ABSTRACT
Chapter Four summarizes the main arguments advanced in this study. Communities of citizens are not commonwealths in the goods and subjects of the current generation alone. Rather, that intergenerational mesh that confers a common identity on them widens the temporal sphere in which they participate in a shared society of duties and the norms of their common membership.
This “we” is not restricted to the community at any one point in time but is rather its long duration. As persons whose identities are partly determined by membership in the political community, we are enmeshed in a normative web of inheritance, responsibility for and to the past, and forward-looking obligations to other not-yet-living members. Part of that can be expressed in the language of responsibility across time including for events that preceded their presence in the world. The acknowledgment of a participation in responsibility beyond the temporal borders of the present generation is rooted in citizens as embedded in the enduring political community.
Dead members of an enduring community have a sharply limited presence. The injustices they suffered are mostly irreparable, and the identity that embeddedness in the mesh of community relationships confers on them is too thin to call for more than a rudimentary (if nevertheless essential) response. Even though they no longer exist as the persons they once were, endowed with the full panoply of plans, desires, experiences, and interests, yet as occupants of that relational fabric they endure as subjects of justice, claimants on our recognition of them and of the injustices done them.
