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Statues, History, and Identity: How Bad Public History Statues Wrong

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2022

DANIEL ABRAHAMS Open the ORCID record for DANIEL ABRAHAMS [Opens in a new window]
DANIEL ABRAHAMS*
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW DAbrahams@gmail.com
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Abstract

There has recently been a focus on the question of statue removalism. This concerns what to do with public history statues that honor or otherwise celebrate ethically bad historical figures. The specific wrongs of these statues have been understood in terms of derogatory speech, inapt honors, or supporting bad ideologies. In this paper I understand these bad public history statues as history and identify a distinctive class of public history-specific wrongs. Specifically, public history plays an important identity-shaping role, and bad public history can commit specifically ontic injustice. Understanding bad public history in terms of ontic injustice helps understand not just how to address bad public history statues, but also the value of public history more broadly.

Keywords

monumentsstatueshistoryapplied ethicsphilosophy of artontic injustice
Type
Article
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , June 2023 , pp. 253 - 267
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

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Footnotes

Special thanks are owed to James Humphries, James Rimmer, Alfred Archer, Nathan Wildman, and J. Phillipp Dapprich. This paper was completed under funding from the Society for Applied Philosophy.

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