ABSTRACT
Chapter One canvasses contemporary writing on doing justice to the past persons and discusses the ways in which the pastness of historical injustice (and the assumed present-tense nonexistence of its persons) is in many accounts (and practices) replaced by a present- and future-oriented understanding of doing justice. Several possible explanations for this are advanced: (1) the very limited sphere of possible practical remedy in regard to the past; (2) the dominance of the present and future in modernity; (3) a rejection of intergenerational indebtedness; (4) an ethical individualist rejection of intergenerational transmission of injury and accountability; (5) the present and future-oriented commitments of theories of distributive justice; (6) the idea that the defining trait of pastness and death is radical absence, up to the point of nonexistence. That raises problems of the fading of past injustices, and the determination of the appropriate and feasible response given the profoundly changed circumstances that death and the passage of time have wrought. (7) In particular, there is the apparently unbridgeable absence that death, recent or long past, seems to yield. Nonexistence here would mean there is no enduring subject of justice to be addressed. These pages will begin the task of grounding a counter to the argument that there is no meaningful sense of a postmortem person to whom justice is owed.
