Philosophers have offered many arguments to explain why historical injustices require reparations. This paper raises an unnoticed challenge for almost all of them. Most theories of reparations attempt to meet two intuitions: (1) reparations are owed for a past wrong and (2) the content of reparations must reflect the historical injustice. I argue that necessarily no monistic theory can meet both intuitions. I do this by showing that any theory that can meet intuition (1) necessarily cannot also meet intuition (2). This result suggests that a theory of reparations must either sacrifice one of the two intuitions or be pluralist. I argue that we ought to prefer the pluralist theory over the monistic theory. I sketch the pluralist theory, and I defend it by considering an objection about the way it can resolve conflicts.

中文翻译：

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论历史不公正赔偿多元理论的必要性


哲学家提出了许多论据来解释为什么历史上的不公正需要赔偿。这篇论文对几乎所有人提出了一个未被注意到的挑战。大多数赔偿理论都试图满足两个直觉：（1）对过去的错误进行赔偿；（2）赔偿的内容必须反映历史的不公正。我认为没有一元论理论能够同时满足这两种直觉。我通过证明任何能够满足直觉（1）的理论不一定也能够满足直觉（2）来做到这一点。这一结果表明，赔偿理论必须要么牺牲这两种直觉之一，要么是多元的。我认为我们应该更喜欢多元理论而不是一元理论。我概述了多元主义理论，并通过考虑关于它解决冲突的方式的反对意见来捍卫它。