Abstract

Transitional justice addresses legacies of social and political wrongdoing by coming to terms in some sense with the past and charting a path forward. In my dissertation, I introduce the complementary notion of ‘transitional ethics.’ Whereas transitional justice asks how we can dispense justice in the aftermath of widespread violence, transitional ethics asks how we can meet wider demands of morality in the aftermath of widespread violence. Although the formulation of the concept of transitional ethics is novel, its deployment is not. In fact, nearly all transitional projects of the past several decades have included an implicit appeal to consequentialist transitional ethics. In my dissertation I make the case instead for a contractualist model of transitional ethics, one that both acknowledges the shared nature of the transitional project and affirms the agency of previously silenced individuals.