The trouble with compensatory measures

What does it mean to owe someone for past wrongs — to be expected to give compensation?

Is it simply a relationship between two entities, or can it be extended to be a relationship between vaguely defined societies and randomly labeled
categories?

When I think of the word ‘compensation’ in this context, I think of a situation in which a clear wrong has been committed by one person or by a set of entities acting against another.

I do not think of a situation in which the one owing compensation is not the one blamed for the wrong.

Thus, if someone on campus were to steal my bike and sell it for parts, I might expect the thief to pay me a sum equivalent to the value of the bike, if apprehended.
I would certainly not expect the other residents of my building to pay me the same sum if the thief were not found.

In past years, the American government has apologized for many of its elapsed policies and actions.

Some of these apologies, such as one by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the inhumane 1940s syphilis experiments in Guatemala, are quite emotional and evoke intense reactions on all sides.

And yet, if an apology is a kind of small compensation, it is unclear to me where Clinton stands in relation to those adversely affected. Is she the spokesperson for the government as a whole?

If so, are we considering the government as all its divisions acting in tandem?

That doesn’t sound like the American government to me and certainly not after decades of transfers of power.

In a similar vein, rationales for affirmative action policies are often given in terms of ‘compensatory measures’ — those who innocently or knowingly benefited from discriminatory policies in the past owe redress to those who suffered.

Thus, treatment in candidacy selection for particular minority groups is rationalized and often based (though, to be fair, not only) on a very thin logic of reparation.

The issue is even starker here: Who stands up in the relationship of wronged to wicked? Are they entire racial groups? What could possibly be more arbitrary?
I find it hard to get behind any cultural trend or program that has at its heart the selective preference for one illogical category of people over another.

I find it hard to not immediately find fault with such inequality wherever I find it, despite its superficially laudatory intentions. But that is beside the point.

The point, regardless of the legitimacy or effectiveness of affirmative action policies, is that the specific logic of compensatory measures does not hold when there is no one to blame but an amorphous idea of skin color and advantage.

I have no issue with the individual desire to apologize for a wrong that one did not commit — perhaps Clinton’s act of contrition can be put under these terms.
But the apologetic should realize the very act of apologizing on the part of one who is not responsible obscures the need for apology on the parts of the ones who are responsible.

Compensation is a tricky concept — one that only retains its meaningfulness when it is not over-used or used inappropriately.

We should realize that when true compensation cannot be acquired from those who have wronged us, it is not positive to acquire it elsewhere just
because we can.


E-mail: cmcglass@indiana.edu