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.