Reconsidering the Comfort Women Case: Inherited Responsibility as Civic Responsibility

Abstract

In this paper, we present civic responsibility with reciprocal non-domination as a viable solution for the "comfort women" issue in South Korea. Specifically, we will carry out the following two tasks: First, by applying the predominant theories of inherited responsibility to the comfort women case, we show that these theories are insufficient in terms of the "agent" taking inherited responsibility and the "scope" of its recompense. Second, by elaborating reciprocal non-domination as a regulative principle through which all citizens can acknowledge the need for preventing similar injustices in the future, we argue that civic responsibility would be more applicable to the comfort women case, particularly in the context of inherited responsibility.