Affirmative action and 'non-identity'

One thing has always puzzled me in the debates about affirmative action: how would economists deal with 'historic injustice', where such injustice means systemic, persistent and socially sanctioned discrimination against groups such as the blacks in the US or the dalits here?

Would they assume it as a given? Would they, when asked to rectify such wrongs, set about measuring the extent of such harm? Would they break down the data after inventing it? Would they run regressions to put forth some theory or the other?  Or would they seek empirical proof of such injustice, you know, "don't talk in the air, show me the data" sort of thing?

An interesting variant of this approach is that slavery, for example, did not harm the descendants of slaves. Proponents of this view argue that but for slavery there would have been no descendants as they would never have been born. So the question of historic injustice does not arise.

This is known as the "non-identity argument", and is used by those who argue, without malice or prejudice, that the idea of historic injustice is all rubbish and that policy should not be based on it. Since this view is not widely known in India, which has assumed historic injustice to be a fact, I thought I would bring it to the attention of readers.

The idea is rooted in the work of a British philosopher called Derek Parfit who has specialised in issues relating to identity. One of these issues was the distinction between personal identity and psychological identity. Which would a person choose? 

Parfit postulated that it was a mistake to view the former as being more important. According to him, psychological connectedness of memory and character was more important. I take it he meant that the sense of being wronged as a group was different from actually being wronged as a person.

In a recent paper*, a young scholar of law called Ori J Herstein of the Columbia Law School has examined the non-identity proposition that has flowed out Parfit's work. He poses the problem thus:

"We can affect the identity of future people, and many of our acts and choices have this effect. This fact gives rise to the non-identity problem, according to which acts that determine the identity of those born in the future cannot harm or wrong those individuals since, had the choice not been made, the individual at stake would not have existed. Future people are better off existing as they are than not existing at all."

So the issue to be decided really is whether historic wrongs can in fact harm members of subsequent generations and if future people ever have rights in relation to past acts. He says that "historic injustice and the harms it generates are best understood as group harms. Claims for historic justice can be grounded in harms currently living individuals suffer as a function of the harms their group or community currently suffers as a consequence of historic wrongs."

This is all very well. But perhaps some Indian scholar should apply the ideas contained in Parfit's work and in this paper to the Indian context. Here the idea of righting historic wrongs has been fully accepted, internalised and legislated upon.

But the inter se distribution amongst different groups of the burden of righting the wrongs has not been worked out properly. Thanks to political pressures that arise from group politics, the burden has not only been unevenly distributed, the tendency for uneven distribution has become more accentuated as former historic wrongers, if you will, claim to have been wronged and demand justice.

But what does this do to equity? Will some Indian scholar please find an answer?

*Historic Injustice, Group Membership and Harm to Individuals Defending Claims for Historic Justice from the Non-Identity Problem https://lsr.nellco.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=columbia/pllt