Judging the Past

Geoffrey Scarre is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Durham University, UK, where he has taught and published extensively in moral philosophy and applied ethics for more than three decades.  In recent years he has focused particularly on the topics of death and aging, cultural-heritage ethics, and on the ethics of archaeology.  His six monographs include Utilitarianism (1996), Death (2007) and On Courage (2010).  He has also co-edited The Ethics of Archaeology (2006) and Appropriating the Past (2013), and edited The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging (2013).

• 1 Prelude: The Demo(li)tion of Edward Colston.- 2 Introduction.- 1 The Problems of Access and Relevance.- 2 The Past as both Foreign and Familiar.- 3 When ‘Jagged Worldviews Collide’.- 3 The Relativity of Distance.- 1 Williams on the Relativity of (Temporal) Distance.- 2 Internal and External Reasons.- 3 Justice.- 4 Choosing a Standpoint.- 1 ‘Take Nature’s Path, and Mad Opinions Leave’ (Alexander Pope).- 2 Reason and Sentiment in Sociable Living.- 3 Sociability in the Kingdom of Ends.- 5 Agents, Acts and the Relativity of Blame.- 1 Witches and Slaves: The Bearing of Ideology on Moral Responsibility.- 2 Fricker and the Relativity of Blame.- 3 The Scope and Limits of Conscience.- 4 Siuation-Adjusted Moral Judgements.- 6 Interlude: A Late-Medieval ‘Hand-List’ of Offences against Sociability: Or, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.- 7 History: Morally Heavy or Morally Light?.- 1 To Judge, or Not to Judge?.- 2 Defining the Historian’s Role(s): A Short History of History.- 3 History and Human Self-Knowledge.- 8 The Morality of Memory.- 1 The Need to Remember.- 2 Warts-and-all History (But Not Forgetting the Beauty-Spots) 172 9 Historical Biography: Giving the Dead Their Due.- 1 Who Should Be Remembered?.- 2 Historical Biography and its Pitfalls.- 3 Reputation and the Passage of Time.- 10 Postlude: ‘Consider the Ant’.