Historical Injustice

Historical injustice generally refers to theories that claim that past wrongs may have implications for current distribution. While it is not self-evident how to define historical injustice, many theorists reserve the term for wrongs whose perpetrators and victims are now both dead. Historical injustice thus concerns the potential claims that the descendants of the victims have against the descendants of the perpetrators. An example is the potential claims descendants of slaves in the United States have against the descendants of slave owners (or perhaps descendants of all non-slaves). While many find claimsbased on historical injustice intuitively compelling, such claims have also been subject to criticism on a wide range of theoretical grounds.