Abstract
The plausibility of the Ethics of Political Commemoration can be demonstrated by subjecting it to three tests. Is it coherent? Can it command a significant degree of consensus? Does it correspond to plausible instances of remembrance? As this chapter shows, the framework passes these three tests. Its coherence derives from being based on the tested and multidimensional Just War tradition, with parallels in other traditions, such as thinking about natural law. The framework can command significant agreement, in that it encompasses scholarly debate, and has analogies in various museum charters and guidelines on commemoration—while connecting these to a larger tradition. Moreover, the framework corresponds to instances of compelling remembrance and helps us to understand why certain suggestions for the Stalin Museum in Georgia, the Cascade Memorial in Armenia, or the Tito Museum in Croatia are more plausible than others. Like the Just War Theory, the Ethics of Political Commemoration is positioned between perennial challengers: the pacifist view that no political compulsion has merit on the one side and an ends-justifies-means rejection of restraint on the other. Taken together, these considerations highlight that the framework constitutes a plausible paradigm.
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Notes
- 1.
For a comprehensive argument in favour of tradition as a mode of moral enquiry, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/200/monograph/book/48319.
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Gutbrod, H., Wood, D. (2023). Truth of the New Paradigm. In: Ethics of Political Commemoration. Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31594-7_4
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