One idea that figures prominently in contemporary moral and political reasoning is the idea that we each have a special duty to “repair” or “rectify” the effects of our past misconduct. Quite apart from its relevance to the law, this idea – which might be called the idea of corrective justice – finds expression, for instance, in the polluter pays principle in environmental ethics and in the various demands for reparations made in respect of slavery, colonialism and other large-scale human rights violations.However, in spite of its prominence in these contexts, the idea of corrective justice is sometimes challenged on the grounds that it unfairly discriminates between equally deserving victims and yields counterintuitive implications in cases where people rectify the effects of one another’s conduct.In this talk, my aim is not to offer a point-by-point rebuttal of these challenges, but rather to take them as the cue for developing a positive rationale for corrective justice that appeals to the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, the view, roughly-speaking, that it is morally more objectionable to do harm than to allow harm.Whilst this rationale raises plenty of questions of its own, I nonetheless aim to substantiate the conditional claim that we cannot be wholly sceptical about the idea of corrective justice if we are prepared to accept the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing.In this way, I hope to show that the idea of corrective justice rests on firmer foundations than some have allowed.