Wai 262

Notes on the video above

It is becoming clearer to me that there are both subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which the Crown and the NZ government has historically been a key player in destroying aspects of Māori culture and the social fabric needed to sustain it. This video highlights a few of the subtle ways this has occurred. E.g. providing housing (some time back) to Māori in a manner which distributed them spatially amongst Pakeha and other immigrants and not providing (or perhaps even not allowing or preventing?) places of social connection for Māori communities such as a Marae.

It has been pointed out to me that those who suffer great injustice feel it themselves and also their offspring potentially for many generations feel the impacts of the injustice - whereas the perpetrators, even if they apologise (or even themselves are punished), do not experience almost any adverse affects (and certainly it is very unlikely that their offspring for generations are affected). This strikes me in the context of this, what actually is the ethical obligation of privileged offspring? Certainly the original perpetrators that have long since passed away are not able to make things right. And surely it is someone’s ethical obligation to make things sufficiently right? So, it seems the conclusion is that the obligation of making things right does fall to the privileged offspring. Challenging but at the moment I see no other it could fall to, except perhaps God - but while I feel God certainly could act, I am very much inclined to think God would want us to do all we can alongside any action that God may take.

A summary of these thoughts from the previous paragraph is shown in the following Argdown diagram.

Argument Map n0 The obligation of making things right falls to the privleged offspring n1 It is someone's ethical obligation to make things right n1->n0 n2 The original perpetrators no longer have obligations n2->n0 n3 The original perpetrators have long since passed away n3->n2 n4 Those that have passed away cannot still have obligations n4->n2 n5 Those who haven't been negatively affected by the perpetrators may well have an obligation n5->n0 n6 The privileged offspring were not negatively affected by the perpetrators n6->n0 n7 The priveleged offspring themselves may well have done nothing wrong n7->n0
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