or, you know, to take a current one that's,
I say currently, in the news, it's always in the news.
That the Palestinians and Israelis arguing about
the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
And so, you know, they say, well, the 1967 borders, the 1948 borders, and they argue
back, it all the way back to the Hebrew Bible, as to whose property this is.
So, the, the idea that compensation, because it's backward-looking and
aimed at fixing a particular identifiable injustice,
the problem with that is exactly, the one you identified, with respect to Kosovo,
that wherever you stop, in your backward-looking fix-it moment,
somebody is going to say, wait a minute, why stop there,
we need to go back further, because there was an injustice before that.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Right?
And so you see this come up over, and over, and over again, and
you get into the same thing, and arguments about affirmative action, for example.
It's compensation for harms, then to minorities, and ap, and,
and other disadvantage group, when, by whom, how far do you go back?
Why is it that people should lose jobs today, who,
who didn't have slaves, who didn't do the, you know?
So you get into exactly the same debate and
the notion that they're any less charged to any less politically explosive
than debates about redistribution, it, it's far from obviously true.
Indeed, if you look at the political science literature on regime transitions,
what you find is, the consensus is,
the sooner you can get people to stop focusing on the injustices of the past,
the better your chances are for building a viable regime.
Because the, if you focus people on the past wherever you stop,
it's going to turn out to be arbitrary, and
the, the people who think you should have gone back further are going to have
their sense of outrage ignited by the, the place at which you choose to stop.
You know, so if, if, we, if we eh, if,
the, if the Crimea is now going to be part of Russia, after all,
the, the Tatars will have a different story to tell and so on.
So that the, the conventional wisdom in, in,
in regime transitions is it's actually better to get people focused on
the future than focused on the past, which might suggest a very different approach.
So this idea that, that compensation is, is somehow less politically,
or philosophically demanding than redistribution turns out to be debatable.
There is no it there's no technical answer to these questions, right?
They're, they're political choices, they depend upon the balance of forces,
at the, at the time, and what they're going to be able to achieve.
There so, in short, coming back to our large Enlightenment theme,
there is no way to, to give a technical scientific answer, and
therefore there's no way to deliver on that aspect of the Enlightenment
to establish the supremacy of individual rights of anybody to anything.