After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (review)

"This book is the reflection of an entire lifetime—what I now think about what I have thought since the mid-twentieth century" (After Evil, p. vii). No exaggeration, Meister's book is just that layered. It is dense, slow reading, hard to summarize, as it moves through political sociology and philosophy to religion, psychoanalysis, and economics. My review focuses on core political and philosophical issues, leaving aside parallels in religion, psychoanalysis, and much else.

After Evil is about an injustice that carries on some of the evil of mass atrocities such as the Holocaust and apartheid. The injustice is that many of the beneficiaries of atrocities get to retain their profits for no better reason than that they were not themselves perpetrators. Meister does not argue the injustice of this, but rather relies on readers' intuitive recognition of its injustice, at least when victims' claims are insufficiently addressed.

Meister finds the injustice supported by the human rights discourse (or "HRD") that followed the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of South African apartheid. HRD speaks the language of "transition," emphasizes reconciliation, and, Meister argues, has changed the focus of human rights concerns from the victims to the beneficiaries, who could be defined as would-have-been perpetrators unless they divest themselves of unjustly gained benefits. The new focus, Meister suggests, has an agenda: to redefine beneficiaries as innocent bystanders who would have resisted if they could, and who should not be treated as near-perpetrators. The motive Meister identifies is to allow beneficiaries to enjoy the profit from atrocities with a clear conscience.

Framed as an empirical psychological argument attributing unsavory motives, this hypothesis might sound paranoid. But Meister's concerns need not be framed in terms of motive. We can simply note that many who are in fact atrocities' beneficiaries regard themselves and each other as mere innocent bystanders; we can then ponder the implications of a political acceptance of that conception.

Meister's concern is that by treating beneficiaries as bystanders who do not deserve to lose their gains, the so-called transitional justice movement (since the late 1980s) defers real justice. Transition, he maintains, carves out temporal space between past evil and justice to come—a justice postponed on the ground that the time is not yet right. Meister fears this "right time" might never come: the time for justice is now. Such "transitions" are not, he argues, the "new beginnings" they purport to be. Rather, they carry the past along in the newly baptized "bystanders." Social institutions sanctioning beneficiaries' ill-gotten gains thus embody a structural injustice.

Meister is less specific than one might wish, but in Chapter 8 ("Adverse Possession") it seems he has in mind property. The justice deferred is redistributive justice for victims and accountability for property holders. There is a substantial philosophical literature on reparations for such historic injustices as genocides or dispossessions of native peoples, American slavery, and the policies of the Third Reich. Jeremy Waldron's "Superseding Historic Injustice" (Ethics 108 [1992]: 4-28) is a classic critique of the counterfactual approach to reparative justice articulated by Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974, pp. 152-53) in which the objective is to make survivors or their descendants as well-off as they would have been had there been no atrocity.

The philosophical problem of counterfactual conditionals, however, is that there seems no way to say what would have happened under other conditions when there are many causal variables, including the choices people might have made. Had the theft not been committed, the possessor might have lost the property in another way, failed to maintain its value, or abandoned it. The further back in history, the more thorny this problem (not to mention that the property itself might have itself been obtained illegitimately). Hence, it is tempting to abandon the goal of what Aristotle called rectificatory justice (Nicomachean Ethics V:1) in favor of a more...