This week British TV (Channel 4) showed a programme by black academic Robert Beckford arguing that ‘reparations’ should be paid to the descendants of African slaves in the British West Indies - Jamaica, Trinidad, and so on.

I didn’t watch the programme (life is too short), but apparently Beckford puts a figure of £7.5 trillion on his demand. Assuming that a trillion is a million million (and not the obsolete meaning of a million million million), that comes to £7,500,000,000,000, or about $13,500,000,000,000 at current exchange rates. This would be about £150,000 per head of the British population.

I think Beckford will have a long wait, but it may be worth examining the basis of such claims.

First, one might query the amount. Cumulatively there can hardly have been more than 5 million black slaves in the British West Indies, and probably only a minority of them have any living descendants. So the claim implies more than £2 million per slave ancestor, which seems a bit steep.

But the real question is whether the descendants of the slave owners owe anything at all to the descendants of the slaves.

I take it as uncontroversial that there can be no such thing as vicarious moral responsibility. No-one should be punished, or required to pay compensatory damages, if they have themselves done no wrong. [Note 1].

The absence of vicarious responsibility might seem to dispose of the question, but the matter is not quite so simple. Suppose my ancestor stole a painting from your ancestor. I have inherited it, but you would have inherited it if it had not been stolen. Am I entitled to keep it, or should I hand it over to you? I don’t know what the law says about such cases, but I think there is a strong moral case for handing the painting over. The same principle would apply if the thief was unrelated to me, and had given it to me as an arbitrary gift. The point is that I have done nothing to deserve it, and the donor had no right to pass it on to anyone, since he had no right to possess it in the first place. [Note 2]

I think the general moral principle we can extract from this example is that if person A is worse off, and B is better off, as a result of some wrongdoing, then B has some moral obligation to compensate A, even though B personally has not done anything wrong. The entitlement to compensation is not unlimited: it cannot be greater than the extent of the disadvantage suffered by A, or the advantage gained by B, whichever is the less.

But how does this apply to slavery?

In this case it may be claimed that one set of persons - the descendants of slaves - are worse off, and another set of persons - the descendants of slave owners - are better off, than they would have been otherwise. The existence of wrongdoing (the slave trade, etc.) is not in dispute. The fact that most African slaves were captured and sold by other Africans, or by Arabs, does not absolve the slave owners from guilt, though it does suggest that the descendants of West Indian or American slaves ought also to be demanding reparations from black Africans, Arabs, etc.

Of course there are some problems in determining whose ancestors were responsible for slavery. As an ordinary Englishman I suspect that most of my ancestors in the 17th and 18th centuries were peasants and labourers, who owned no slaves and were little better off than slaves themselves, in terms of diet, life expectancy, etc. Nor do I think that the average Briton now benefits from past slavery to the tune of £150,000, as required by Beckford’s figures. So if anyone wants any reparations from me, they can swivel!

But there remains the question whether the descendants of slaves have any legitimate claim on anyone. A crucial part of the argument I have outlined is that the descendants are worse off than they would have been otherwise. And in this case the ‘otherwise’ is what would have happened if their ancestors had stayed in Africa. It is very difficult to be sure what would have happened in Africa if there have been no Atlantic slave trade. We can only go by what evidence we have, which is that the descendants of Africans who stayed in Africa are, in general, far worse off than the descendants of the slaves. On this assumption the claim for reparations does not even get off the ground.

Possibly the claim for reparations could be based on some other argument than the one I have suggested. I would be interested to hear of one. Until then I conclude that the claim for reparations is just politically motivated chicanery.


Note 1: Vicarious responsibility should be distinguished from collective responsibility. Citizens of a democracy can reasonably be expected to share some responsibility for the actions of their government. Even in the absence of democracy, collective responsibility can sometimes be inferred, for example if a tightly-knit community fails to take action against notorious terrorists in its midst.

Note 2: A more difficult case arises if I have bought it from the thief for a fair price, with no reason to suspect that it is stolen. I won’t go into this.