We Live in the Present
Not the past and not the future.
One of the prime causes of the global warming that is causing weather catastrophes around the world is the burning of fossil fuels by the global north for the last couple of hundred years.
This has caused problems for the global south.
Pakistan faced horrendous floods this year and Pakistan is a poor country that now needs a lot of rebuilding.
India faces yearly killing heatwaves
The Maldives may be submerged by rising sea levels.
I've been reading about calls for the global north to pay reparations to the global south for that damage.
The meaning and logic of reparations changes according to the scale that it's applied to.
If one person benefits from illegally harming another then the harmed one should get reparations from the one who got the benefit that repairs the harm. That seems intuitively obvious.
When the idea is applied to groups it gets more dubious to me, and the bigger the group, the more dubious I am.
From the example of the First World War; One of the causes of the Second World War was the hardships imposed on all Germans for the actions of their rulers.
The moral issue there is that the people paying the reparations were not the people who caused (let alone benefited from) the war.
There are other calls for reparations these days. In Canada First Nations people are starting to talk about the idea. In the USA black people are talking about that too. And there is no denying that the harm was real.
But the same moral issue applies; it's not fair to make people pay for something they don't think they benefited from.
I have lived a comfortable life as a Canadian. Lots of First Nations people haven't. Isn't my comfortable life a benefit? After all, it's linked to historic injustices.
I'll say no, I wouldn't call my comfortable life a benefit. It's been my good fortune but also I worked all my life and lived very close to poverty.
I don't think I've had an unfair benefit that I took from someone that I should repay. I think that's the wrong way to frame the issue.
I'd frame the issue in terms of solving problems in the present.
I have seen that many First Nations people live in substandard housing. Can that really be so hard to fix? We're Canada; a rich nation full of smart people and lots of resources.
But, from my perspective we can't because (mostly) doing that sort of thing doesn't fit in with minimizing government expense in a paternalistic culture where rich people worry about taxes and giving people something for nothing.
But maybe we could think - if we need houses then let's make houses. Get the workers and materials together and get to work. The work would be employment for the people on their own land.
But let's keep our eye on the ball here; the idea is to solve a problem about housing because it's a problem and we can do it.
But there are lots of problems in Canada. If we work on all of them then nobody will feel disadvantaged by the past.
I think that fits well with Karl Popper's idea of an open society. If we are good at solving problems in the present then the future will take care of itself.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.