Judging Historical Figures

[General Mung Beans]

Would it be appropriate to condemn historical figures for doing things that would be immoral for us today but not then? Take slavery for instance. Until well into the 1700s, virtually everyone accepted slavery as part of life. Indeed in some eras, many people sold themselves into slavery to make money.

[Rabid]

Would it be appropriate to condemn historical figures for doing things that would be immoral for us today but not then?

Short answer : no.


Moral, as a Human construct, is not an absolute.

As it is often the case, reality is a complex thing, and you can't say "My moral, here and now, is superior to any others", and then act as the Supreme Judge Of All That Is Good And Bad For All Eternity.

You can only be judged by the standards of your environment (era and culture).

For example, you can't "judge" (by your standards) some Aztec King for the mass murder / sacrifice of its defeated enemies, as it was basically the core of their culture / civilization at the time. But you could however "judge" him by the standards of its culture at the time.


Think of it like this :

Imagine you are, today, say, kissing your girlfriend on a bench in a park. Then, a time traveler from the future that was passing by see you and declare what in immoral wreck you are and that you should be punished. "What the heck ?!", you say, "what I'm doing is perfectly legitimate, there's nothing wrong with it !". "Not from where or when I come, buddy !", he then answer.

Do you see the point ?

[Metahive]

Until well into the 1700s, virtually everyone accepted slavery as part of life.

Considering that even back then people extremely disliked being slaves as the various violent slave uprisings reaching way back into pre-christian times show (Spartacus anyone?), it's irrelevant that it was wide-spread or "accepted". Support for slavery can and will be counted against any purported "great" person of history for this reason. Same with raping, pillaging, murder etc. etc, all once "accepted" practices as well. Nobody was ever "OK" with being the victim of it and therefore its perpetrators can't hide behind the veil of moral-relativism. When it comes to questions of very basic empathy people throughout all ages are liable to be judged by the same standard.

[Simon_Jester]

Metahive's argument is reduced in force when we talk about practices that people in a society routinely did to each other.

If you have a culture where the standard practice between warring communities is to capture people from the other community, put them to work in your fields for five years, and let them go... well, it's slavery, but it's entirely conceivable that today's slave has himself profited from the institution in the past, or may profit from it again in the future.

When slavery (or closely related conditions like serfdom) are being imposed by an elite class on others, and there's no back-and-forth, I'd argue it's a different matter. There, you can definitely condemn the elites for the way they treat the commoners, even if both elites and commoners "accept" the arrangement in the sense of being unable to imagine society working any other way.

The latter is a more common condition in human affairs: usually, you had a privileged class that got to enjoy the rewards of screwing over everyone else they could find.
________

Metahive's argument should also be softened a bit in terms of the degree to which we condemn people for their behavior. Medieval aristocrats were oppressive to their peasants, and should be condemned for this as a class, but individual members of the class (with a few exceptions) didn't do this out of any real personal viciousness. They were taught to do it, raised to do it, surrounded by those who did it; I'm sure they enjoyed the benefits of doing it, but they didn't do it because they were each and every one of them monsters.

So we shouldn't just look at each individual nobleman of the Middle Ages and say "he was shit because he oppressed the peasants. He was. And he was. And..." until we've gone through the entire list. Morality loses its meaning if everyone is judged to be good, or if everyone is judged to be evil.

In the same vein, I don't think we should treat a man who kills five people because he's a member of a primitive hill tribe engaged in a blood feud the same way we treat a serial killer who kills five people purely because it amuses him to do so. The former is, in context, less vicious, less "evil" than the latter.

Context should not be allowed to excuse the behavior of a class- we should rightly condemn the blood feud system as barbaric. But assuming that everyone who gets caught up in the system is just as monstrous as someone who did the same acts without the context of the system... that is unjust.

[fgalkin]

Would it be appropriate to condemn historical figures for doing things that would be immoral for us today but not then?

Short answer : no.


Moral, as a Human construct, is not an absolute.

As it is often the case, reality is a complex thing, and you can't say "My moral, here and now, is superior to any others", and then act as the Supreme Judge Of All That Is Good And Bad For All Eternity.

You can only be judged by the standards of your environment (era and culture).

For example, you can't "judge" (by your standards) some Aztec King for the mass murder / sacrifice of its defeated enemies, as it was basically the core of their culture / civilization at the time. But you could however "judge" him by the standards of its culture at the time.


Think of it like this :

Imagine you are, today, say, kissing your girlfriend on a bench in a park. Then, a time traveler from the future that was passing by see you and declare what in immoral wreck you are and that you should be punished. "What the heck ?!", you say, "what I'm doing is perfectly legitimate, there's nothing wrong with it !". "Not from where or when I come, buddy !", he then answer.

Do you see the point ?

That only works for arbitrary things like that. Every civilization has prohibitions against rape and murder, for example, but some allow exceptions in certain cases like war, capital punishment, or religion. The worth of these exceptions can be considered when taking things into account. The Aztecs' massacre of captives, or the mass burning of cities by Genghiz Khan, or the ancient Israelites can thus be examined from hindsight and the worth of the culture can be derived. We can point out the hypocrisy in recognizing certain rights for one's own people and denying the same rights to outsiders, for example.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin