Abstract

This issue's lead article, Alison Reiheld's "Rightly or For Ill: The Ethics of Individual Memory," takes up a topic that is manifestly deserving of philosophical analysis, and routinely important in our private and public interactions, and yet as far as I know it has never before received systematic treatment: the ethics of memory. That is, Reiheld asks, when are we morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for remembering, forgetting, or encoding a memory in a specific way, and what are the ethical principles that should govern our practices of remembering and forgetting? As Reiheld points out, this set of questions only makes sense once we understand remembering and forgetting as constructive activities involving...