Perfectionism and antiracism

the conditions for the realization of Charles W. Mills’s corrective justice

Abstract

This article defends the need for the prior adoption of the political virtue of anti-racism as a necessary step towards the possible realization of the corrective justice proposed by Charles Mills. To support this claim, anti-racism will initially be proposed as one of the democratic political virtues, considered as those capable, together, of affecting the basic structure of liberal democracies. Next, the article suggests that only societies in which such virtue is sufficiently present could adopt the demanding principles of corrective justice proposed by Mills to correct accumulated injustices against their racialized population nonwhite, leaving open the question of the possibility/necessity of state promotion of that virtue through political perfectionism.