MAP-seminar: Marion Kathe Godman (Aarhus)

Seminarium

Datum:

fredag 4 april 2025

Tid:

10.15 – 12.00

Plats:

D734

Abstract

Debates about historical injustices face the “temporality problem”; they need to explain how the living can, on the one hand, be held accountable, and, on the other hand, be made whole relative to wrongs committed in the distant past. In this paper, we critically examine and object to three influential views on offer: enduring or structural accounts, institutional liability accounts, and national community accounts.

We argue that while these views are initially attractive, each in their own way, they face a common problem: they appeal to contingent features of historical injustices. Consequently, they struggle to capture real or very similar cases. We propose a novel account in which inherited agency, which emerges from lineages of social learning, links past and present generations. Given that social learning is a non-contingent feature of intergenerational communities, it provides a stronger solution to the “temporality problem”.

To be a member of an intergenerational community is to be the product of one or more lineages of social learning and to inherit a ledger of moral claims and debts from past generations of those very lineages.

Map for the gap

Journal of Social Philosophy pdf, 720 kB. (720 Kb)