Our Brothers’ Keeper : moral witness
Abstract
This article considers the practice of witness in the world – witness to the world – in particular the character and temper, nature and purpose, significance and resonance of “moral witness,” a kind of ideal type, as conceived by the philosopher Avishai Margalit. It proposes that the artist plays an important role as a moral witness; and that the work of art itself performs the same function, even after the fact – the phenomenon of “post-witness.” In this context it identifies an ethics of precision or exactitude, and adduces a variety of exemplars, ranging from poetry to photography, including Shot at Dawn (2014), a suite of landscape photographs which are also war photographs and memorial photographs, and acts of moral witness, by Chloe Dewe Mathews.
Citation
Danchev , A 2015 , ' Our Brothers’ Keeper : moral witness ' , Alternatives , vol. 40 , no. 3-4 , pp. 191-200 . https://doi.org/10.1177/0304375415617623
Publication
Alternatives
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0304-3754Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright The Author(s) 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
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