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The Ethics of Memory The Ethics of Memory by Avishai Margalit Harvard Univ. Press, 2002 224 pp. $14.95, paper Waiting for Snow in Havana Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire Free Press, 2003 400 pp. $14, paper

A soldier was killed by friendly fire and, during a public interview about the incident, the commander of the soldier's small unit could not remember his name. According to newspaper reports, people were incensed. The name of this fallen soldier should have been "scorched in iron letters" on his commander's heart, they thought. But was the commander's failure a moral one or just a case of embarrassing but innocent forgetfulness? Avishai Margalit's book Ethics of Memory, he tells us, was occasioned by this incident. Thus provoked, Margalit, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, set out to investigate the obligation to remember. Do we have a duty to remember people's names, their stories, or major events in their lives? If we do, what kind of duty is that? In recent decades, many books have been written on memory. Most of them simply assume that such a duty exists. Margalit's is one of the very few explicit treatments of this thorny question.

Margalit offers a two-part proposal. It builds on his distinction between ethics and morality. Ethics, he proposes, regulates "thick" relations, that is, "our relation to the near and dear." Morality regulates "thin" relations, "our relations to the strange and remote." According to Margalit, in the "Christian project," all relations are thick (every person is a neighbor); in the "Jewish project," a version of which he advocates, the distinction is kept between neighbor and stranger and therefore between ethics and morality. I'll leave aside here whether in the "Christian project" all relations are "thick" in Margalit's sense or whether the "Christian project" can accommodate various degrees of "thickness" and "thinness," making room for the moral significance of special relations (such as relations to family members, coreligionists, members of the same nation, etc.). When Margalit applies the distinction between ethics and morality to the duty to remember, he concludes that "while there is an ethics of memory, there is very little morality of memory."

What ought we to remember about those to whom we are "thinly" related? Margalit's question is not what might be desirable to remember (say, if you want to consider yourself an educated or considerate person) but what you have a moral obligation to remember. His answer is simple: of the acts of people to whom you are thinly related, you are morally obliged to remember only those "that undermine the very foundation of morality itself." The case in point is Nazi eliminative biologism, as exercised in extermination of Jews and Gypsies on the grounds that they are subhuman. This, Margalit believes, "was a direct onslaught on the very idea of shared humanity," and therefore ought to be remembered by all people.

Why ought we to remember such acts? Margalit offers only a vague appeal to the need to protect morality itself from being undermined. But why does morality need the protection of this kind of memory? What would the memory of inhumanity add to what our moral sense already tells us—namely, that every being born of a human is a human being and ought to be treated as such? Memory could make us wise, teaching us how to protect ourselves and others or to be more vigilant in keeping before us the frequency with which morality's foundations are undermined. But it would be hard to derive a moral obligation to remember from the need for such wisdom or vigilance. Moreover, it is not clear why all onslaughts on the idea of shared humanity ought to be remembered by all people. Is it a moral failure on the part of a 75-year-old man living on the Croatian island Ugljan not to remember that European colonialists have slaughtered indigenous American populations partly because they deemed them subhuman? Similarly, why would a Mongol herdsman be morally obligated to remember the Holocaust? Unfortunately, Margalit explores none of these critical issues.

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