Consider the following case. Imagine you inherit a fortune from your parents. With that money, you buy a luxurious house and you pay to get a good education, which later allows you to find a job where you earn a decent salary. Many years later, you find out that your parents made their fortune through a very bad act—say, defrauding someone. You also find out that the scammed person and his family lived an underprivileged life from that moment on.

What do you think you would need to do to fulfill your moral obligations?

Here are some possibilities:

Nothing. After all, you are not to blame for your parents’ moral faults. You have no moral obligations because, even though you benefited from the fraud, you did it unknowingly and innocently.

Find the scammed person and give her your house (or the money you get from it after selling it). It is a way of returning at least part of the fortune to its rightful owner. There is no need to return the money you spent on your education because education is not something that can be sold or transferred. If the wronged person has died, your moral obligations died with her.

Find the wronged person and give her your house (or the money you get from it after selling it). If the person has died, you should give that money to her descendants, who are the rightful heirs to the stolen fortune. Children of the wronged person are bound to have inherited at least some of the difficulties and pain that resulted from the scam, and they too deserve to have at least some of their fortune returned.

Giving your house to the scammed person or her descendants is not enough because that is only one part of the fortune. You would also have to repay the money you spent during your education (adjusting for inflation). If you do not have enough cash, you should give a part of your salary each month to the wronged person or her descendants until you manage to give back all of the money.

Returning all of the money to their rightful owners is not enough. In addition, you are required to provide compensation for moral damages—for all the suffering caused and the years in which the family lived precarious lives. You may compensate monetarily and maybe by putting at the service of the wronged person and her descendants your professional skills and time. (Perhaps you are only required to provide compensation provided it does not represent a great sacrifice for you.)

I recently asked this question at a Spanish forum of scholarship holders. To my surprise, most people who answered (admittedly, not that many) chose the last option.

It seems to me that the last option is supererogatory. In order to fulfill his moral duties, the scammer would certainly need to return the fortune and provide compensation for damages, but his descendants should not be burdened with compensating for an action they did not do. Descendants of wrongdoers should not be punished. If they are obligated to return a stolen fortune it is only because the offspring of the scammed person have a stronger claim to that fortune in virtue of it rightfully belonging to their parents.

In other words, it seems to me that the descendant of the wrongdoers bears harms in returning the stolen fortune. He was misled to believe he was the rightful owner of a fortune, and with that money he made himself a life that he has to give up in order to right a wrong he did not do. In this way, he is harmed. The harm that he suffers, however (which, incidentally, was indirectly caused by his parents), is less than the harms suffered by the scammed person and her descendants. The scammed person and her descendants suffer from the damage of having had their property stolen and they suffer from the precariousness that is caused by a lack of resources.

How much should the descendant of the wrongdoer give back to the offspring of the wronged? I suspect it will partly depend on how wealthy is the former and how badly off are the latter. If, through no fault of his own, the descendant of the wrongdoer lost the fortune in some mishap, it would be unfair to demand that he pay up something he did not know was stolen and does not own anymore. If, at the same time and thanks to some unexpected turn, the offspring of the wronged have done very well, it seems to me that they are owed less.

This is a simplified example. Real world scenarios invite many other factors to take into account. For instance, many cases feature grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and beyond. Perhaps moral obligations get diluted with every generation that creates distance between the wrongdoing and the present. (However, it seems to me that a proper argument needs to be offered as to why it makes a moral difference to inherit stolen property as a grandchild rather than as a daughter or son).

Simplified cases such as this one, however, can inform our moral judgments and may have important implications for international relations. A couple of days ago, Jamaica asked Britain to pay billions of pounds in reparations for slavery. One might object that the case discussed is a disanalogy with respect to Jamaica’s request because slavery is nothing like a scam. Britons would not be giving anything back to Jamaicans—they would not be returning stolen money. Rather, they would be giving compensation for moral damages, for the harms involved in slavery. I suspect it is a mistake on the part of Jamaica to frame this case as a case of compensation (if that is in fact what they mean by “reparations”). It seems to me that compensation is only owed by the wrongdoer, and not by his descendants.

Furthermore, for the purposes of this case, slavery can be cashed out as a forceful theft. Slaves worked and produced for others without getting anything in return: the fruits of their work were stolen. There were many other abominable harms involved in slavery, of course, but those were not committed by present-day Britons. It is easier to argue that present-day Britons have nonetheless benefitted from inheriting wealth produced by slaves (arguably, they have not benefitted as much from the other harms perpetrated on slaves). Perhaps Jamaicans would do better in claiming that Britain should return what is theirs, rather than asking for reparations.

In any case, in order to (morally) assess Jamaica’s claim, some of the variables to think about are the following: How well off Britain is (and how much of that wealth can be attributed to gains from slavery), how badly off Jamaica is (and how much of that poverty can be attributed to slavery), other reparations Britain would have to make to other countries, whether we think it makes a moral difference how many generations have passed since slavery, how to calculate the amount owed, how much of a sacrifice that would mean for Britons, and whether what is owed is a matter of returning money to their rightful owners or compensating for moral damages.

@carissaveliz