Ethical Relations to the Past: Individual, Institutional, International

Abstract

Ethical relations to the past – whether to ancestors, the dead, historical injustices, events with contested interpretations – are complex and often elusive. The representations of history are, as Edward Said put it, not ‘ontologically given’ but rather ‘historically constituted’ (Said 1989, 225). Rather than preserved as a ‘thing’ by this or that established account, ‘the past’ is something with which we are in an ongoing state of negotiation. At points, this process seems especially highly charged. Our call for contributions to this special issue followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in June 2020, and a global response calling for an end to racism and colonialisation, an acknowledgement of the presence of past injustices in the here and now. The need for such acknowledgement has been at the heart of other recent high-profile cases and movements, from historic child abuse by high-profile celebrities to #MeToo, and from the moral skirmishes in the UK and US around the removal of statues of those involved in the slave trade, to the October 2021 ruling that the Canadian government must compensate Indigenous children taken from their homes and placed for the sake of ‘assimilation’ in residential homes where many went on to be abused. Distinct ethical questions arise when we are dealing with the past, and with transition. Can people of the past be wronged in the present? With events long in the past, how does responsibility carry over to current agencies not directly involved – to present governments, businesses or institutions? Does ethics sometimes require a revision of how past events and people are commemorated? To what extent is it legitimate to judge beliefs and actions taken as ‘normal’ in previous eras and contexts by standards arising in our own time? In post-colonial contexts, what is the rightful role of ‘allyship’ in resolving past conflict, trauma and oppression – and giving due prominence to the agency and authority of those who have offered resistance? Meanwhile other factors are crucial to how these ethical questions are negotiated. Whose knowledge counts, in getting to grips with historical events? What role can, or should, survivors’ testimony play? What (if anything) constitutes an authoritative account? Our commitment in this special issue has been to address how the harms of the past live in current welfare policy and practices. Terms such as ‘post-coloniality’ and ‘historical abuse’may suggest that somehow the harms at stake exist only in the past, rather than being carried among those currently living. A willingness by governments to take steps to redress those harms may seem to be partial, and non-inclusive of the insights of those affected. Our intention is to foreground both the need for care and criticality in our understanding of ethical relations to the past, and the need to hear the plurality of voices and insights among those affected then and now. Shona Hunter’s paper addresses the question of decolonising the white self as an action of anti-racism in institutional settings, in response to the call for change sitting with people of colour rather than people who benefit from white privilege. Hunter’s graceful choreographic interplay of responsibilities for change calls for a contextualised understanding of situations, giving depth through listening to the voices of experience.