Carlos: Response to Henry's Conclusion

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I've spent way too long trying to argue against Henry's point because it just seems wrong to conclude with "there is no current social framework by which we might call their lasting effects socially unjust–at least under the political conception of justice". Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I felt I had to agree with Henry's argument regardless of how strange it felt to do so. Still, I did have a few ideas as I was thinking of how to refute Henry's conclusion:

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1) With the hypothetical situation Henry provides, if we were to fully extend its logic to our current world, I think Prof. Hurley would have also created a division between the A and B group that would have maintained even into Tuesday. I think were that division were to have taken place, even after Prof. Hurley disbanded the government, the division would have remained and the hierarchy of power would continue into the rest of the week. It seems faulty to say that a state can be dissolved as easily as Henry puts it. As such, for Táíwò, even if the nations and institutions that created the Global Racial Empire no longer exist in the same manner as they originally did, their distributions of dis/advantages continues into the present.

From this idea, it may be possible for one to argue that if these previous nations did have "a form of organization that claims political legitimacy and the right to impose decisions by force" (Nagel 140) and their influence continues on into the present even after their dissolution, then there may be a claim to political justice for those affected in the present. The main problem Henry has with Táíwò is that there is no global state to hold accountable for the injustices that he outlines in Reconsidering Reparations. However, I still think it may be possible to hold accountable the descendants of those legitimate global powers that created the original injustices. Of course, this doesn't fully address Henry's critique of a lack of a current global state, but I think it may be possible to derive its past existence and hold that responsible for current injustices.

2) Although Henry echoes Nagel's idea that "world economic interdependence" fails to provide a global state that can be held responsible for matters of justice, I was considering whether Elizabeth Anderson's idea of private government can help solve for this failure. Anderson identifies private government as a situation where "(1) you are subordinate to authorities who can order you around and sanction you for not complying over some domain of your life, and (2) the authorities treat it as none of your business, across a wide range of cases, what orders it issues or why it sanctions you" (44-45). As such, many of the social, economic, political, military, and ideological tools used to uphold the Global Racial Empire can be understood to be private government's. Although I can't say that these private government's have political legitimacy or can be understood in the same way Henry and Nagel understand the global state, I wonder whether those private government's could further combine with a "legitimate" state to create a global state. 

For the World Bank, since they can sanction nations and don't care about the opinions of the nations it sanctions, Anderson would likely label it as a private government. Furthermore, Táíwò has shown that the World Bank continues to hold power over nation states and can even work with nation states to do so.  So, although this is definitely a more rough idea than the previous, I think it may be possible to see private governments become legitimate governments given the right conditions. The Global Racial Empire could be seen as a global state if the private governments it is composed of properly combine with national governments. Although this reality would bring about a whole other set of problems (and may not fully be realizable), I think given the right situations it could lead to a global state.

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Both of these ideas are preliminary thoughts and I still think Henry's conclusion holds strong, but I felt that I had to throw out some ideas for the sake of disproving the conclusion. It feels wrong to end with the conclusion that no one can be held politically responsible for past, present, and future injustices, so I tried to provide counterarguments. I look forward to other's responses and their ideas on the arguments I provided because I realize these two are very rough ideas.

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