 Injustice. Few things cause stronger feelings. Moral beliefs are some of our deepest held beliefs, and perceptions of injustice can spark protests, political movements, or can even become a preface to war. When people believe morality is on their side, they can become emboldened to make serious changes in the world. Everybody has some perception of injustice in society. For some people, it's blatant racism or sexism that fires them up. For me, police brutality fills me with an indignation faster than anything else. When I witness some meathead bully that's harassing an innocent civilian, my blood pressure goes through the roof. I immediately feel the tension rising in my chest. However, strong feelings of indignation can also be dangerous when misapplied. My desire to wallop some power-tripping bully should be based on the accuracy of my perceptions. If my perceptions are inaccurate, then my desire to intervene to do something about it might end up causing more harm than good. Same for example, you're walking in a mall and you see some guy rip a purse out of a woman's hands. You might chase after him thinking he's a crook. Imagine you catch up to him and you manage to yank the purse back out of his hands and return it to the woman. You might feel pretty good about yourself. Your sense of justice has been satisfied. But what if you made an error? What if the woman stole the purse in the first place and the man was simply taking it back for his wife? What if she shoplifted the purse and the man was returning it back to the store? So your attempt at correcting an injustice would itself become an injustice. Now that's embarrassing at least, if not downright harmful. Alas, this counterproductive behavior happens all the time. People act out of moral indignation before carefully thinking about their perceptions. Especially dangerous is trying to correct injustices with the tools of government. No matter how well-intentioned people are, exercising political power is a dangerous proposition and it always seems to cause more harm than good. Consider an example which periodically comes up in the United States. Reparations for slavery. On the surface, proponents of reparations make a good point and they point out a clear injustice. Before the Civil War, millions of Africans were enslaved by white plantation owners in the southern United States. These slave owners stole 100% of the slaves' property and labor by implication their lives for years. Not only did the slaves themselves suffer, but their descendants did too. Slaves were unable to accumulate as much wealth to pass on to their children, which gave their offspring an unfair disadvantage in society. Similarly, the slave owners were able to pass on their ill-gotten wealth to their children, giving their descendants of slave owners an unfair advantage in society. The solution, they claim, is to try to best right the wrong in the 21st century by the U.S. government paying reparations, essentially some predetermined amount of tax money to black Americans. It's not a perfect solution, but at least it would try to correct some of the socioeconomic injustices caused by slavery. In my opinion, to put this proposal in the best light, it sounds nice and that's about it. The entire story gets caught up in imprecise abstractions and their fix would end up causing more harm than good. The more concrete this proposal becomes, the more absurd it appears. Now, because people are always quick to assume the worst of you, let me unfortunately state the patently obvious. The institution of slavery is nothing short of an abomination and in no circumstance can anybody construe my beliefs as being ambiguous on this topic. Slavery is the most reprehensible of all human institutions and those who practice it are self-righteous barbarians. So in this regard, supporters of reparations and I are in agreement. When reparations try to go from abstract to concrete, things immediately get fuzzy. For example, exactly who is paying the taxes to whom? If the principle is to redistribute the slave owner's wealth, surely we can't favor reparations by general taxation. I mean, only a tiny fraction of Southerners owned any slaves. The vast majority of Southern whites were too poor to own any slaves. So should their wealth be confiscated too? Or more precisely, should the descendants of entirely innocent Southerners be forced to pay reparations for crimes their ancestors did not commit? The same goes for Northerners who never owned any slaves. And what about my great-great-grandfather, who was an abolitionist preacher in Virginia? He didn't benefit from slavery. In fact, he was kidnapped from behind a pulpit, tied to a horse, and dragged to his death. Does that make his family exempt from the taxation? My relatives' lives and mine, as a result, were directly affected by his murder. Am I entitled to some compensation from the descendants of my great-great-grandfather's murderer? And while we're talking about who pays for reparations, what about all the immigrants in the United States who had absolutely nothing to do with slavery? My wife's grandparents moved here from Norway in the 1900s. Are they also forced to pay? What about all the particular stories of the families involved? Take a scenario where a slave owner drank all of his ill-gotten profits away. Let's say my great-great-grandfather had to start from scratch because his slave-holding father was some irresponsible drunk. How could it be considered a justice to hold his descendants liable? They didn't benefit one penny from slavery, part of the reward for hard work is being able to leave money to your children. And if the man received nothing from his corrupt slave-holding father, it seems like a great injustice to take away part of the gift to his offspring. And what about the African slave owners who arranged many of the slave trades to white Europeans? Are they liable to? Can a black American sue citizens of Ghana because of the actions of their great-great-great-great grandparents? In fact, many Europeans were enslaved by North Africans. So do North Africans actually owe me reparation? Now, all of these questions need concrete answers if we're to carefully pursue justice. Let's ask some more questions about who actually receives the money. Is it all black people in the United States or just those who can prove that their ancestors were slaves? It would surely be an injustice to forcibly take money from some innocent white American to give to a black American unaffected by slavery. What about black immigrants from the Caribbean? Does everybody need a verified, documented family tree to present to some judge? And what is a just amount for reparations anyway? Is it proportional to the time that their ancestors spent as a slave? Or perhaps it's proportional to the amount of abuse they received? You can imagine justice having some relationship to the brutality that was suffered by slaves. So for example, the horribly treated and cruelly whipped slaves should be entitled to more than those slaves who were treated relatively kindly, right? And what if somebody was enslaved for just a few months? Does their families then get less compensation? Does the modern black American have to prove the duration of his ancestor's slavery or does everybody simply get a certain cut of money regardless? If the latter, then reparations are an extraordinarily crude way to correct an injustice that happened 200 years ago, essentially stealing from one group of innocent people who had nothing to do with slavery and giving that money to another group of people who are far removed from slavery. So concretely speaking, you might end up forcibly taking money from Italians who immigrated in the 80s to give to Jamaican who moved here in the 90s. Now there's not a shred of justice there involved. Another question, just how far back do these reparation claims go? After all, if we go far enough back, I bet everybody has ancestors who were slaves. Say that I discover I'm a distantly related relative to some Egyptian pharaoh. Do I owe Jewish people some small amount of money because of their bondage in Egypt thousands of years ago? I mean, surely I cannot possibly be held liable for the actions of an Egyptian pharaoh. I mean, perhaps my position in life is slightly improved because of the exploitation perpetrated by my ancestors in ancient history. I mean, at some point, we must recognize the futility of trying to right a wrong in the past. As you can see, while it's easy to point out the injustice of slavery, nobody disputes that. It's quite difficult to come up with a solution. To me, all of these uncertainties and difficulties make it impossible to justify forcing everybody to pay for reparations through taxation. In fact, my own view takes this a step farther. Not only is it virtually impossible to discern the specifics around who owned slaves. It's actually irrelevant in almost every case. I am not liable for the crimes of my parents, much less my great, great, great grandparents, whose names I've never even heard of. So what's the connection between my liability in 2015 and their crimes in 1840? My DNA? Give me a break. I'm no more liable for the damage that they cause than I am the decisions of my ancestors in the 11 hundreds or in 5,000 BC. Forcefully taking the fruits of my labor to satisfy some transgenerational justice campaign is simply theft. It's theft in the present to pay for theft in the past. I can only imagine one scenario where it might actually make legal sense to justify intervention. So imagine that my great grandfather was a proven slave owner and he claimed complete ownership over his slaves. As a result, he took one of their family heirlooms, let's say a ring. Now imagine that that ring never changed ownership and it stayed in the little metal box for 200 years. I can see a case in that circumstance that the ring actually belongs to the provable descendants of the slave instead of the descendants of the slave owner. Now, this is where a lawsuit might actually be legitimate, but in no way would that involve general taxation for everybody unrelated to the parties. It's clear cut in a way that avoids all of the impossible to fix problems caused by government reparations. Because it seems nearly impossible to correct these injustices without creating more injustice, I can only conclude not all wrongs can be righted. It's tragic, but it's unavoidable and unfortunately it's demonstrated all the time. When people are wrongfully imprisoned, they permanently lose part of their lives and no amount of compensation can ever make up for that. When somebody is wrongfully killed or murdered, their surviving family might receive a check, but that doesn't fix the injustice. Sometimes nothing can be done, it's that simple. In the case of slavery reparations, everybody who was on earth at that time is dead. All of their children are dead too. So it's wishful, abstract and ultimately harmful thinking to believe that 200 year old atrocities are going to be fixed by punishing their distant relatives in the present who are only related by accident of birth. Granted, reparations would make a lot of people feel better about the past. I mean, it would certainly placate their guilt and sympathy and I understand this desire, but it doesn't justify committing any further injustices. Rather than deal with grand abstractions in a distant history, I think people should focus on the very real injustices that are instead taking place right now. Become indignant about the unequal application of drug laws which disproportionately affect minorities or the sickening cases of police brutality or the powerful connected people who get preferential treatment in our court system in the present. Or the slaughter of innocent civilians overseas or the hundreds of thousands of children that have died because of sociopathic politicians. People should be outraged by their atrocities. If justice seekers are itching to file lawsuits, there are plenty of legitimate ones to file, but it's unwise to let moral indignation go unchecked. Too often it becomes a greater cause for harm than good. The transgenerational justice warriors need to turn their attention to cases which can be concretely resolved and leave the distant past alone. If you like the sound of these ideas, if they resonate with you, then make sure to subscribe. And if you want to help create more content like this, then check out patreon.com slash stevepatterson and you can help support the creation of a more rational worldview. To read this article or to learn about my books, check out steve-patterson.com. Thank you.