It is relatively easy to understand the situation when one person owes money to another person, having borrowed it before. It is also not much more difficult to understand the situation when one person owes another person a compensation for damages after being ordered by court to pay it. Somewhat more vague is a situation when there is no court involved, but the second person expects the first one to pay for damages (e.g. breaking a window), because it is customary to do so. All these situations involve one person owing a concrete thing, and the meaning of the word “owes” is (disregarding edge cases) relatively clear.
Problems arise when one tries to go from singular to plural but we still want to use intuition from the usage of singular verb. Quite often, there are many ways to extend the meaning of a singular verb to a plural verb in a way that is still compatible with the meaning of the former. For example, one can extend the singular verb “decides” to a many different group decision making procedures (voting, lottery, one person deciding for everyon, etc.), saying “a group decides” simply obscures this fact.
Concerning the word “owe”, even when we have a well defined group of people, we usually prefer to either deal with them separately (e.g. customers may owe money for services) or create a juridical person which helps to abstract a group of people as one person and this allows us to use the word “owe” in its singular verb meaning. There are more ways to extend the meaning of the word “owe” from singular to plural, but they are quite often contentious.
“Western civilizations” is a very abstract group of people. It is not a well defined group of people. It is not a juridical person. It is not a country. It is not a clan. The singular verb “owes” is clearly inapplicable here, and if one wants to use it here, one must extend its meaning from singular to plural. But there seems to be a lot of possible extensions. Therefore one has to resort to other kinds of arguments (e.g. consequentialist arguments, arguments about incentives, etc.) to decide which meaning one prefers. But if that is the case, one can bypass the word “owe” entirely and go to those arguments instead, because that is essentially what one is doing, because words whose meanings one knows only very vaguely probably do not do much in actually shaping the overall argument.
In addition to that “being disadvantaged as a result of imperialism” is very dissimilar from “having a window broken by a neighbour”, it is not a concrete thing. The central example of “owing something” is “owing a concrete and well defined thing”. Whenever we have a definition that works well for a central example and we want to use it for a noncentral one, we again must extend it and there are often more than one way to extend it (Schelling points sometimes help to choose between all possible extensions, but often there are more than one of them and choice of the extension becomes a subject of debate).
In general, I would guess that if someone argues that an entity as abstract as “western civilizations” owes something to someone, most likely they are either unknowingly rationalizing the conclusion they came to by other means or simply sloppily using an intuition from the usage of the singular verb “owes”. I think that the meaning of the word can be extended in many ways, many of which would still be compatible with the meaning of the singular word and some of them would imply “new generations are not responsible for the sins of the past ones”, while some of them wouldn’t, therefore it is probably better to bypass them altogether and attempt to solve a better defined problem.
Other words where trying to go from singular to plural often causes problems are: “owns”, “chooses”, “decides”, “prefers” (problem of aggregation of ordinal utilities), etc.
It is relatively easy to understand the situation when one person owes money to another person, having borrowed it before. It is also not much more difficult to understand the situation when one person owes another person a compensation for damages after being ordered by court to pay it. Somewhat more vague is a situation when there is no court involved, but the second person expects the first one to pay for damages (e.g. breaking a window), because it is customary to do so. All these situations involve one person owing a concrete thing, and the meaning of the word “owes” is (disregarding edge cases) relatively clear.
Problems arise when one tries to go from singular to plural but we still want to use intuition from the usage of singular verb. Quite often, there are many ways to extend the meaning of a singular verb to a plural verb in a way that is still compatible with the meaning of the former. For example, one can extend the singular verb “decides” to a many different group decision making procedures (voting, lottery, one person deciding for everyon, etc.), saying “a group decides” simply obscures this fact.
Concerning the word “owe”, even when we have a well defined group of people, we usually prefer to either deal with them separately (e.g. customers may owe money for services) or create a juridical person which helps to abstract a group of people as one person and this allows us to use the word “owe” in its singular verb meaning. There are more ways to extend the meaning of the word “owe” from singular to plural, but they are quite often contentious.
“Western civilizations” is a very abstract group of people. It is not a well defined group of people. It is not a juridical person. It is not a country. It is not a clan. The singular verb “owes” is clearly inapplicable here, and if one wants to use it here, one must extend its meaning from singular to plural. But there seems to be a lot of possible extensions. Therefore one has to resort to other kinds of arguments (e.g. consequentialist arguments, arguments about incentives, etc.) to decide which meaning one prefers. But if that is the case, one can bypass the word “owe” entirely and go to those arguments instead, because that is essentially what one is doing, because words whose meanings one knows only very vaguely probably do not do much in actually shaping the overall argument.
In addition to that “being disadvantaged as a result of imperialism” is very dissimilar from “having a window broken by a neighbour”, it is not a concrete thing. The central example of “owing something” is “owing a concrete and well defined thing”. Whenever we have a definition that works well for a central example and we want to use it for a noncentral one, we again must extend it and there are often more than one way to extend it (Schelling points sometimes help to choose between all possible extensions, but often there are more than one of them and choice of the extension becomes a subject of debate).
In general, I would guess that if someone argues that an entity as abstract as “western civilizations” owes something to someone, most likely they are either unknowingly rationalizing the conclusion they came to by other means or simply sloppily using an intuition from the usage of the singular verb “owes”. I think that the meaning of the word can be extended in many ways, many of which would still be compatible with the meaning of the singular word and some of them would imply “new generations are not responsible for the sins of the past ones”, while some of them wouldn’t, therefore it is probably better to bypass them altogether and attempt to solve a better defined problem.
Other words where trying to go from singular to plural often causes problems are: “owns”, “chooses”, “decides”, “prefers” (problem of aggregation of ordinal utilities), etc.