At the end of our recentepisode on reparations, John expressed bewilderment about what should be done. That’s understandable. The historical injustices perpetrated against blacks on American soil span four centuries and would be impossible to quantify. It seems impossible to settle who should pay reparations, given that slaveholders are all dead, and who should receive them, given that descent is a complicated affair. And the political sentiment is mostly contrary, even among liberals.

One’s feeling of bewilderment is apt to increase, at least temporarily, upon reading relevant historical information, such as in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s famousAtlanticpiece,“The Case for Reparations.”Most Americans learn in school that slavery occurred. But the extent of racist practices like discriminatory house selling “on contract” comes as a shock.

But before we give in to the impulse to throw up our hands, let’s see if we can alleviate our sense of hopelessness by distinguishing components of the challenge injustices pose.

在我看来，当不公正发生时，如何解决这个问题有形而上学的、认知的和实用主义的三个方面。

The pragmatic dimension concerns how—inpractical术语中修复损失。在政治上是否有可能获得足够的赔款支持?法律的实用性是什么?是否有足够的资源?实用主义的维度很重要——不仅对政治家和活动家，对哲学家也是如此。But here is a crucial point: the fact that it may beextremely difficultto put justice into effect does not imply that there is no justice owed. True, 90% of white people may be against reparations, as guest Michael Dawson pointed out, but that may just mean that doing what’s right is hard. It doesn’t imply that reparations aren’t the right thing. So we should keep our eye on practical concerns, without succumbing to the erroneous thought that their difficulty renders the principled question with no answer.

The epistemic dimension concerns the difficulty ofknowing谁欠赔款，谁欠赔款。自然，认知维度是实用主义的一部分，因为找出如何修复不公正的实用性之一是获得相关的知识。But the epistemic dimensioncanbe addressed without solvingallthe practical problems. As Ken put it on hisrecent blog, “Reparations are easier when they can be paid to assignable victims who have been done assignable harm by assignable wrong-doers.” As I read this, theassignableterm is partly epistemic. A victim is “assignable” only if oneknowswho the person is (or who the people are), and likewise for harms and wrong-doers.

A lot of people despair over reparations because of this epistemic dimension. It feels impossible to know all the relevant facts. Yet Coates makes the point (not quite in these terms) that notallcomponents of the epistemic problem are intractable. In some cases, it’seasyto know who has been the victim of injustices. The victims of contract loans (a predatory lending scheme in which would-be home buyers could be kicked out with no equity if they miss one payment) are in many cases living and identifiable. The perpetrators are identifiable too: they are the contract sellers and the crafters of racist policies that denied African Americans regular mortgages.

So, to me, there is hope in realizing that, although some aspects of the epistemic dimension may be intractable, some aspects can be addressed by historical research into racially-motivated zoning and financing practices. The victims and perpetratorscan知道了，由于不平等的做法而造成的公平损失至少可以大致量化。

这就把我们带到了形而上学的维度。In my view, there may be a right and wrong about reparations (or any issue of justice),even if we can’t know what it is. That is, there can be a truth about what someone is owed, even if, given our limited epistemic resources, we can never figure out what that truth is.

Let me give a not-too-fictionalized example of a situation like this (where there is a truth about reparation owed, but we can’t know it). Suppose that a German Jewish man in 1942 had 100,000 Reichsmark stolen from him by a German Nazi named Dieter Schmidt, who subsequently deposited that amount of money in a Swiss bank named ZBC. Obviously, the man should get his money back. But let us suppose that ZBC has five customers named Dieter Schmidt, all of whom have died, and each of them died with a large enough amount of money in the bank to have been the perpetrator of the theft. Each Schmidt has left all his money to a sole heir, and neither the heirs nor the bank has knowledge sufficient to settle which of them has the Jewish man’s money.

Nevertheless,one一个叫施密特的继承人欠赔款。这是一个事实。但是，鉴于目前的情况，我们可能永远无法知道这个事实是什么。换句话说，从形而上学的角度来说，存在一个关于欠下什么的事实，即使这种情况的认知维度是难以解决的。

And this is a general point about the relation between metaphysics and epistemology. Knowledgeaspiresto facts, but may not always reach them; that doesn’t, however, show that the facts don’t exist. Obligations to repair may exist, even if we don’t (at least yet) know what they are. And so it is in real life, not just in my stylized example.

这些区别如何减轻我们的困惑感?我认为它们使我们能够一次专注于赔偿问题的一个组成部分。The metaphysics is a matter of thinking things through in principle, as they would be foranyone谁可能是历史不公的受害者。认识论要求找到相关的事实，以一种被认为是对它们有知识的方式。而务实的层面在很大程度上是战略性的，是政治意愿的问题。我们可以认识到有一种正义有待发现，即使要知道它是什么并付诸实施需要做很多工作。