"Cancel culture" and ethics: On the ethical responsibility of a historian
Authors:   National Research Tomsk State University, Syrov Vasiliy N. 
Published: December 2024

The article discusses the place and role of the professional community of historians in developing public attitudes towards the ideas and practices of cancel culture related to historical subjects. Based on the analysis of the article by Belyaeva and Lynchenko, a set of claims that can be made to the discourse used by cancel culture activists is explicated. The role of moral assessments in such discourse is especially noted. I believe that their presence pushes us to expand the context of discussion of the topic, namely, to actualize the long-standing problem of the essence, functions and the very legitimacy of moral еvaluations in relation to the past. I will not talk about public memory, but about the professional community of historians or about the place and role of ethics in historical writing and knowledge. I think that we should be talking about developing a consolidated, if possible, expert assessment, which we could rely on in developing balanced position on this matter. We can note an increase in the degree of reflexivity of the discussion of the topic associated with the analysis of the question itself: what does it mean to be morally involved? In my opinion, a productive discussion of the topic is impossible without discussing the issue of the nature of historical truth as a key normative requirement of professional ethics. In agreement with the position of a number of modern authors, in particular Lorenz, I believe that his solution requires overcoming the long-standing positivist belief in the possibility and legitimacy of drawing a clear boundary both between facts and theories, and between knowledge and values. It seems that overcoming it lies on the path of distinguishing between sources and facts, on the one hand, and awareness of the theoretical load of any fact, on the other. Therefore, I think any historical fact will not be a prerequisite for research, but its result, and will require the explication of argumentative procedures. Moreover, I can put forward the thesis that a language that operates in terms like "facts", "theories" or "interpretations", "descriptive judgments" and "normative judgments", and draws a rigid line of demarcation between them is, at a minimum, little productive in understanding historical production. I believe that we should agree with the position that any historical statement that claims to be factual is implicitly axiologically loaded. Moreover, my thesis is the assertion that the more value judgments it contains, the greater the degree of heuristic it acquires. Therefore, the historian's moral involvement is seen as a necessary condition for increasing the degree of originality of historical production. In the end, I assume that the answer to the question of the content of such moral involvement should be associated with Ankersmit's thesis: one should prefer those values that provide a more original, more complete, and more promising picture of the past in terms of new hypotheses. It is argued that the basis for the totality of such values and the basis for developing a possible consensus of the professional community should be based on the Kantian idea of respect for personal dignity.