From a 2020 interview:
Jennifer Grossman [47:15]: What is your perspective, Professor Hicks, on reparations, a claim that current society must repay current racial minorities for wrongs done in the past?
Stephen Hicks: My view is: Absolutely not. Reparations comes out of a kind of tradition of justice. Justice is absolutely important. If an individual wrongs another individual, they owe restitution or reparation to that individual. If an institution a business institution, a government institution, engages in an injustice, that does owe reparation, and so forth. But reparation needs to be understood in an individualistic framework: it’s individuals who are harmed, and those harms are not transferable to other individuals. So in this case, we would say: slavery was a great injustice of many individuals and some institutions against many other individuals. I’d say the bottom line is that unfortunately all of the individuals who participated in it are dead. Reparations is just not possible to people who suffered from slavery: there is no way to give restitution to those individuals and from the people who perpetrated the injustice who would properly be required to pay the restitution. They’re not around to do so.
So the idea, though, that somehow through your group membership, many generations later, you have become a victim—that is just a rank collectivism of the worst sort. I don’t think there’s anybody alive who deserves restitution for historical slavery, because you know, unless you’re actually a slave or were a slave, you don’t deserve the restitution.
But it’s also important to focus on the other side of the equation, that there’s a great injustice in making people who did not participate in slavery pay for something that they did not engage in.
Now I want to say something about statutes of limitations, not so much as a legal principle, but as a moral principle and a psychological health principle. There’s a good reason why in the legal system, they will say, if an injustice has occurred and after a certain number of years have gone by, the healthiest thing to do is just to say: We’re going to let it go, just get it out of your system, move on, get on with your life. So we have successfully eliminated slavery many, many years ago, and the vast majority of people right now are horrified by the idea of slavery. I don’t think there’s anybody now who does actually believes in it. In contemporary America, the vast majority of people weren’t even around at the time. So it’s a non-issue.
I think the only issue that’s the appropriate issue is a historical issue: You could go back and make sure that the historical record is accurate. You’re naming the names of the people who were the victims, naming the names of the people who were advocates, and making sure we learn the historical lesson so that we don’t repeat it.
The full interview is here:
Related: Ayn Rand on individual rights, in the Philosophers Explained series.