ABSTRACT
To hold that redressing a wrong is an obligation of justice is to hold that some remedial action is (at least prima facie) necessary, something that morally must be done. The requirements of justice are usually understood to be ones that we are required to meet in all cases in which practical circumstances are not so dire or chaotic as to prevent our performance, and in which no other obligations of comparable gravity or urgency conflict. It is curious, then, how often arguments in recent theoretical literature on reparations for massive violence and abuse aim to show that reparations are impossible (or nearly impossible)—logically, morally, or practically—to make. Some claim to show that, regrettably, the very worst among actual injustices—atrocity, genocide, slavery, dispossession, and the like—are ones for which just repair is simply impossible. Yet these are the very cases for which we invoke the concept of reparations.
