The Politics of Transparency and the Moral Work of Truth

Bibliographic Data

ID23637255
AuthorsMargaret Urban Walker (corresponding author)
Year2008
Pages211-234
Publication date2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueMoral Understandings (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195315394.003.0009
OpenAlexW2490646763
ISBN9780195315394
LanguageEN
References cited118

The proliferation of truth commissions and the establishment of a “right to truth” concerning human rights violations embody a politics of transparency that makes moral claims for truth telling about violence and injustice. This chapter argues that having told, being told, and telling truths in these cases has more than the instrumental value of identifying wrongs. Truth telling, through acknowledgment and voice, serves to establish or restore the dignity of victims and to reconfigure a moral community. Dignity is the moral standing of a full participant in practices of mutual accountability. Acknowledgment, as successful apology shows, validates a victims'experience and shifts the reflective equilibrium of common belief to secure stable recognition. Having voice demonstrates one's competence and credibility as a giver of accounts, a constitutive feature of full participation in practices of accountability.

Accountability · Competence (human resources) · Credibility · Dignity · Epistemology · Injustice · Moral agency · Moral disengagement · Perception · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Transparency (behavior) · Truth telling · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Psychology · Social Psychology

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