WHAT DO WE OWE ONE ANOTHER ?

                Should We Atone For The sins Of Our Predecessors ?

   Let's now focus on another argument often raised by opponents of apologies for historic injustices --- principled argument that does not depend on the contingencies of the situation. This is the argument that people in the present generation should not ---in fact, cannot--- apologize for wrongs committed by previous generations. To apologize for an injustice is, after all, to take some responsibility for it. You can't apologize for something you didn't do. So, how can you apologize for something that was done before you were born ? 
   John Howard, the Australian prime minister, gave this reason for rejecting an official apology to the aborigines. "I do not believe that the current generation of Australians should formally apologize and accept responsibility for the deeds of an earlier generation. 
   A similar argument was made in the U.S. debate over reparations for slavery. Henry Hyde, a Republican congressman, criticized the idea of reparations on these grounds : "I never owned a slave. I never oppressed anybody. I don't know that I should have to pay for someone who did own slaves back generations before I was born." Walter E. Williams, an African American economist who opposes reparations, voiced a similar view :"If the government got the money from the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, that'd be great. But the government has to take the money from citizens, and there are no citizens alive today who were responsible for slavery."
   Taxing today's citizens to pay reparations for a past wrong may seem to raise a special problem. But the same issue arises in debates over apologies that involve no financial compensation. 
   With apologies, it's the thought that counts. The thought at stake is the acknowledgment of responsibility.  Anyone can deplore an injustice. But only someone who is somehow implicated in the injustice can apologize for it. Critics of apologies correctly grasp the moral stakes. And they reject the idea that the current generation can be morally responsible for the sins of their forebears. 
   When the New Jersey state legislature debated the apology question in 2008, a Republican assemblyman asked, "Who living today is guilty of slaveholding and thus capable of apologizing for the offense ?" The obvious answer, he thought, was no one : "Today's residents of New Jersey, even those who can race their ancestry back to . . . slaveholders, bear no collective guilt or responsibility for unjust events in which they personally played no role." 
   As the U. S. House of Representatives prepared to vote an apology for slavery and segregation, a Republican critic of the measure compared it to apologizing for deeds carried out by your "great-great-great-grandfather."