Grayling's question: can the past entitle us to apologies, reparations or recognition today?

Every month, in the front pages of our print edition, Professor AC Grayling answers a philosophical query sent in by one of our readers. As of this month, we'll be posting each of his questions on the blog as well as on our main website, so readers can discuss the response, contribute their own thoughts—and, of course, send in further questions for future editions. You can post your queries in the blog below, or email them to us at this address. This month, courtesy of Mal Smith in London, our query (along with Prof Grayling's response) is…

Can the past entitle us to apologies, reparations or recognition today?

It is easy to suppose that history gives us our entitlements just as it tells us who we are. The land our forefathers occupied, the apologies due to us now for the harm done to them then, the works of art they made that are now in other people's museums—all the sentiments involved here, and many more like them, are bequeathments of history. They are also the source of lingering resentments that can easily flare into conflict, of claims and counter-claims, of romantic yearnings and loyalties.

Consider: the desire of today's Serbs not to relinquish Kosovo dates back to a battle near Pristina, in 1389, where defeat by the Ottomans became a tribal memory that in the 19th century fuelled nationalistic longing for independence. Likewise, the Jews and Israel, the Greeks and the Elgin Marbles, Islamists and the Caliphate, today's African-Americans and the history of trans-Atlantic slavery, Scottish separatists, the Flemings and the Walloons of Belgium—all are examples of the past's influence (some might say, stranglehold) on the present.

Does the past sanction the claims we make in the present: for land, artworks, reparations, independence? The answer is a paradigm of philosophy: it is "yes and no," for it genuinely depends on individual cases, and there is no general rule. This is mainly because some past-based claims, such as those about "national identity," are a load of nonsense, while others, such as claims by post-second world war German Jewish survivors to the property expropriated from them by the Nazis, are manifestly just.

Consider the question of apologies and reparations to the descendants of Africans taken into New World slavery between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, some 12m of them by most estimates. This was a horrible crime. Direct descendants claim a special relation to this history, which some regard as entitling them to reparations now—say, from the cities of Bristol and Liverpool, which profited from the trade in human flesh and suffering.

A hidden premise is that direct descendants have more claim to be appalled by the history of slavery than others. That is very questionable; but if one grants it, it then becomes relevant to point out that every single one of us is descended from slaves—for slavery is ubiquitous in human history, and demographic arithmetic relates all of us to them. It also relates all of us—and with us the descendants of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—to slave-owners too: a not-so-comfortable meditation for today's claimants.

These thoughts, like the one that points out that nations are all mongrels, and that almost all national borders are drawn in the blood of past conflicts, should make us pause in claiming that history is on our side when it would be advantageous to think so. For history just as often teaches us—if we are prepared to listen—to think very differently.

Sent in by Mal Smith, London N12.