Battles with Integrity

Aye, but what adjustments, and for whom, and for how long, and at whose expense? By Diamond's figuring, Europeans' advantage over sub-Saharan Africans and the quasi-indigenous peoples of the Americas goes back 11,000 years...

Secondly, in my thinking about this topic lately, I've been forming the opinion that "accident of birth" (or as you put it, "good fortune of being born") is a dangerous concept, because it treats individuals as somehow springing into the world by accident, as though they drew a lottery ticket in Limbo to determine through which vagina where they'd come into existence.

In fact, we are all the products of an unbroken chain of choices made by our ancestors for the last 500+ generations, of where and how to live, whether and how many offspring to bring into the world, and how to raise them. While not all of those decisions were consciously made, many of them, particularly in American history (at least for those of us whose ancestors came here of their own will), were made SPECIFICALLY to improve the lot (there's that idea of random birth again) of their offspring, if not their own.

And so, to tell the descendants of Irish immigrants who came here at the turn of the 20th century, when they were much dispised (are you listening, Pat Buchanan), specifically to improve the lot of their descendants, that they must pay a price for slavery (as an example), an institution in which they took no part, and was (in its legal sense) ended several generations before they arrived... well, I can see where they would balk at that.