ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how 'we' are shaped by history, how 'we' ought to respond to the legacies of historical injustices, and what 'we' must do to avoid passing injustices forward to future generations. Individuals have freedom and autonomy to make individual choices, but they do so within traditions and social structures shaped by the past. For Machiavelli, free will allows individuals to control half of their actions while 'fortune determines' the other half. However, in re-defining justice and expanding the boundaries of 'us' to include previously excluded groups such as women and African-Americans, reformers always faced resistance from those who defended the narrower, more exclusive definitions of justice and 'us' preferred by the status quo. For Rawls, political communities are "a scheme of cooperation spread out in historical time" and each generation should be "governed by the same conception of justice that regulates the cooperation of contemporaries".
