Abstract:
Assessing historical injury in terms of reparative potential, Winter looks at some of the difficulties facing a reparative claim for slavery in the United States. The slavery reparations literature is traditionally divided between two understandings of slavery's injury: what Winter calls 'asset-based' and 'affect-based' accounts. In the corrective justice framework he assumes, both asset- and affect-based descriptions of historical injury face powerful liability-derived objections. After critiquing some recent work that attempts to meet these challenges, Winter sketches a hybrid account. Drawing on the divergent strengths of the asset- and affect-based understandings, he concludes by suggesting conditions for a reparatively relevant historical injury that answer several traditional liability objections.