Abstract

The compensatory‐justice justification of affirmative action requires a comparison of the actual world in which the injured person lives with a relevantly similar possible world in which this person lives but where the unjust injuring act never occurred, in order to identify the degree of harm brought about by the unjust injurious act. The problem is that some unjust injuring acts, particularly acts of slavery, led to intercourse and the later creation of the ancestors of many members of minority groups. Hence, there is no possible world in which these individuals exist and in which the injustice, e.g., slavery, did not occur. As a result, the counterfactual test does not allow us to measure or even understand the existence of a compensatable injury to these persons. I provide an inheritance‐based account of compensation that escapes this.