The Relevance of Apology to Reparations for Historical Injustice

ABSTRACT This article explains the centrality of apology to an adequate account of reparations. I look in depth at what goes on in apology. As I have previously argued, apology is an expressive action through which we seek to mark adequately the significance of our own wrongdoing. I claim that apology so understood is not merely ornamental. I defend the role of apology against criticisms that it is insufficient, unnecessary, or irrelevant to historical injustice. Apology, I claim, has an essential role in an adequate account of corrective justice. Corrective justice is sometimes rejected as a basis for reparations because of the inapplicability to historical injustice of the narrow financial compensation model found in tort law. However, as numerous theorists have argued, compensation cannot be the whole story of corrective justice. The contribution of this article is to defend an apology model of corrective justice. According to the apology model of corrective justice, the most fundamental normative effect of wrongdoing is the incurring of penitential obligations, the existence and persistence of which do not depend on the persistence of compensable harm to identifiable individuals.