argument	Claims that living Black Americans are owed reparations because they are still being harmed by wrongs committed after slavery
Inheritance argument	Claims that living Black Americans have inherited the right to reparations that belonged to their enslaved ancestors and was never paid
Non-identity problem	The puzzle that if slavery hadn’t happened, these particular people wouldn’t exist—so can they really say slavery harmed them?
Supersession	The idea that old wrongs can stop mattering because circumstances have changed so much

Key People

John Locke (1632–1704): An English philosopher who argued that people have natural rights, including rights to reparations against those who wrong them. His ideas about consent and inheritance are still used in debates about historic injustices.
Boris Bittker (1916–2005): A legal scholar who wrote an early book making the case for Black reparations. He argued that the main harm of slavery was unpaid labor, and that post-Civil War governments were responsible for letting slavery’s effects persist.
Robert Fullinwider (born 1942): A philosopher who reformulated the harm argument to focus on the U.S. government’s failure to protect Black civil rights after the Civil War, rather than on slavery itself.
Jeremy Waldron (born 1953): A philosopher who argued that historic injustices can be “superseded” by changed circumstances, though defenders of reparations argue this confuses restitution with reparations.

Things to Think About

The non-identity problem is weird: It says that if your ancestors hadn’t been wronged, you wouldn’t be you. Does that mean you can’t claim you were harmed by that wrong? Or is it a trick of logic that doesn’t really capture what’s at stake morally?
If a wrong was committed 150 years ago, and nobody alive today did it or was harmed by it directly, does the moral debt still exist? At what point—if ever—does a debt just expire?
Would accepting reparations be good for Black Americans, or could it create new problems? Some writers have worried that it might encourage dependence or resentment, rather than equality. Is that a real concern, or a distraction?
Think about something that was taken from your family long ago—maybe land, an heirloom, or an opportunity. Would you feel entitled to get it back? Does it matter how many generations have passed?

Where This Shows Up

In the news: Debates about reparations for slavery have become more visible in recent years. In 2020, California created a task force to study reparations for Black residents. Cities like Evanston, Illinois have started local reparations programs.
In other countries: Similar debates happen around the world. South Africa has debated reparations for apartheid. Germany paid reparations to Holocaust survivors and to the state of Israel. Former colonial powers like Britain and France face calls to pay reparations to countries they colonized.
In your life: Every time you hear someone say “that was a long time ago, why should we care?” or “I didn’t do anything wrong, why should I pay?”—you’re hearing the same kind of objection philosophers wrestle with in this debate. The question of what we inherit from the past, morally speaking, comes up all the time.
In law: Courts sometimes have to decide whether people can sue for wrongs committed against their ancestors. The legal concept of a “statute of limitations” sets time limits on when you can bring a claim. But should moral debts have time limits?