Historians and Their Duties

We need to specify what ethical responsibility historians, as historians, owe, and to whom. We should distinguish between natural duties and (non‐natural) obligations, and recognize that historians' ethical responsibility is of the latter kind. We can discover this responsibility by using the concept of “accountability”. Historical knowledge is central. Historians' central ethical responsibility is that they ought to tell the objective truth. This is not a duty shared with everybody, for the right to truth varies with the audience. Being a historian is essentially a matter of searching for historical knowledge as part of an obligation voluntarily undertaken to give truth to those who have a right to it. On a democratic understanding, people need and are entitled to an objective understanding of the historical processes in which they live. Factual knowledge and judgments of value are both required, whatever philosophical view we might have of the possibility of a principled distinction between them. Historians owe historical truth not only to the living but to the dead. Historians should judge when that is called for, but they should not distort historical facts. The rejection of postmodernism's moralism does not free historians from moral duties. Historians and moral philosophers alike are able to make dispassionate moral judgments, but those who feel untrained should be educated in moral understanding. We must ensure the moral and social responsibility of historical knowledge. As philosophers of history, we need a rational reconstruction of moral judgments in history to help with this.     

Duties and rights in the thought of Giuseppe Mazzini

Abstract

In the Mazzinian sense, duties are not commandments. Duty means dià logos, dialogue. It posits a dialectical approach that welcomes different points of view, recognizes the dignity and legitimacy of diversity, is determined to understand the reason of ‘others’ for the sake of peaceful coexistence, and to oppose institutions and governments that trample on fundamental human rights. Duties in the Mazzinian sense are ethical guidelines, to be examined and applied personally on a daily basis, keeping in mind the consequences of one's actions. This definition of duty is the premise for the Mazzinian concept of republican solidarity, which rises from the awareness that everyone and everything has an assigned role and a dignity of its own, and is therefore in direct or indirect relationship with the rest.     

宋代馆职的名实与职任

宋代馆职从职能上可以分为狭义的馆职与贴职两大系列。狭义的馆职是有具体职事的馆阁官,贴职则系由他官兼领的职名。馆阁职事官的员数主要依需要而定,贴职则没有具体规定。专职的馆阁官有校书、修书等“职业”及轮直制度,其他或兼领馆务,或带职外任。元丰五年崇院并入秘书省,原有馆职与贴职作为职事官与寄禄官的关系发生转换,但馆阁的职能并未改变。     

Duties to the Dead and the Conditions of Social Peace

This essay focuses on the purported duty—defended by Walter Benjamin but widely assumed in much political theory and practice—of the living to redeem the suffering of those who died as a consequence of oppression, exploitation, and political violence. I consider the cogency and ethical value of this duty from the perspective of a politics grounded in the equal life-value of human beings. For both metaphysical and ethical reasons I conclude that this duty does not obtain, first because the dead cannot experience redemption, and secondly because it is politically counterproductive: it personalizes a pathological form of political resistance which may easily incite further violence and thus perpetuate human suffering and oppression.