Transformative justice for repairing past injustice? An ethical critique

‘Transformative justice’ is advocated as a superior, forward-looking as well as backward-looking, alternative to ‘transnational justice’ for repairing deep-rooted social injustice. The present article offers, especially, an ethical critique of proposals to employ transformative justice, complemented by ‘transformative reparations’, for the purpose of repairing a more distant past of slavery or colonialism. The article develops two arguments for why such attempts are ethically unjustified. First, the proposals suggest an uncritical endorsement of (victim-descendant) activists’ historical ‘structural injustice’ claims regarding the impact of colonialism and slavery on present communities and relationships, when the empirical and moral foundations of such claims appear mostly weak or contestable. Second, the proposals’ appeal to forward-looking distributive justice fails, because this inclusion entails a flawed usurpation of distributive justice as well as a misjudgment of backward-looking corrective justice as arguably the core foundation for reparations. That the proposals thereby blur the different rationales of corrective justice and distributive justice signals the incoherence of the very concept of transformative reparations. The article concludes that transformative justice entails no acceptable concept of just reparation to which present-day descendants of victims of slavery or colonialism are typically entitled, and that the very approach of transformative justice has serious shortcomings.