How can you or I be held responsible for historic atrocities against Native Americans or treaties with tribes broken long ago?

None of us were alive when these acts took place. In many cases, our ancestors who were living at the time were in Norway or Germany or Russia. How can we be guilty of anything worth apologizing for?

Yet the U.S. Senate approved a resolution, introduced by Sen. Byron Dorgan, along with two other senators, that "apologizes on behalf of the American people" to Native Americans for "all ill-conceived policies" and "acts of violence" against Native Americans by U.S. citizens.

The senate resolution we are told was "not meant to authorize or support any claim against the U.S. government or serve as a settlement of any claim."

Frankly, I've struggled with this issue. I had trouble making sense of it when President Ronald Reagan apologized in 1988 to Japanese Americans confined in internment camps during World War II, and when the U.S. House apologized in 2008 to African Americans for slavery. True, wrongs were done. However, no one I knew, or their ancestors, were involved in locking up Japanese Americans or kept slaves. Where is our complicity in any wrongful acts?

As it happens, I just finished reading a book titled "Justice" by Michael J. Sandel. He teaches a class by the same name at Harvard. Apparently, it's very popular among students, and the class is now on some public broadcast stations (not ours) and freestreamed on the Internet. I found the book fascinating. It sort of charts the roots and evolution of American political philosophy.

Sandel devotes a chapter to apologies such as the recent senate resolution. He attributes the opposition to apology, for some, to the idea of "moral individualism." To quote Sandel: "For the moral individualist, to be free is to be subject only to obligations I voluntarily incur; whatever I owe others, I owe by virtue of some act of consent -- a choice or promise or an agreement I have made, to be tacit or explicit."

The moral individualist wasn't involved in slavery or westward expansion, so he's absolved of guilt or any need to apologize.

Or there's the theory that government should be "morally neutral" and respect individual choice. A morally neutral senate would not apologize for what some see as a moral wrong and others as irrelevant, given the passage of generations since the acts against Native Americans.

Sandal, in support of apology, relies on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, writing in 1981, who advanced the idea of narrative conceptions. As Sandel explains it: "When confronted with competing paths, I try to figure out which path will best make sense of my life as a whole, and of the things I care about." In other words, how does apologizing to Native Americans fit into my life story? What I am and what I will become?

The opposition theories, says Sandal, fail "to account for the special responsibilities we have to one another as fellow citizens. More than this, it fails to capture those loyalties and responsibilities whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular person we are -- as members of this family or nation or people; as bearers of that history; as citizens of this republic."

That's the gem of it. We are more than an individual. We are free. But we also are part of something larger than ourselves, whether we are willing to acknowledge that or not. And we are part of a narrative. Our lives are stories that began long before we were born. It began with our grandparents and great grandparents and earlier. And so to it is with the nation. If we are to apologize for acts of the federal government going back sometimes centuries, back as far as our founding fathers, this is the essential justification. It's a part of our story.

I assure you that Sandel lays this out with more clarity. He makes a good case for the apology, one that I can accept.

However, to apologize for apology sake means nothing. And the senate resolution with its toothless language fits the nothing category. But an apology built on well-developed political philosophy, tempered by shared moral understanding, that would be something. It might lead to the resolution of some long-standing issues with Native American people.

(Ken Rogers' column appears each Saturday. Contact him at ken.rogers@bismarcktribune.com.)