IRRC No. 910
Opinion note: …And if there was also a duty to forget, how would we think about history then?
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Abstract
Is remembrance an absolute moral duty or is it better thought of in more ethically
constricted pragmatic and empirical terms? This essay argues that both individuals
and societies should strive for remembrance where possible, but accept that there
are times and places where more forgetting is the only safe choice to make. One
may hope that at some point in the future the need to remember will sweep away
a prudential decision to forget, but while we are within our moral rights to hope
that, in a given case, forgetting itself will outlive its usefulness, conflating our
wishes with teleological certainties is an exercise in hubris, not morality. But on no
account should memory be thought of as a categorical imperative.