ABSTRACT
The corporate account of responsibility argues that incorporated groups are agents, yet begs this question: if states are corporate agents, then why should citizens be liable to pay for its past mistakes and injustices? Several theorists supplement the corporate account to argue that democratic citizens agree to take on the liabilities of the state through authorization or intentionality. I argue that this route is mistaken, that citizens are obliged to pay for many of the state’s obligations without citizen agreement. Yet I also suggest that motivating citizens to pay for a state’s past mistakes will often be hard to do, partly for reasons that Jeremy Waldron explains. Still, I argue that Waldron is too quick to suggest that the passage of time means that states do not have an obligation to repair any past injustices. I argue that states may have an obligation to redress historical injustices, but that there is often a motivational gap for doing so. Both states and citizens have a bias to the present and future, which is difficult, though not impossible, to overcome.
