Abstract

The claim by CARICOM (representing the governments of the Caribbean) for reparations from Europe’s slave-trading and colonial powers, includes in the first place a call for ‘a full formal apology for the wrongs of slavery and the subsequent treatment of emancipated people’. Objections are sometimes raised to the very idea of people apologising now for what other people did then. In his lecture, Prof. Michael Banner will explore the moral logic of apologies and consider the various difficulties which are found in apologies for historic wrongs.

Speaker

Michael Banner has been Dean, Fellow and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies at Trinity College since 2006. He was previously the Director of ESRC Genomics Forum and Professor of Ethics and Public Policy in Life Sciences in the School of Molecular and Clinical Medicine, University of Edinburgh, and from 1994 to 2004 F.D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social Theology, King’s College, London. He has been a regular contributor to discussions of public policy in areas ranging from the environment to the use of animals in science, ethical investment to the regulation of the use of human tissue, and has chaired or served as a member of numerous government committees over the past 25 years.

He is the author of the highly influential book The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology and the Imagination of the Human (OUP, 2014). Recent works include his paper on the relationship between theology and social anthropology in The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics (CUP, 2023) and Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now! (OUP 2024)

The REPAIR lectures

The REPAIR lectures are an interdisciplinary lecture series on contemporary reparations demands and policies around the globe. They are given by leading reparations experts and investigate how reparations claims and policies come about, how they play out from a political, economic and moral perspective, and what they may teach us about politics and economics today. The lectures are hosted by the REPAIR project, based at the Anthropology Department of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). They are co-sponsored by the UvA’s Amsterdam Centre for Conflict Studies (ACCS).