A Journal of Philosophy, Applied to the Real World

In early August 2013, an Australian mining company was fined $150.000 for desecrating and damaging “Two Women Sitting Down”, an allegedly sacred site in the custody of the aboriginal people of Kunapa living near Tennant Creek, in the Australian Northern Territory. The damage was ascribed to blasting at a nearby mine that caused the collapse of an overhanging rock and the consequent split of the site into two parts, provoking irremediable damage to it. Although aboriginal representatives had been consulted when undertaking the works, the mining company was accused of “abusing their trust” and concealing the full extent of the impact of the operation. The collapse, according to the Kunapa people, made it impossible for them to continue perceiving the site as part of a traditional songline (in this case narrating the story of blood spilled during the fight between a marsupial rat and a bandicoot) making it “much harder for Aboriginal people to recognise the dreaming” (see Jabour, 2013).

Many people tend to think, and I agree, that the verdict of the Australian courts in this case was justified. The Kunapa people had been affected in some non-negligible way; indeed, they had castillos hinchables been wronged. Many people also think that the Kunapa were wronged because people who are attached to particular external objects ought to have a special say on how those objects are used. Both the diagnosis of the wrong and its suggested remedy, I want to argue, is misguided. Although attachment to particular external objects is a very important component of our descriptive explanation of why people object to the way others (who may not share the same sense of attachment) make use of such objects for other purposes (including distributive purposes), it does not help us construct a plausible account of why that complaint is normatively defensible. To provide a normatively defensible account of why sometimes agents who are attached to certain objects might be granted special claims over them, a more promising route is to ask whether agents making such claims suffer from structural injustice in the present. The first part of this paper explains and defends that claim. The second part illustrates the implications of my position. It suggests that while attachment is irrelevant for grounding special claims, it might have a role to play in determining the content of remedial obligations. The third part examines some objections.

II. Claims based on attachment

One reason for why attachment-based claims appear promising is that they seem to give us reason for understanding why particular agents might have special claims over particular external objects – an issue that seems difficult to settle by endorsing a conventionalist account that makes the allocation of objects to people depend on institutional norms that may or may not reflect the particularity of the relation.1 The Kunapa people are connected to the rocks of Tennant Creek in some unique way: such objects are central to make sense of who they are, to the pursuit of purposive activities together with others they are related to, and to the distinctive system of rules and norms that they have reason to value. Thus, external objects are thought to matter because to be attached to those objects the way, say, Kunapa people are, implies to structure an entire life around activities sustained by access to those objects, and to do so in a way that recognizes and supports the meaning and values of certain group practices. To deny the Kunapa a special access to such objects central to their life plans, implies interfering with their autonomy to construct these lives as they see fit. This understanding of the role of attachment is implicit in the multicultural demand for the recognition of group-differentiated rights required to protect cultures as the context of choice in which individual autonomy often takes shape (see for example Kymlicka, 1989; Appiah, 2005; Raz 1994, esp. ch. 8).

Cultural attachment takes us to the problem of whether special claims to particular external objects can be justified with reference to the role that such objects play in promoting particular cultures and in sustaining the life plans of individuals whose lives are shaped by this belonging. Claims based on cultural attachment are often defended as pro-tanto claims, claims that are typically granted some validity but that can also be overridden. But under what conditions can they be overridden and when is it more difficult to do so? The crucial question, I want to argue, is whether agents making special claims to certain objects on grounds of cultural attachment suffer from structural injustice in the present. To introduce my argument, let me begin by contrasting two examples.