What is Reparative Justice?

Each year, the Wisconsin-Alpha chapter of the International Honor Society for Philosophy at Marquette University invites a scholar to deliver a lecture in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas.

In 2010, that was Margaret Urban Walker (ethics and philosophy, Arizona State U.), who discussed the history, current thinking, and potential future application of the notion that amends are owed for wrongs and wrongful harms. Despite its venerable past since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, she says, reparative justice has not received the degree of attention in contemporary thought that distributive and retributive justice have enjoyed