The Importance of Forgetting

Rima Basu (Claremont McKenna College)

Abstract:

Forgetting plays an indispensable role in our lives. Forgetting facilitates forgiveness. Forgetting protects privacy. As evidenced by the right to be forgotten becoming enshrined in European law, forgetting protects our future from the shadows of our past. Sometimes we want aspects of our identity to be forgotten, e.g., when they’re embarrassing or we’re no longer the person we were when we did those things, and there is a distinctive harm that accompanies the permanence of some content about us, content that prompts a duty to forget. This talk explores the important role forgetting plays in facilitating and protecting moral goods such as forgiveness and privacy. Although this duty to forget may seem to be us at odds with other important goals like knowledge, I aim to take some of the sting out of this conflict by demonstrating that not only are we are permitted to forget, but also not every instance of forgetting is either irrational or unfortunate.

Speaker:

Rima Basu is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Her research focuses on questions that arise at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of race. In particular, she argues that when it comes to what we should believe morality is not voiceless. What we owe each other is not just a matter of what we do or what we say, but also what we believe. Over the course of several publications, she has argued for the dual claims that beliefs by themselves can be wrong and that moral considerations rightly affect our judgments about when evidence is enough evidence to justify belief. Her work has been awarded a Mark Sanders Foundation Prize, numerous research grants and mentoring awards, and her work has also been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, she volunteers with the education outreach non-profit Corrupt The Youth to bring philosophy education to underprivileged students at Title I high schools.