Should the British government apologize for Britain's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as Ken Livingstone has argued? I don't know, to be honest. I mean, I'm not sure. But I do know that I haven't yet seen a persuasive argument why they shouldn't apologize. Two of the points commonly made strike me as being non-starters, and I'll deal with these only briefly as I've blogged about them before. Simon Jenkins seems to have trouble with the idea of someone taking responsibility for actions of which they are not themselves guilty, particularly where this is on behalf of an organization or institution. But, as I argued here and here, it's just because organizations and institutions are real entities - though this doesn't mean they have metaphysical personalities, or could exist without the human persons that at any given time belong to them, act for them, and so on - that those in a position to speak on their behalf can make apology for wrongs of the past, where the organization or institution was responsible for these but the individuals actually making the apology aren't. There is nothing mysterious about it.
Another argument touched on by Jenkins and also made here concerns not the possibility of this kind of apology, but its undesirability - on the grounds that it's really about making the person who delivers the apology 'feel smug', about 'pandering' to certain political constituencies. Whether or not this is a fair charge against the Mayor of London I leave to one side; but I think it's a lousy argument. Suppose it to be the case that on all other grounds we are justified in holding that an organization owes a group of people an apology for some past misdeed by it towards them. Then the fact that the persons to whom it falls to make the apology may not do so with the right sort of inner feelings is not a reason for withholding it. That may tell you something about those individuals, but the apology itself in this context is a public symbolic act on behalf of a collective body and it is not rendered empty by the particular motives of this or that official voicing it.
I also discount Simon Jenkins's suggestion that an apology for a crime of the past is just a way of deflecting attention and energy from contemporary problems and evils. It may be but it needn't be. Apologizing for past slavery doesn't have to divert anyone from the campaign to get rid of present and continuing forms. It could be seen as a way of reinforcing that campaign.
There is, then, the argument that the putative apology is for something that is not only past but from the very distant past - in which it differs from, say, the Holocaust or the Rwanda genocide. But I'm not altogether persuaded by this either. This past is not all that remote. And the thing for which the putative apology is mooted is an enormity of evil without qualification. This is not an instance - as, for example, with the controversy over the Iraq war - where there are two sides, each of which felt that there was a compelling moral case. Would an apology over the slave trade mean that from now on every historical injustice, large or small, and however remote in time, would have to be covered by an institutional apology by someone somewhere? Not at all. It's a matter of relativities and proportions.
There may be a cogent argument against the apology Ken Livingstone is asking for, but I haven't seen one.