ABSTRACT
Reconciliation is often discussed in terms of restoring moral community. On this
account, wrongdoing alienates the perpetrator both from the victims he has injured
(by failing to show respect for them as his moral equals) and from the moral
community he has disturbed (by violating its publicly shared norms). Reconciliation
is initiated by the perpetrator’s acknowledgement of the wrongfulness of his act,
followed by remorse and reparation, which opens the way for forgiveness and,
eventually, the restoration of community. I will proceed on the assumption that it is a
political mistake to construe reconciliation in these terms, given the starkly opposed
narratives in terms of which members of a divided society typically make sense of
the violence of the past. Political reconciliation will not get off the ground if it is
conditional on first establishing a shared moral account of the nature of past wrongs.
In divided societies, neither community nor communal norms can be presupposed
