History and Ethics

One More Thing . . .
Written By Elizabeth Boyle

An Introduction to the Theme Issue

 

ANDRE DE LEMOS FREIXO & JOÃO OHARA • JANUARY 2025

This One More Thing . . . entry is related to the “History and Ethics” theme issue, which was published in December 2024 and guest edited by Andre de Lemos Freixo and João Ohara.

Cover image by NEOSiAM 2024+.

Cite this post: Andre de Lemos Freixo and João Ohara, “History and Ethics: An Introduction to the Theme Issue,” One More Thing... (blog), History and Theory, January 2025, https://historyandtheory.org/omt/2025-historyandethics.

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Ethics is everywhere nowadays. We hear about it in the news, in speeches by politicians and corporate executives, in public campaigns, and so on. However, it is not always clear what precisely people mean when they use the word ethics. It is often treated as a synonym for what ought to be done—that is, the normative considerations that allow us to judge actions (our own or of other people), and sometimes their consequences, while bearing in mind such things as duty, responsibility, accountability, empathy, justice, virtue, and historical reparation. Insofar as conventional historiographical and philosophical understanding goes, this general understanding seems adequate, but it is not sufficient.

As historians, we suspect that treating ethics as a form of “behavioral education” or certification is not a good thing. And for historical and philosophical reasons, it is concerning when any one group or individual thinks of themselves as paragons who possess the power or ability to scold or otherwise enforce some idiosyncratic norm upon others. So, when scholars everywhere seem more or less eager to embrace an “ethical turn,” we begin to wonder what kind of ethics is at play.

A lot has been written about the “linguistic turn” and how professional historians tried to cope with it by altogether embracing or rejecting it. According to Judith Surkis, the term was coined in the 1950s and, after much use and abuse, became increasingly associated with French Theory.[1] In the heyday of social and economic history, the “old” theorists of history raised a few eyebrows by talking about narrative, language, and the limits of historical representation. Paul Veyne, Lawrence Stone, Paul Ricoeur, Michel de Certeau, Frank Ankersmit, Jörn Rüsen, Dominick LaCapra, and many others debated concerns related to the difference between history and historiography, the practices of professional historians, and the status of fact and fiction in their work. Unfortunately, however, discussions quickly turned into heated polemics, and further meaningful advances in our understanding of history became increasingly unlikely.

We do not wish to repeat these debates, and we know much has changed since their heyday. But we think that, to understand what an “ethical turn”[2] is, we should take a few steps back and examine our practices and bodies of knowledge in the humanities, in general, and history, in particular. Historical knowledge is saturated with ethical and political problems. At first sight, it seems good that historians are now interested in taking these matters seriously and dedicating time to thinking through these problems. But doing so requires careful attention to the moral and political theories implied or presupposed by our intuitions about responsibility, integrity, obligation, and so on.

What is perceived to be a matter of evaluation (judging and weighting values, which is therefore an “ethical” issue) may change significantly depending on the culture and place in the world we are considering. For Jacques Rancière, ethics can be understood as a complex sphere of constitutions in which political practices dissolve “the distinction between fact and law, or between what is and what ought to be.”[3] In this vein, ethics (from ethos) dissolves the general norm to consider the fact—that is, what actually happens in the social, political, and economic environment—in order to identify that particular environment, the ways of being, and a principle of action. According to Rancière,

the contemporary ethical turn is the specific conjunction of . . . two phenomena. On the one hand, the instance of judgement, which evaluates and decides, finds itself humbled by the compelling power of the law. On the other, the radicality of this law, which leaves no alternative, equates to the simple constraint of an order of things. The growing indistinction between fact and law gives way to an unprecedented dramaturgy of infinite evil, justice and reparation.[4]

In the case of Western historical culture and thinking, different social and political interventions made clear the social role of historians (professional or not) in presenting politically laden discourse as objective descriptions of historical phenomena—think of labor, race, gender, class, postcolonial, decolonial, and anti-imperialistic histories. In dealing with other human beings as human beings and the meanings we attribute to the world, to reality, and to the future, the present, or the past, historians are entangled within a complex network of relationships that can never be purely epistemic, even if they aim toward rigor and objectivity. Historiography is but one of many other ways of dealing with temporality, historicity, human life, historical meaning, identities, societies, conflicts, passions, and politics, and it can be thought of as a practice that has always come from, and has always raised, important ethical and political questions.

Twenty years ago, in December 2004, History and Theory published the “Historians and Ethics” theme issue. The goal of “Historians and Ethics,” as stated in Brian Fay’s introduction to it, was “to revisit afresh a question that has periodically been urgent to those who think and care about the discipline of history, namely, the relationship between historians, the practice of history, and questions of ethics.”[5] Since then, the world has changed dramatically. We have once again begun to witness the rise of nationalism in a world plagued by war, tyranny, and genocide. Horrors that many assumed were confined to the past are now shaping our present. Denialism, conspiracy theories, chauvinism, sexism, homophobia, and a general animosity toward the Other are all important challenges to the “triumphant” post–World War II historical consciousness and to its legacy in the moral realm: human rights. As the colonial roots and assumptions of old Western universalism were scrutinized and decentered,[6] the debate about the “entanglement” of knowledge, power, ethics, politics, and history—and the problems posed by this entanglement—became old news for many scholars. But then what?

The December 2004 History and Theory theme issue offered important insights into the value-ladenness of historical discourse, including whether historians possess any special duties or responsibilities and whether it is appropriate for historians to make moral judgments. In the same year, David Carr, Thomas R. Flynn, and Rudolf A. Makkreel published an edited collection titled The Ethics of History, and its chapters dealt with similar concerns.[7] So, although epistemological questions were—and remained—central to the theory and philosophy of history, ethical ones clearly touched on sensitive topics about which scholars had many different, sometimes conflicting, perspectives.

As with History and Theory’s December 2004 theme issue, our December 2024 “History and Ethics” theme issue also received a large number of submissions.[8] In selecting contributions to include in the issue, we made a conscious effort to cover a wide range of questions, topics, and approaches while also attending to geographical diversity and gender balance. Despite our best efforts, some gaps unfortunately remain. Nevertheless, we believe that the nine excellent pieces that constitute this theme issue offer, at the very least, entry points into many of the different ethical problems that haunt history from a variety of perspectives, including concerns ranging from the ethical constraints that historians face in their research to the challenges of history teaching and from the study of historical cases to the theoretical analysis of conceptual problems.

This diversity of perspectives is in line with a broad understanding of the theory of history, one that emphasizes collaboration and debate across disciplinary boundaries and intellectual traditions. As emphasized by such authors as Herman Paul, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, and João Ohara, this pluralistic attitude can be particularly productive in the context of our field, especially considering its lack of institutional foothold in many countries (including, but not limited to, the United States). It should enable researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds not only to collaborate and confront different perspectives connected to our many ways of relating to the past but also to benefit from existing institutional structures.[9]

There is no single and unequivocal interpretation of the “history and ethics” theme. Nevertheless, we can identify some organizing threads that run through the contributions we have chosen to include. The first one concerns historians, their values, and their practices as professional historians. In “A Virtue Ethics for Historians: Prospects and Limitations,” Herman Paul considers how mutually beneficial a dialogue between virtue ethicists and historians of historiography could be in the context of recent worries about research ethics in the sciences and humanities. He argues that, on the one hand, the case of history provides interesting material for virtue ethicists to consider the affordances of virtue talk in practice, giving virtue ethics a more critical edge. On the other hand, by familiarizing themselves with scholarship on virtue ethics, historians gain access to a rich conceptual space whereby they can better frame some of their worries about integrity and truthfulness.

Even without these sophisticated conceptual tools, historians have long discussed problems concerning the moral and cognitive values involved in their practices. For instance, in “Truthful Is Moral: Practicing Ethical Responsibility in Chinese Historiography,” Q. Edward Wang explores the practice of “straight writing” in traditional Chinese historiography as an attempt to reconcile historians’ commitment to both historical truth and moral education. For traditional Chinese historians, truthful writing involved not the factual restraint of modern “scientific” historiography but the courage to write without fear of potential retribution. Moral concerns were not alien to “straight writing”; they were integral to it.

We see similar concerns, although in a very different historical context, addressed in Antoon De Baets’s “Open Letters in Closed Societies: The Values of Historians Under Attack.” De Baets’s analysis of a set of open letters gives us a glimpse into some contexts wherein the threat of state interference prompted historians to look for support from peers located elsewhere in the world. In doing so, these historians appealed to both cognitive and noncognitive values—that is, to integrity and respect for the historical record and to freedom of expression—and showed a broad understanding of historiography that far exceeded the solitary work in the archives. And perhaps most importantly, they appealed to the very real impacts history can have on the world.

The noncognitive role of histories in broader social processes is another interesting thread in this theme issue. In “What Is History in a Settler Colonial Society? Mapping the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical Historiography Using an Australian Case Study,” Anna Clark reflects on some important questions that arise from doing history in a (post)colonial context. It turns out that historians should worry about the noncognitive consequences of their work: at least in contexts of colonialism and imperialism, historiography has, in fact, been a cog in the machinery of excluding and oppressing colonized people. Clark’s article focuses on how Australian historians have dealt with the ethical and epistemological challenges of not only integrating indigenous knowledge into “ordinary” history but also rethinking the very intellectual and disciplinary practices that continue to exclude certain people both as subjects and as writers of history.

Carolyn J. Dean’s “Bystanders, Jews, and Historical Interpretation” focuses on our current understandings of the bystander category in historiography related to Vichy France. By recovering the history of its use, Dean highlights how a seemingly descriptive category is saturated with a specific moral evaluative component, one that should be reconsidered in light of the recognition of Western colonial violence. In her view, the idea of “willful ignorance” can help us to better understand the tension between bystanders’ sympathy for victims and their complicity in violence.

Another thread is related to the concept of responsibility. In “What Is Responsibility toward the Past? Ethical, Existential, and Transgenerational Dimensions,” Natan Elgabsi explores questions about historical responsibility. He distinguishes between two different logics of responsibility: one is rooted in the Latin concept of spondeo and the other is rooted in the Hebrew concept of acharayut. Whereas the former operates in a judicial logic, with its associated idea of guilt, the latter points to our embeddedness in relations with others, relations to which we are bound and from which we cannot simply escape. For Elgabsi, by thinking about transgenerational responsibility in its acharayut sense, we should be able to explore the value of a concept of responsibility that goes beyond inherited guilt and enables us to reflect on our being with others.

Zachary Conn’s “A House with Exposed Beams: Inquiry-Based Learning and Historians’ Ethical Responsibilities as Scholar-Teachers” takes us into the classroom, where we find a different sense in which historians must consider their professional responsibilities—in this case, their responsibilities, in the present, to their students. Conn’s quasi-ethnographical account touches on tensions that appear both in the context of research and in the classroom and discusses the relational character of inquiry-based learning.

In “How Should Historians Empathize?,” Taynna M. Marino explores issues surrounding empathy in moral discourse and empathy as an aspect of historical understanding. In her account, empathy is a human capacity that has often been overlooked or explicitly rejected as a relevant part of our moral considerations and our historical investigations. However, as empathy is an ineliminable feature of our engagement with others in the world, Marino argues that historians should think carefully about it—and her preferred framework for doing so is the ethics of care.

In “‘Testimony Stops Where History Begins’: Understanding and Ethics in Relation to Historical and Practical Pasts,” Jonas Ahlskog argues for the importance of distinguishing between history and memory as different forms of relating to and understanding the past. Following R. G. Collingwood, Ahlskog emphasizes that historical understanding is qualitatively different from the kind of understanding that witnesses can offer. Unlike memory and testimony, which offer some sense of “authenticity” and “immediacy,” history remains an indispensable tool for us to critically assess the “ready-made images” offered in cultural memory. For Ahlskog, historians’ responsibilities remain rooted precisely in providing this critical form of understanding that testimony simply cannot offer.

In our view, this theme issue highlights the fact that historians, philosophers, and theorists of history care deeply about ethical questions related to history. But the scope of “ethics” in these cases is much wider than we could ever deal with here. Indeed, it includes, among other things, the values to which historians are committed in their professional practice (both in research and in teaching), the means by which these values are brought to bear in those practices, and the relations both between historians and the people they study and between historians and the people to whom they write. Considering that ours is an interdisciplinary field whose researchers come from very different intellectual backgrounds, this is not surprising. The challenge, however, rests in enabling true collaboration to emerge from this diversity. We hope that readers of this theme issue will find plenty within it to think about, explore, and discuss further—and that they do so by drawing on their own perspectives and experiences.

NOTES

[1] Judith Surkis, “When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012), 700–22.

[2] Dave Boothroyd, Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Dominick LaCapra, Historia y memória después de Auschwitz (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2009), 207–40; Marcelo de Mello Rangel and Valdei Lopes de Araujo, “Introduction—Theory and History of Historiography: From the Linguistic Turn to the Ethical-Political Turn,” História da Historiografia 8, no. 17 (2015), 318–32; Marcelo de Mello Rangel, “The Urgency of the Ethical: The Ethical-Political Turn in Theory of History and History of Historiography,” Ponta de Lança 13, no. 25 (2019), 27–46; Thamara de Oliveira Rodrigues, “Theory of History and History of Historiography: Openings for ‘Unconventional Histories,’” História da Historiografia 12, no. 29 (2019), 96–123; Ethan Kleinberg, Joan Wallach Scott, and Gary Wilder, “Theses on Theory and History,” Theory Revolt, May 2018, https://historyandtheory.org/theoryrevolt; Andre de Lemos Freixo, Aguinaldo Medeiros Boldrini, and Walderez Ramalho, eds., Emergencies: Race, Gender, and Decoloniality (Vitória: Editora Milfontes, 2021).

[3] Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, transl. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 109 (emphasis added).

[4] Ibid., 110.

[5] Brian Fay, “Historians and Ethics: A Short Introduction to the Theme Issue,” History and Theory 43, no. 4 (2004), 1.

[6] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

[7] David Carr, Thomas R. Flynn, and Rudolf A. Makkreel, eds., The Ethics of History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004).

[8] In his introduction, Fay mentioned that “the journal received more submissions for this Theme Issue than for any other in our history” (“Historians and Ethics,” 1).

[9] See Herman Paul, “History and Philosophy of History (HPH): A Call for Cooperation,” in Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives, ed. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 165–79; Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “Do Theorists of History Have a Theory of History? Reflections on a Non-Discipline,” História da Historiografia 12, no. 29 (2019), 53–68; and João Ohara, The Theory and Philosophy of History: Global Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Elizabeth Boyle
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An Overview of Time Studies in the Theory of History after the 2000s