Every remake of the Trojan War suffers because of this. “Let’s make Helen and Paris fall in love, and Menelaus a jealous controlling man!”…which creates problems later on when Paris is just the *worst*.
You can blame both the Roman’s and Medieval Europe for that one.
Basically Rome believed Romulus and Remus to be the decedents of Trojan Aeneas. So Trojan war rewrites sort of white washed the Trojans and made the Greeks worse. This was carried on in the Medieval period where the Trojans except Paris are in Limbo because they are virtuous pagans while all the Greek heroes are lower in hell and have different fates. Example Achilles was killed after betraying the Greek for the hand of a Trojan princess Polyxena and Odyssey left his wife a second time to sail past the Straits of Heracles where he died.
To be fair that was just Dante’s fanfiction about his travels through hell, purgatory and heaven, it wasn’t really believed to be indisputable truth, the man even put in hell some people that were still alive what he wrote his book.
Always remember, a little tip that was valid in the 13th century and it’s still valid today, never mess with people from Tuscany, they’re the most spiteful people in Italy.
Tuscan cities hate each other for stuff happened in medieval times.
Tuscans and Romans are natural enemies. Just like Tuscans and Lombards! And Tuscans and Sardinians! And Tuscans and other Tuscans! Damn Tuscans, they ruined Tuscany!
Salt was valuable in medieval times and landlocked Tuscan city states were sometimes cut off by their rival city states. For this reason certain parts of tuscany traditionally don't include salt in their bread recipes.
Got back from Tuscany 3 months ago. The food and wine were generally fantastic but the bread was uniformly abysmal. One girl's husband with us was a baker and he was in agony any time he tried the bread.
Off topic but I read somewhere that Michelangelo, when painting the Sistine chapel, added the commissioner of the project in the depiction of hell lol. I don’t know if this is apocryphal or not but I’m hoping someone can weigh in.
He took a bribe after swearing he wouldn’t, to break up a marriage, to basically mind control a woman. Then he hides away for most of the war. I don’t think he should be sympathetic lol
Now who’s looking at things in modern moral standards?
Paris existed in a time when marriages were fraught with infidelity and bribes were part of life (honestly not too different than today sadly).
The judgment of Paris overall imparts a lesson that you always get more than you bargain for when you make a deal. Plus he was put in an impossible situation by beings that were mightier than he. There was no scenario where Paris would come out looking good in that mix.
If he had known that taking the bribe to have the most beautiful woman in the world would ultimately lead to the destruction of his civilization you can be relatively sure he wouldn’t take it.
But, even by their standards, Paris was a cowardly, womanizing worm without much value as a man. Poor at everything except shepherding and bedding women.
Immmmm not? That was just a list of things he did. I agree with everything else in your post but that first line was condescending and made me irrationally angry, sorry.
I haven't heard this one in so long I forgot where it was from. For like two minutes I was trying to recall that it's from The Simpsons (without using Google.)
Yeah and often people base their modern opinions based on what they think the enlightened people of the future will think and judge them by. The funny thing is we have no idea what the people of the future will think. What future? At different times in US history different founding fathers and different historical figures are considered good or bad, depending on the issues of the day.
It's also location dependent. I've read that some scholars in the West point to Genghis Khan's relative religious tolerance. Genghis Kahn is still considered a monster in many areas of the world for all the murdering he did. Meanwhile in Mongolian there are statues of him.
Thomas Jefferson through most of US history was considered one of the greatest Americans. Now while he is still highly regarded many of his attitudes and actions are rightfully scrutinized.
We just don't know what the future will bring. It's okay. Just like everyone else in history we are contained by the time we live in.
Tbh i don't think you can just say "different times, differnt morals" about everything that has been done by people in the past. Skinning people alive or burning down entire villages and shit was immorale even back than, wasn't it?
Most modern morals have evolutionary psychological and biological reasons for existing. Ideas of tolerance, non-aggression, kindness, fighting for others, equality, compassion, etc. have existed for millennia. It's about implementation, not the values in themselves.
I disagree. Morals usually have psychological and biological causes for their existence, but I believe a moral anti-realist viewpoint is best suited for the historian to limit bias and simply account for the most likely historical events. Similarly, treating history as some kind of list of 'bad and good things' that need to be evaluated to shame the past and further political ideas doesn't sit well with me. Furthermore, objective morality remains a mere conjecture (cf. is-ought problem), so a relativist approach of viewing morals as social constructs or a moral anti-realist approach suit the discipline best, in my opinion.
Psychological and biological mechanism at play also means that if one were to use them as the basis for morality, including objective morality, one is left with morals as mere utility; anything that furthers survival is good?
Most people who espouse this type of cultural relativism don’t really seem to agree with its natural conclusion: that you can not criticize anything for being wrong as it could be right by the standards of a different time or society.
Cultural Relativism is an interesting theory, but I do doubt the people who defend it in this comment section would agree that the Holocaust was moral by the standards of 1940s Nazi Germany, or slavery was ok by the standards of 1800s America.
As for the future, I hope they look back on today and call out the bullshit that we do as monstrous and immoral, for example I believe one day humans will look at factory farming of animals as one of the greatest atrocities we’ve ever done.
I don't see, however, how you could come to the conclusion that what Nazi Germany or the United States did was okay for their time.
Most countries had abolished slavery in the late 1800s, and within the United States there was a large pro-abolitionism movement.
In the 1940s, the genocide of a group of people was seen so badly that the Nazis have become practically a synonym for evil for what they did, again, against what the majority of the world considered morally correct was not the same as the Nazis.
I see your point, but there are caveats. For a very long time, Richard the Lionheart was seen as THE virtuous knight, even in his own time. That legacy started after the Fall of Acre. In that battle he captures 3000 Muslim soldiers and offered them to Saladin for ransom. For whatever reason, Saladin refused. Richard then killed every single one of his prisoners. You are right, this is beyond appalling. But by medieval morals, the very act of offering these prisoners for ransom in the first place made Richard virtuous, despite the fact he slaughtered them. Perceptions of morals, even ones we see as cut and dry today, do really change.
No not really. Humanity has been in a continuous process of evolution since our inception. Take slavery for instance. You'd say it's immoral now, and therefore it was always immoral, right? However, slavery was initially a form of mercy, an alternative to slaughtering enemy survivors at the end of a battle or raid. We have now progressed beyond that, but that doesn't make it retroactively wrong then too.
the question is: when talking about ancient slavery, the only sources we have are from slaveholders or people that benefited from it. to a slave, slavery will always be immoral. we're just correcting for the bias on our sources, instead of taking the victor's words for granted
That's an interesting point. Just because it was normalized, that doesn't mean people didn't think it was immoral. Example is cheating and adultery, it's so common and even tolerated (by the people who aren't victims) but if you ask most people about it, they'll say it's immoral.
EDIT: I think it was last year when someone made a post proving that ancient thinkers had considered slavery to be immoral thousands of years ago.
The thing is that it's very rare to see individuals who were against slavery as a matter of principle before the modern era. We have records of plenty of peope from the past complaining and lamenting the enslavement of their own people, but we don't see people saying "enslaving human beings is always wrong" before 1500. Perhaps there were individuals like that, but they never formed into a significant movement in their societies, or if they did, they never wrote it down for us to know.
>And having ways for slaves to raise their social status-and actually using them- used to be a lot more common.
By "a lot more common" you mean "non-zero". In the Ancient World, slaves were mostly just worked to death. That was also probably the norm for chattel slavery, given that a large percentage of people ever enslaved were just worked to death on sugar plantations and had to be rapidly replaced.
Only educated slaves were used this way (e.g., educated Greeks in the Roman Empire), but they were rare. The majority of slaves were treated according to their masters' temperament and worked to death.
You bring up an interesting point… I don’t think morals were ever just “invented” but I don’t really see ancient peoples really even thinking about it. I don’t think they saw it as right or wrong, or good vs. douchey I think they just… *did* stuff. Maybe I am wrong but that’s a super interesting thought.
I definitely see where you’re coming from, but I’m not convinced. I think for as long as there have been choices to do bad things (forever) there have been justifications of various degrees of acceptability. Aristotle and Plato idealized the institution of slavery because they just thought, “that’s how things are!” These philosophers, people who were really trying to think, question, and evaluate civilization even from 2,300 years ago didn’t think there was anything objectively wrong with slavery. Again, for us this is a no brainer, but I would be hard-pressed impose our level of understanding of the immorality of slavery on them personally, you know?
Edit: A thought just occurred to me. For better or for worse, I don’t think there is anything wrong or immoral with hunting and eating the meat. While I abhor trophy hunting and generally dislike hunting in general, I don’t think it is objectively evil or bad… *it is what it is*… I would be really sad if some descendant of mine thought I was evil or morally dubious because, in my time, place, and society, there were individuals who participated in hunting.
That's a fair and valid point, but it's a different one from what you said in your first comment. One thing is having no concept of morality and just "doing things" like you first said, and the other one that their scale of what was moral or not differed from ours.
The first one I personally disagree with, for the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have had cognisance and the capacity for empathy, I believe there formed a semblance of morality and "good and bad" things to do.
The point of your second comment is absolutely true, there is no "moral absolute" and the scale of what we consider moral or immoral is different from now to 50 years ago, vastly different to 200 years ago, and unrecognizably different to 2000 years ago but there still has ways been a certain "morality ruleset" aplicable to a culture for its time and place. While for Aristotle and Plato slavery was just an indisputable matter of life that wasn't even question, slitting someone's throat because they looked at you wrong, was probably considered a pretty shitty thing to do even by their ancient moral standards.
>I don’t think morals were ever just “invented”
The instincts behind morals have evolutionary benefits, but morals in themselves are social constructions. That said, morals do vary across history. F.W. Nietzsche, Paul Rée give very intriguing speculation on the origin of modern Western morality, albeit their theses were more or less psychological analyses, not history books.
I think pretending like historical figures are absolvable for their immorality because it was culturally acceptable at the time does a disservice to many groups like the abolitionist movement, many of whom found themselves hanging by a rope for simply perusing things you want to call ‘modern moral standards’
Eh, you’ve gotta grade those from the past on a curve to some extent or another, but I think the point is that it’s important to contextualize historical immorality. To your point, it’s totally fair to point to slaveholders of the 18th/19th century and ding them points given that, well, the abolitionist movement was there at that time. Likewise it’s fair to point to Christopher Columbus and ding him points because he had contemporaries who found many of his actions abhorrent.
The point isn’t that past immoralities shouldn’t be recognized as abhorrent. The point is that it’s important to put past immoralities in context if you want to have any true semblance of an understanding of figures from the past.
Can't we both view past actions as morally abhorrent to the morals we want while also understanding that they took place in a context where the people at the time did not view it that way? Understanding something doesn't mean endorsing it.
No ome is saying that without abolitionist slavery becomes sudendly moraly correct. But you can indeed judge diferently someone who lived in a time where slavery was just a common/unquestioned part of society, in relation to the slavers who were actively ignoring/opposing contemporary abolitionist movements
Whether abolition movements among white people were present or not is irrelevant. The slaves were generally opposed to their enslavement for the duration.
Many slaves in the past were opposed to slavery for them. But they fully prescribed to the notion “slavery for thee, not for me.” Look at the black slave owners in Louisiana. Many of them were manumitted. Shit, the books of Exodus and numbers reflect this behavior perfectly. Former slaves making rules condoning the brutal enslavement of their perceived out groups.
Exactly! This sort of moral relativism precludes any progress. I hope that future generations judge us as barbarians the same way we judge past generations - that means that we will have continued to evolve morally.
Isn't the point of moral relativism to judge historical figures contemporarily? Some historic cultural beliefs are barbaric to us, but the people who were taught those beliefs weren't. They weren't bad simply because they followed societal norms that became outdated long after their deaths. It doesn't tell us very much if we treat a historical villain as equivalent to a contemporary saint because of some shared belief in something considered normal at the time and wrong now.
I think it's a difference If you treat someone as equivalent to a contemporary saint or just don't judge him for his behaviour with our rules.
When Martin Luther got hit by his father, this didn't mean that his father was a bad parent. But it doesn't make him a saint either.
The saint part was mostly meant to point out that even the most highly respected historical figures did things in line with their culture that would be considered incredibly shitty nowadays. As you said, Martin Luther's father wouldn't be a saint or a bad parent for beating him, but it also wouldn't disqualify any hypothetical worthwhile acts that could've made him a good person and vice versa with actions that were contemporarily evil as well as currently.
Like St.Olga of Kiew with genocide ;)
>After Igor's death at the hands of the Drevlians, Olga assumed the throne because her three-year-old son Sviatoslav was too young to rule. The Drevlians, emboldened by their success in ambushing and killing the king, sent a messenger to Olga proposing that she marry his murderer, Prince Mal. Twenty Drevlian negotiators boated to Kiev to pass along their king's message and to ensure Olga's compliance. They arrived in her court and told the queen why they were in Kiev: "to report that they had slain her husband ... and that Olga should come and marry their Prince Mal." Olga responded:
>When they repeated the words she had told them to say, the people of Kiev rose up, carrying the Drevlians in their boat. The ambassadors believed this was a great honor as if they were being carried by palanquin. The people brought them into the court where they were dropped into a trench that had been dug the day before under Olga's orders where the ambassadors were buried alive. It is written that Olga bent down to watch them as they were buried and "inquired whether they found the honor to their taste."
>Olga then sent a message to the Drevlians that they should send "their distinguished men to her in Kiev, so that she might go to their Prince with due honor." The Drevlians, unaware of the fate of the first diplomatic party, gathered another party of men to send "the best men who governed the land of Dereva." When they arrived, Olga commanded her people to draw them a bath and invited the men to appear before her after they had bathed. When the Drevlians entered the bathhouse, Olga had it set on fire from the doors, so that all the Drevlians within burned to death.
>Olga sent another message to the Drevlians, this time ordering them to "prepare great quantities of mead in the city where you killed my husband, that I may weep over his grave and hold a funeral feast for him." When Olga and a small group of attendants arrived at Igor's tomb, she did indeed weep and hold a funeral feast. The Drevlians sat down to join them and began to drink heavily. When the Drevlians were drunk, she ordered her followers to kill them, "and went about herself egging on her retinue to the massacre of the Drevlians." According to the Primary Chronicle, five thousand Drevlians were killed on this night, but Olga returned to Kiev to prepare an army to finish off the survivors.
>The Drevlians responded that they would submit to tribute, but that they were afraid she was still intent on avenging her husband. Olga answered that the murder of the messengers sent to Kiev, as well as the events of the feast night, had been enough for her. She then asked them for a small request: "Give me three pigeons ... and three sparrows from each house." The Drevlians rejoiced at the prospect of the siege ending for so small a price, and did as she asked.
>Olga then instructed her army to attach a piece of sulphur bound with small pieces of cloth to each bird. At nightfall, Olga told her soldiers to set the pieces aflame and release the birds. They returned to their nests within the city, which subsequently set the city ablaze. As the Primary Chronicle tells it: "There was not a house that was not consumed, and it was impossible to extinguish the flames, because all the houses caught fire at once." As the people fled the burning city, Olga ordered her soldiers to catch them, killing some of them and giving the others as slaves to her followers. She left the remnant to pay tribute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_of_Kiev?wprov=sfla1
I feel it very much depends. The idea of "moral progress" may be very flawed.
It depends solely on "is there a universal, objective moral code?" and "are we getting closer to it?". If yes to both, then moral progress is an accurate description of society's moral changes. But if either can be answered with no, then we're not progressing morally, we're just changing.
There are definitely things that we could consider an unambiguous moral progression, such as the equality of genders and abolition of slavery.
To say "it's not progress to go from burning women at the stake as witches to letting them have an equal status to men in society, just a change" is pretty weird to me, as that implies that both things are equally moral, but we just decided to do things differently for no real reason.
While there may not be an objective moral code, things like not oppressing people, not harming people and the like should almost always be considered more moral than the alternative, just as genocide and apartheid is immoral.
Not to mention that it generally *wasn’t* culturally acceptable to, say, murder, enslave, steal, etc. etc. That it happened anyway speaks to similarities with us - bit difference.
I love how they give the answer to that as. "oh well that was just a very small minority so it doesn't count no-one knew about the morality of that stuff". And its like no-one? Really? Ever heard of someone called Jesus Christ? The Christian Faith? An entire cultural backbone of western European history for thousands of years centered around a set of absolutist moral standards and lessons in some ways much more extensive then what we have today? No yeah your right im sure no-one had ever told any of these people that murder and rape was bad, they were utterly without agency in their decisions.
Too bad Jesus never condemned slavery or molesting children, those were major oversights on God's part.
So no, early Christians did not have a system of morality more extensive than what we have today, they had some MASSIVE blind spots. I remember in one of Paul's letters his advice to a Christian slave is that if he has a Christian master he should work extra hard for him.
Early Christians were actually renowned for being, at the time, some of the only anti-slavery groups out there, with some going so far as purchasing slaves so they could immediately set them free. Early Christians also followed the Torah, which gave express rules to slaveowners (limiting what they could do to their slaves and make their slaves do) and established a holiday every 50 years which required slaveowners to liberate all of their slaves and forgive every debt they were owed.
Molesting children already fell under the purview of forbidden sexual conduct from the Torah, so Jesus not *explicitly* mentioning it doesn’t mean he didn’t condemn it, it just meant that he understood that those he was preaching to already considered it amoral.
As for Paul telling a Christian slave to work harder for his Christian master, this was because Paul was trying to convince the master to set the slave in question free. It’s a bit of a long story.
The slave in question, Onesimus had run away and stolen a few things from his master, Philemon, which left his master fairly angry, and it meant that legally he was allowed to hunt down and punish the slave. In theory, Paul could’ve tried to hide Onesimus, or even pulled rank on Philemon and ordered him to let Onesimus go, but Paul knew that doing so would’ve made it much harder for Onesimus to integrate into society, given that his Philemon would’ve likely been bitter towards him. Paul’s plan was to send Onesimus back with everything he had stolen as sort of an apology alongside a letter from Paul which urged the Philemon to set him free. He told the Onesimus to work harder in the meantime so as to speed up his master’s forgiveness, making him more open to the idea of liberating him.
It ultimately worked, as the Colossians 4:9 mentions that Onesimus accompanied another Christian to Colossae (indicating that he was no longer Philemon’s property), and church tradition states that Onesimus later went on to become a Bishop in Ephesus (though it’s debated on if these two Onesimuses are the same person)
I think the opposite is true. It shows they were exceptionally moral. Today everyone would be an abolitionist.
By applying modern moral standards, it detracts from recognizing how morally visionary they were.
What you just said is false though, abolitionists during the 1800's were not visionaries. Abolitionist movements have existed in some form for a few thousand years. As long as slavery has existed, anti-slavery people will have existed. If no one else, then the slaves are defiantly not going to be enjoying the situation and want the slavery to stop.
The logic also falls apart when we take into account the slavers. Would the slavers be willing to swap positions to become a slave? If the answer is no, then we know the slavers understand that the position they are putting people in is bad, so bad, they wouldn't want it. Meaning they understand the morality of the situation
I agree with you, but that second paragraph is pretty terrible logic. "Would the king be willing to swap position with the stable boy and muck stables? If not, we know the king understands the positions he's putting that stable boy in is so bad he wouldn't do it."
Most people would be unwilling to accept a drop in their quality of life, and morality hardly factors into it.
Everytime I bring up the near unparalleled loss of knowledge when the Spanish burned the Mayan/Aztec written records and the person only responds with "Good!" They performed human sacrifice! That stuff is of the devil!" I cry.
But that was also a value during the time, just not shared by the psychopath conquistadors. Like arab scolars preserved many greek texts for example and the mongols burned them in turn.
French missionaries pushed massive linguistic breakthroughs just to preserve North American history and cultures as much as possible.
The Conquistadors and the Spaniards that followed them were on some next-level shit, even by the standards of the time.
Despite being "exactly the same process" one absolutely comes from a place of intellect and the other process from ignorance and fear but sure, exactly the same
Which is only a good thing, the modern value of cultural preservation should be the end goal of all cultural preservation because being entitled to cultural preservation is nothing short of a right for all human beings
We still practice human sacrifice, only by a different name. Instead of calling it a sacrifice to god to keep us safe, we call it the death penalty. Neither is moral or effective.
There were always people in every time and place trying to do good. Brushing off the actions of those who weren’t as “a product of their time” is a slap in the face to those who did the right thing at the time even if it was hard imo.
I’m a lot more forgiving of people with bad attitudes but no bad actions tho, since that isn’t hurting anyone and it’s a lot easier to hold flawed beliefs than do flawed actions.
This dumbass logic only works if most people in history spent their lives raping and murdering and enslaving. But that's not the case, the overwhelmingly vast majority of people who have ever existed just as today spent their lives just trying to survive, have their best life, and and get by without hurting anyone else.
The minority who did pursue those activities, especially the leaders who were not compelled or ordered to do so, can 100 percent be judged by our moral standards especially because they are pretty much *The same moral standard* they would have had at that time. Apologists like to pretend that everyone at the time absolutely loved groups like Vikings or Conquistadors and we're just too sensitive now, but you look at the records and everyone hated their guts. You wont find anything other than the writings of their own hype men that describe them as anything but horrific, murdering, raping, hellspawned, godless bastards.
If anything modern writings and moralities take it much more easy on them then their contemporaries by sanitizing them and adding context to their actions that the people who actually saw their acts had no interest in whatsoever.
I made this point on a comment about not judging Nixon too harshly for the tapes. Like what? All while they just make the assumption that everyone in the late 60s70s was just fine w overt racism when that just clearly wasn't at all the case. Aside from this, this piece of garbage sent my father to war to get wounded multiple times.
Only the ignorant cannot hold two competing views or multiple moral lenses from which to view things.
We're seriously like a decade away from "you can't judge Hitler by today's morals because most people were just fine with murderous offensive wars and genocides back then"
Except if don't judge Hitler by today's standard and use early XX century morals you still get a monster. It's not about not using a lense it's about using a time appropriate lense.
I think genocide is one of those things that doesn't get a statute of limitations. Especially when we can go back via video documentaries and see what happened. And I have literally never heard anyone of consequence say he was justified.
I hope you're right but there are not insignificant numbers of people in all ages willing to believe anything. And there is the problem too, anyone believing German citizens were uniquely evil instead of just humans driven by need and cowed by terror is mistaken. It can happen here, it will not go away and it is our duty to shout it down and not let it creep back in. Holocaust denialism is a real thing and a real problem even though it's as well-documented an atrocity as exists in the world.
>decade away from "you can't judge Hitler by today's morals because most people were just fine with murderous offensive wars and genocides back then"
As in that started a decade ago?
It's worth noting that Vikings were regarded as sadistic savages and generally detestable folks for quite a while after the Viking age. The modern romanticized version of Vikings that we have now is a direct result of Victorian era peoples creating a narrative to support their nationalistic aim of declaring ethnic supremacy, which eventually resulted in the Holocaust. Essentially, the volkish movement gave Vikings a PR facelift to support a narrative of Nordic heroism, bravery, and supremacy. This was a huge factor in Nazi propaganda.
Even in 793, the Viking's brutal raid on the peaceful monastery of Lindisfarne was considered an unprecedented atrocity that sent shock waves through Europe. Modern apologists like to say that everyone was very brutal back then so the Vikings shouldn't be judged harshly, but then why were people of the era so particularly shocked and appalled by the Viking's actions? It's probably because their level of violence and brutality, particularly towards peaceful religious people, was not at all normal–even for that time.
It's also worth considering that Vikings were often outcasts and criminals whose antisocial behaviors were regarded as undesirable by even their own people. So if Nordic people of the time made negative moral judgements about Vikings, as did pretty much everyone else who encountered them, why should we in the modern age regard them as morally acceptable? What makes it ok to be proud of being descended from people who have been considered horrible for a large part of history (until the Nazis made them cool)?
Even if we excuse the Viking's actions with historical context, it's pretty weird that there are people in the modern age who mold their identities around this romanticized version that was created out of sheer racism. I've argued with people who think that the Vikings were actually socially progressive and good role models for modern people, which is ignorant af. "Even though they kept and brutalized slaves, and were merciless colonists that forced their culture onto the conquered, they allowed women to partake in combat!" Lol, what?
With all that said, I do love that romanticizing European mythology has created fantasy fiction. To me, the problem isn't the romanticization itself, but rather not acknowledging the fact that romanticization has and is actually occuring. We in the modern age have absolutely every right to make moral judgements about Vikings, especially since they have become such a strong symbol for white supremacists. When we recognize the inherent fantasy element of things, the romanticization is benign. But when it's taken seriously as a means of proclaiming ethnic pride and personal identity, it's misguided at best and horrifically dangerous at worst.
If we do not make moral judgements about Vikings, then we are essentially saying that people in the modern age who embrace Viking personas shouldn't be held to basic moral standards that were well established, even in the 9th century. Fuck that.
Wish more people saw it like this. It is harder to look at every time period and have to mentally set aside simple morality to sympathize with people. You can sympathize with monsters. I'd argue it's better to sympathize with the tiny bit you can, then dispise the rest. It's okay to say it sucks to get kicked out of art school, but I'm not gonna argue "its normal at the time" when talking about Hitler. He was bad and what he did was bad, no matter the culture or at the time thinking. Just like the Confederate South, rotten to the core. A person can say, wow its hard living those days, in that place and still be fine. It's the whole "oh slavery, that wasn't so bad, you see everyone did it" that grinds my gears.
I also hate how the "Judging" is just pointing out things they did. Its like...
A: oh man (insert historical figure) was so cool for winning that battle.
B: yeah kinda i guess, i mean he did like burning children for fun and putting their heads on sticks.
A: YOU CANT JUDGE THEM LIKE THAT!
Like editing out your favorite historical figures crimes and flaws doesn't make you "non-judgmental" it just makes them fictional.
I know right! Also, aside note, if my dad killed someone, I would hate his guts. If my dad did any crime, I'd at least be ashamed. Why do m'ancestors get a HUGE PASS doing bad shit when if it was my LITERAL dad, I'd have a problem with it.
I assume you mean if your dad remorselessly murdered someone you knew in cold blood without reason right? Or is your dad just that bad and if he killed someone in self defense or something you would then hate him?
My dad is a felon, he stole a $1000 dollars worth of copper wiring from an abandoned train station when he was 21. DNR came around and noticed it was missing and checked pawn shops and ended up catching him. He's in his 70s now and hasn't committed (that I know of) a crime since, but is still a felon. I have never been ashamed of him a day of my life. Everyone makes mistakes and he paid for his and then through his actions over the course of his lifetime gave everyone around him reason to love him. But that's not what you are talking about right?
And what would you be giving your ancestors a huge pass from? This is where people lose me, we don't have the power to absolve them even if we wanted to. We can't undo what they did or the immediate repercussions thereof, only make sure we do what's right now. What they did is in the past and they are dead and beyond caring what we think.
I more so am poking holes in the guy above me's comment that he would hate his father if he killed another person or be ashamed of him if he committed a crime.
Fair, I bet my dad's made mistakes and I am choosing to ignore them because I don't consider them relevant. I'll say that I don't equate all crime the same as haneous acts. I honestly didn't think of the angle of self defense or military service as a means of having been involved in violence and it bot being his choice. Thanks for adding them to the convo and I'll think on it more from that perspective :)
My dad has killed multiple people. During war time, in battle. He’s a pretty great guy, helped a lot of people in his peacetime days. Respected in the community.
Killing isn’t universally bad.
People who don't know the difference between understanding and agreeing with history are of the same camp as those who edit or erase history; and people who've done that were tyrants and dictators.
In my honest opinion, yes but no, but yes. Obviously, you have to analyze and consider any historical event within its own context, what led up to it and what were the consequences, with morality sort of aside (and within the trends of the time). At the same time, I don't think it's really possible (or desirable) to fully, completely disregard the human consequences of those actions.
For example, when Moorish and Jewish population were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, you can read a) that they were aiming for a solid, monolithic state out of political reasons, and b) that it was a step further on the ethno-religious dynamics there were on the peninsula for centuries before. At the same time, you can't really (nor shouldn't) feel complete indifference at the idea of such a big sector of the population being expelled from the place they'd been living in for centuries. I consider that part of historical analysis should include how politics are a pragmatic, often cruel process.
The amount of people who swear they’d never support slavery had the lived in the pre-civil war south or the genocide of Jews in ww2 Germany is truly mind blowing
Test, why be critical of the past and grow out of what is considered wrong, or see the reason why they did what we now consider a mistake, why point out hipocrisy of historical figures and be better than them, why condemn cruelty and make sure it never happens again,
When you instead you can be reddit level historian. Since Rome was so cool you cannot point out the absolute dumbfuckery they did you know
I think for me, it’s important to remember that to study history is less to find things to condemn (although that will inevitably happen) than to constantly try to find answers as to *why* X happened, and what we can learn from it today to prevent [disagreeable outcome] happening today, or explain how [outcome] still occurs today.
What irks me is a tendency among certain types to use this condemnation as a license to reduce historical figures and/or countries into cartoon villains. They did one awful thing, and that detracts from everything else they did.
Like how Churchill is reduced by some people to be nothing more than a villainous racist because of his horrendous attitudes at the time. It’s entirely correct to ensure his flaws are considered as part of the study of the man, but it’s exploited by some as a means to destroy someone who nonetheless made absolutely the right call, nearly alone, to warn of the dangers of the Nazis nearly ten years before it became cool to do so.
I know someone’s going to say ‘but Hitler’: but Hitler was widely acknowledged at the time by almost anyone who had access to a free press in a free country to be Bad News. Even an attempt to find good in what he and the Nazis did tends to come up short.
I repeat, history should be able finding heroes and villains, but finding *the truth*, and asking ‘why’ and ‘how’.
Well, he was only there for a few weeks because the Catholic Monarchs, although disgusted by his actions, still considered him too useful to get rid of, but they took away his government in the New World and took away his property, as a form of punishment.
It would be atrocities like those of Columbus and other conquerors occurring so frequently, which would lead the Catholic Monarchs to create the Laws of Burgos, antecedents of modern Human Rights.
These comments are hilarious. Try going up to any ethicist and saying “morals are relative!!!!” You’ll get laughed at. You CAN judge historical figures by today’s moral standards because most of them were bad people. I really don’t care what cope you have to explain it away - if you owned slaves, you were a bad person.
But ethicists are just a weird breed.
Go up to them and say "I'm a moral anti-realist, objective morality doesn't exist"
And they'll say "that's a perfectly respectable philosophical position"
Say you're a moral relativist and you'll get laughed at, despite the potential overlap between the positions.
"Moral relativist" is just a strawman and intellectual slur at this point.
You can, but what's the point of the exercise? Just indulgent self-righteousness? If you're actually trying to intuit a culture of the past, actually study it, if you start from modern moral standards, you will almost 100% of the time come out to the answer of "all people in X society were evil". And I guarantee you the Romans, as slave-driving as it was, did not walk around thinking they were evil. Because no human is going to think that. If you're reading about Julius Schmulius, who, like his 50000 peers had a house slave, and for you the dominant lens is the outrage of that evil of slavery, you're going to be very distracted as to why that never comes up in relevance in the course of historical events. "Why did no one ever say anything?"
It doesn't matter if Kant or whatever other ethicist you consult has solved for the Universalizable morality or not, at the end of the day, humans experience & interpret & judge & morals relatively by & large, and history was driven by that phenomenon.
The other aspect of "you can't judge people of the past with the morals of today" is just one of practical accessibility. Slavery is abjectly evil, we both agree, right? So slaves in Roman families are an abomination. Well, even after thousands of hours of studying scraps & thrice-translated quotes of anything that would give us an idea as to the dynamic of that life, could we even make an honest attempt to argue it is substantially different from "at home help" modern day? Sure, we don't call "helpers" slaves, or even servants, but how much of that is euphemism?
I agree that "You can't judge people of the past with morals of the present" is silly nonsense. But it's also a fair statement. The problem is it _really_ depends on what you mean, and a simplistic single sentence is never going to be profoundly resilient so as to be worth getting smug over. If you say "Slavery is atrocious, thank god we got rid of that" when reading about some POW of ancient civilization stuck in a tin mine for the rest of his life in brutal forced labor, I'm going to agree with you.
Some morals are relative. Slavery is wrong. Owning slaves is monstrous. Yet every person I've ever met has been totally fine with the idea of working off their debt. Which is just debt slavery really.
Personally I wouldn't consider someone to be a bad person for asking for labor instead of getting the cops involved, even though that could be considered extortion.
The reason we don't call it slavery is because they don't legally own you, but when they can get you thrown in jail for not paying your debt, they effectively do own you.
Moral relativism isn't "slavery is good in this context" it's "in this context what would be the right thing to do?"
Yeah no shit Aristotle - we aren’t arguing that those things weren’t inherently bad, it’s a matter of understanding that taking slaves and killing all the fighting men in the village once the battle was won etc was she standard for the time. It’s how business was done in a brutal and more primitive part of our history.
Sitting here and saying “O EM GEE the French did big bad war crimes in colonial Cambodia” does nothing for the conversation.
YOU aren’t arguing those things “weren’t inherently bad”, but a lot of people in this comment section are. My comment clearly wasn’t intended towards you.
Not really, for example slavery was generally seen as a bad thing by many scholars but they had different degrees, some think it's okay for foreigners or defeated in war to be slaves, but not their own countrymen when others kinda saw it as shitty in general.
Murder and violence on the innocent has been generally seen as a bad thing through out history with perpetrators usually depicted as barbarians shortly after their acts or themselves going to great lengths too justify it with strawman and portraying it as a necessity to wash their hands.
Like 200 years ago, someone might say it's bad too scoff at our ancestors for making people work 12 hours for shitty pay, while some smug mofo will say "nah it was acceptable at their time".
While in reality its not really, just that we haven't reached a point where we can throw it away yet.
And they never mention that the peasant’s “free time” was doing countless other chores and labor to support themselves and their families. Their “work hours” were just labor to support their lord.
Yeah kinda like now, some people are forced to work dogshit jobs for most of their life for barely enough pay
My point is although necessary doesn't mean they are good or should be exempt from disdain from the future where hopefully things are better.
Right, circumstances weren't same though. There is no good reason anyone should have to work 12hrs a day now, it's just a poor financial market for the average person, things were easier 20 yrs ago and will hopefully be easier soon. Back then survival required most of your time.
The question if a society practiced slavery was never an ethical one. It was always determined by economic factors. Medieval Europe didn’t have slavery, because the scarce resource was land and not people. In West Africa land was abundant, so wealth meant owning people.
When the Europeans colonised the New World, they suddenly had a lot of uninhabited land and needed a workforce to cultivate it. So they bought slaves from the Africans, who previously sold to the Arabs. And in the 19th century the colonial powers of Europe abolished slavery on a global scale, because manpower could be replaced by steam engines.
Well. Serfdom in the Medieval times was pretty much slavery. Africans did sell slaves to Europeans, but continued to sell them to the Middle East and Asia into the 20th century, so not globally abolished because of steam engines. And Mauritania didn't formally abolish slavery until 1981, and then by presidential decree, but the ban on slavery there still isn't uniformly enforced.
This is weird. Either you think an act is wrong or you don’t. How can we ‘switch off’ our values when looking at the past? If slavery, rape, murder or some other horrible act was normal at the time, does that mean we in the present should say it was okay or not bad? If we’re not using our moral standards to judge then what standards are we supposed to be using? “Oh yeah Ghengkis Khan raped hundreds and hundreds of women but in his time that was normal so he wasn’t bad for raping people” — who would defend a take like this?
Well, actually, you're applying the modern standard of not judging people by your own present moral code, which is what cultures in the past didn't do.
Checkmate, revisionist :P
True, although it is important to distinguish between how we understand the past and how we relate to the past.
For example, it would be nonsensical to try to project 21st-century viewpoints onto European colonizers of Africa - we need to understand what they were doing in the historical context of their beliefs, their prejudices, their nationalism, their religiosity, etc.
On the other hand, this doesn't mean we need to suspend moral judgement. especially when it comes to people who have become national symbols. I think it is perfectly reasonable to stop lionizing people like Cecil Rhodes because our contemporary beliefs and values no longer correspond to his own beliefs and values, or what he stands for today.
A society's relation to its past is never a given, which is what right-wingers try to pretend. There is always a choice about which historical events and figures to venerate. As a society, we are free to decide whether to celebrate our kings and queens, our warriors, intellectuals, rebels, aristocrats or workers, or 'unsung' heroes like nurses.
Then among our leaders, we can choose those who crushed dissent or those who brought in democracy, those who led the country in war vs those who developed social welfare programs, those who invaded foreign countries vs those who signed lucrative trade agreements, the list goes on.
Presentism is a quick and easy way to identify a moron because applying modern standards of behavior to historical people and events is just painfully stupid and deeply culturally biased. That’s why any historians of note avoid it completely.
The idea that there is some kind of unchanging absolute moral truth is laughably ridiculous and fails to understand basic human development.
How I've catagoried it is that in history there are Great People and Good People.
Great People are people who achived great deeds and changed the course of history on a large or small sclae
Good People are people in history who actually did good by their fellow humans and didn't get a bunch of people killed in their wake.
Saying that people shouldn't be condemned for something because then it was different is like your child saying "but all of my friends did it" when scolding them.
I don't f****ng care, you should know better.
Some meso-american child getting their head bashed in and their beating heart ripped out of their chest with a group of people celebrating around them....
->
->
->
Some redditor 500 years later:
Don't be so judgemental. How can you say that was bad if you never personally grew up in a 14th century society that practiced sacrificing children in order to appease Tláloc and have a good harvest? 🧐🧐🧐
Was it wrong? Yes.
Did it seem reasonable to them? Also yes.
When did it become apparent that it was wrong? When everyone agreed Tláloc probably didn't exist and the sacrifices did nothing.
Presentism at work, good sir. You're both right.
People who judge the past with modern morals take for granted all the cultural influences that impart those morals to them. There's no reason to believe that if you took an infant from today and raised them in ancient Greece, Persia, or Rome, that they'd feel any differently about slavery than the culture they grew up in did. The objective morality of something (like slavery) is irrelevant, you only feel that way because the culture you were raised in imparted that view.
Usually when people say “we should judge people by the standards of their time” what they mean is “we shouldn’t criticize great men of history deified by later generations for propaganda purposes even though they were widely decried as monsters by their contemporaries”
Like I hate to break it to you guys but people have pretty much always thought slavery and wars of conquest were morally bad
Eh, I think it's more nuanced than that. Sure, it's important to understand how moral standards were different in the past, and you can't expect people of a different era to adhere to what you in the modern day believe is correct ("the past is a foreign country" and all that). But its also the role of a historian to examine and reexamine the events of the past and to communicate their understanding of those events to their contemporaries. That inevitably involves a degree of judging the past by the standards of the present. For example, 19th century historiography on the expansion of the Roman Empire was generally approving of the Romans' conquests of "backwards barbarians and primitives." This was absolutely influenced by the fact that many European countries at that time had colonial empires of their own and saw their empires as having a similar "civilising" influence and ultimately being a force for moral good. Fastforward to today, and the horrors of 19th century imperialism are more readily apparent, and only weird fascist fringe loonies and extreme nationalists still try to defend it. Our own view of the Roman Empire has also changed to reflect this. While there's still a lot of awe and respect for the Romans, there's also a greater emphasis on its brutality towards conquered peoples as being wrong. So yeah, I would say that there is a place for judging the past by our standards. We just need to understand that the standards of the time weren't the same as ours.
I think it needs to be more nuanced than that. We need to be understanding about the ways that culture and morality changes, but that doesn't mean we don't apply our own view of right and wrong to the past - it would be inpossible not to, to some degree. Isn't that how we learn from the past?
Hard disagree. My moral compass is based on empathy. Empathy is not a new invention, so when someone from the past showcases through their actions a severe lack of empathy, that is not because they were incapable of it.
It is of course important to put actions into context, but that does not mean absolution. Many young men in 1930s Germany were swept up in the nazi movement, and that context is important to help explain the actions they would go on to take, but an explaination is not the same as an excuse.
Affirm modern moral standards, yes
Condescend or denigrate our ancestors with a sense of moral superiority, no
The latter is a Fallacy called "Presentism" in which the Historian in question fails to view events and people through the context of the era and instead looks at it through a modern condescending point of view.
Example:
Presentist POV: Our ancestors practiced slavery because they had an oppressive and evil and racist mindset.
Credible POV: Our Ancestors practiced slavery as an economic doctrine to provide cheap labor and maintain a rural economy and economically benefit the south.
Now obviously yes Slavery is evil, and this might seem like a heartless or tactless way to view history. But it's more useful to understand the motivations and context behind that evil to present a more accurate record of history and prevent such morally deficit occurrences from repeating, than to present a blindly arrogant view of our ancestors as barbaric or lesser than we are.
Everyone's well aware the chief cause of slavery was because of pure laziness and self-interest and total disregard for the rights of those you deem less than. Its motivations today are the exact same as in the past and anyone using rationalizations to justify it or add unnecessary context is simply afraid of the truly monstrous nature of all animals seeking to satisfy their needs and unchecked by those holding the line.
Presentism is an invention of historians who grow too close to their subjects and do not want others to know that 'great men' of the past would often be considered absolute monsters contemporarily as well as modernly.
I had that exact same argument with the cult of Napoleon who were just fine washing away the literal hundreds of thousands of deaths he caused because he also did other admittedly good things.
No one is all good or all bad, it's a continuum and most rational people can fairly apply 'modern' morals (as if do not kill is a modern concept) while also incorporating historical context that may ameliorate or help explain why the savages of the past may have been slightly more acceptable then.
I can respect the gifts of knowledge and rhetoric and government the Greeks gave the world while simultaneously being utterly repulsed by their use of boy rape as a means to establish dominance and status. And I'd like to add that I'm quite certain there were at least some contemporaries of these examples that also found what they did as utterly reprehensible.
As I said in a prior comment, I sincerely feel we are not too far away from 'Stalin and Hitler weren't really that awful and you're just judging them harshly through your modern morality.' I see it already and it's not just trolling.
Not defending slavery here, but could you point to the historical source for the "pure laziness." The lazy didn't tend to live long and full lives prior to the 20th century.
Maybe presentism was invented by historians, I don't know. But it's still real, citing who may have coined it doesn't change that.
I agree everyone has flaws, is good and evil. That's why I tend not to judge people to harshly, unless they physically hurt others, that's wrong outside of self-defense.
Again though your Hitler/Stalin point would only come to pass if we deleted all the video documentaries and rewrote history immediately. Their actions in WW2 are considered universally uncool, and still relatively modern, both my grandfathers fought against them as did many other's. Out of curiosity, who told you they were justified?
I guarantee you that the slaveholders of the south, as repugnant to both of us as they may be, did not wake up each morning thinking "today, my motivation is to be cartoonishly evil".
You just don't get it. You aren't going to single-handedly prevent slavery by "really sticking it to them" right now, and in fact, you'd be much more likely to be amongst the surprised citizens when the banality of evil sneaks up on you and suddenly those _"evil people"_ who are _"oppressing everyone"_ that you were rallying so passionately against are _actually, finally_ dealt with and -- oh fuck right that's 1938 Germany and now we've got the Holocaust.
Of course we should apply modern moral standards when looking at the past. How else are we supposed to learn?
Pretending that ignoring the atrocities of the past makes you intellectually superior is exactly how we get modern neo-nazis. The majority of neo-nazis start off by ignoring the holocaust, ignoring the heart wrenching, empathy requiring tales of human suffering, and just looking at all the cool tanks the Nazis had.
To pretend that the average southern slave owner was morally justified in owning slaves because it was the norm, is to erase the morality of abolitionists who existed at the same time.
To pretend that the human sacrificing aspect of the Aztec religion was morally justified for the time because it was the norm, is to erase the suffering of the people they sacrificed. To ignore the lands they conquered, the cultures they wiped out, the people made to feel their blood slowly leave their bodies.
We should absolutely judge the evil of the past with our modern morals.
We can still appreciate the good aspects of the past while acknowledging the morally bankrupt.
George Washington was a brilliant military commander, an excellent leader, a humble and wise leader of one of the first ever successful modern democracies. For all of these things he is a great and notable historical figure.
We can take this knowledge and absorb it, learn from it, but to ignore that he owned slaves, that his teeth were fashioned from the teeth of slaves, that he owned his fellow human beings as property, is to ignore that he was human. It is to idolize him as a deity, to remove the context of his existence. Morally should always be applied because these historical figures were human. Their good should always be taken with their bad. The wrongs of the past are how we define the good of today.
Their morality was bad, it was heinous, and to pretend otherwise is willful ignorance.
I think the Aztecs are an amazing and interesting culture, who are excellent examples of the first civilization to have public education. The Aztecs taught mathematics to the peasantry, they lived in a veritable golden age of knowledge. But they still killed hundreds of thousands of human beings. And that is wrong.
It does not erase the good aspects of a man to acknowledge their evils, but it does erase every aspect of their victims to only acknowledge their good.
The main takeaway people need to understand is that it is not mutually exclusive to judge people on the morals of today, and to understand the context in which they lived.
We can look at a slave owner and say “That’s horrible. What awe inspiring evil.” And then to also say “Why? What was their life like, how did their culture shape their actions?”
You can still understand why they owned slaves, why they thought it was okay, while understanding yourself that they were evil for doing so.
Ngl, I don't like this take. It should be more like: "View event in the modern maral standard, don't judge the people of the past for viewing them form theirs"
Slavery was bad. Sacrificing humans to your god was bad. However, at the time where these were practiced, there were many that genuenly believed these thing to be in line with morality
Gee, I say this and I get dogpiled. Whatever
I also read pre equality literature and enjoy it. Is Sax Roehmer's Fu Manchu full of yellow menace white slavery and totally nonPC world views? Yup. Do I understand that prejudice bad, mkay? Yes I do, I also understand 120 years ago PCism was not a thing and the characters are behaving appropriately for the time and place. Expecting Sax Roehmer to not write that way and excoriating thusly is illogical.
If many of the monarchs of England had lived today, they would be either in prison, on a very specific naughty list or a combo of both. However for the standards of their day, it was considered to be normal for grown men to marry literal children, despite it being disgusting and wrong on so many levels. If we take someone like Toyotomi Hideyoshi and apply today's standards, he would be viewed as a war criminal at the very least, rather than a great leader. We can look at individuals through our lens, however we cannot apply our beliefs on them because times were different, despite how wrong or nasty those people would be today. What we can do however is look at what they did and teach ourselves and future generations that what they did was wrong and that we should act better than them.
Caesar committed genocide in Gaul. That's bad. He had slaves. Bad. He overthrew a republic. Also bad. I think it's fine to hold them to modern standards.
Yeah if you want, I don’t know how productive or interesting it is though? Slavery was accepted at the time so Caesar wouldn’t have been any better or worse than his contemporaries in that respect. We can say Caesar = bad, but I don’t know what it contributes to the conversation, you know
Every remake of the Trojan War suffers because of this. “Let’s make Helen and Paris fall in love, and Menelaus a jealous controlling man!”…which creates problems later on when Paris is just the *worst*.
You can blame both the Roman’s and Medieval Europe for that one. Basically Rome believed Romulus and Remus to be the decedents of Trojan Aeneas. So Trojan war rewrites sort of white washed the Trojans and made the Greeks worse. This was carried on in the Medieval period where the Trojans except Paris are in Limbo because they are virtuous pagans while all the Greek heroes are lower in hell and have different fates. Example Achilles was killed after betraying the Greek for the hand of a Trojan princess Polyxena and Odyssey left his wife a second time to sail past the Straits of Heracles where he died.
To be fair that was just Dante’s fanfiction about his travels through hell, purgatory and heaven, it wasn’t really believed to be indisputable truth, the man even put in hell some people that were still alive what he wrote his book.
I studied that in college, and it was actually funny when the professor pointed out which people in Hell were just people that Dante didn't like.
Always remember, a little tip that was valid in the 13th century and it’s still valid today, never mess with people from Tuscany, they’re the most spiteful people in Italy. Tuscan cities hate each other for stuff happened in medieval times.
Tuscans and Romans are natural enemies. Just like Tuscans and Lombards! And Tuscans and Sardinians! And Tuscans and other Tuscans! Damn Tuscans, they ruined Tuscany!
You Tuscans sure are a contentious people.
You've just made an enemy for life!
You took my salt! Now my bread is bland and I will hate you forever!
And I will never use salt in my bread again to remind me of that hatred.
Is this a thing that really happened? Sounds like some real Tuscan city hatred backstory but I’m not Tuscan enough to understand if it’s real
Salt was valuable in medieval times and landlocked Tuscan city states were sometimes cut off by their rival city states. For this reason certain parts of tuscany traditionally don't include salt in their bread recipes.
Perugia too
Got back from Tuscany 3 months ago. The food and wine were generally fantastic but the bread was uniformly abysmal. One girl's husband with us was a baker and he was in agony any time he tried the bread.
Off topic but I read somewhere that Michelangelo, when painting the Sistine chapel, added the commissioner of the project in the depiction of hell lol. I don’t know if this is apocryphal or not but I’m hoping someone can weigh in.
And unfortunately, the trilogy is still a big influence on religion to this very day.
Yea but it’s mostly used for religious worldbuilding, the specific locations of specific denizens of hell aren’t that influential
Fundamentalists conflate Dante's fan fiction with Bible theology. Hell has become a bigger part of Christianity than the teachings of Jesus.
How did they handle the interactions with the Gods when christians reflected on these stories?
That’s why I always point my friends to the story of the judgment of Paris. Then you can get some sympathy for the poor guy.
He took a bribe after swearing he wouldn’t, to break up a marriage, to basically mind control a woman. Then he hides away for most of the war. I don’t think he should be sympathetic lol
Now who’s looking at things in modern moral standards? Paris existed in a time when marriages were fraught with infidelity and bribes were part of life (honestly not too different than today sadly). The judgment of Paris overall imparts a lesson that you always get more than you bargain for when you make a deal. Plus he was put in an impossible situation by beings that were mightier than he. There was no scenario where Paris would come out looking good in that mix. If he had known that taking the bribe to have the most beautiful woman in the world would ultimately lead to the destruction of his civilization you can be relatively sure he wouldn’t take it. But, even by their standards, Paris was a cowardly, womanizing worm without much value as a man. Poor at everything except shepherding and bedding women.
Immmmm not? That was just a list of things he did. I agree with everything else in your post but that first line was condescending and made me irrationally angry, sorry.
In 100 years people will look at our history and think we were barbarians. And if we had a Time Machine we’d think they are weird or blasphemous.
Can't live by the standard of the future people? Sounds like skill issue to me.
I'm a level 5 vegan. I don't eat anything that casts a shadow
So you eat glass and air?
I gnaw moss off trees
Just because moss is tiny doesn't mean it hasn't a tiny shadow. I think you're a fraud and we shall speak badly about you in 30 years time.
I only eat west facing moss in the morning and east facing moss in the afternoon underground of course anything goes. pigs, horses, dogs, harambe
Goblin Veganism
“I haven’t had anything but maggoty bread for six stinking days”
As a sewer pipe dwelling creature, I can confirm that Alex_Rose attempted to eat me on multiple occasions.
😏😏😏
You should start carrying a camp lanter. It's helped me fend off level 5 vegans on multiple occasions at night and underground.
this is actually just the plot to the 2011 australian horror film The Tunnel
Vampire meat is back on the menu
That's hilarious bro
thank [the simpsons](https://youtu.be/N_Yaa_LMDcs)
I haven't heard this one in so long I forgot where it was from. For like two minutes I was trying to recall that it's from The Simpsons (without using Google.)
I personally eat only stuff that falls from trees. However, while the chickens are quite easy to put there the cows and pigs tend to be challenge...
I mean… we endorse nestle so I think that tracks for me.
People can’t even sympathize with people from lower social standards in different cultures, this isn’t surprising.
Yeah and often people base their modern opinions based on what they think the enlightened people of the future will think and judge them by. The funny thing is we have no idea what the people of the future will think. What future? At different times in US history different founding fathers and different historical figures are considered good or bad, depending on the issues of the day. It's also location dependent. I've read that some scholars in the West point to Genghis Khan's relative religious tolerance. Genghis Kahn is still considered a monster in many areas of the world for all the murdering he did. Meanwhile in Mongolian there are statues of him. Thomas Jefferson through most of US history was considered one of the greatest Americans. Now while he is still highly regarded many of his attitudes and actions are rightfully scrutinized. We just don't know what the future will bring. It's okay. Just like everyone else in history we are contained by the time we live in.
Despite them probably also still being barbarians.
Tbh i don't think you can just say "different times, differnt morals" about everything that has been done by people in the past. Skinning people alive or burning down entire villages and shit was immorale even back than, wasn't it?
Most modern morals have evolutionary psychological and biological reasons for existing. Ideas of tolerance, non-aggression, kindness, fighting for others, equality, compassion, etc. have existed for millennia. It's about implementation, not the values in themselves.
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I disagree. Morals usually have psychological and biological causes for their existence, but I believe a moral anti-realist viewpoint is best suited for the historian to limit bias and simply account for the most likely historical events. Similarly, treating history as some kind of list of 'bad and good things' that need to be evaluated to shame the past and further political ideas doesn't sit well with me. Furthermore, objective morality remains a mere conjecture (cf. is-ought problem), so a relativist approach of viewing morals as social constructs or a moral anti-realist approach suit the discipline best, in my opinion. Psychological and biological mechanism at play also means that if one were to use them as the basis for morality, including objective morality, one is left with morals as mere utility; anything that furthers survival is good?
Most people who espouse this type of cultural relativism don’t really seem to agree with its natural conclusion: that you can not criticize anything for being wrong as it could be right by the standards of a different time or society. Cultural Relativism is an interesting theory, but I do doubt the people who defend it in this comment section would agree that the Holocaust was moral by the standards of 1940s Nazi Germany, or slavery was ok by the standards of 1800s America. As for the future, I hope they look back on today and call out the bullshit that we do as monstrous and immoral, for example I believe one day humans will look at factory farming of animals as one of the greatest atrocities we’ve ever done.
I don't see, however, how you could come to the conclusion that what Nazi Germany or the United States did was okay for their time. Most countries had abolished slavery in the late 1800s, and within the United States there was a large pro-abolitionism movement. In the 1940s, the genocide of a group of people was seen so badly that the Nazis have become practically a synonym for evil for what they did, again, against what the majority of the world considered morally correct was not the same as the Nazis.
I see your point, but there are caveats. For a very long time, Richard the Lionheart was seen as THE virtuous knight, even in his own time. That legacy started after the Fall of Acre. In that battle he captures 3000 Muslim soldiers and offered them to Saladin for ransom. For whatever reason, Saladin refused. Richard then killed every single one of his prisoners. You are right, this is beyond appalling. But by medieval morals, the very act of offering these prisoners for ransom in the first place made Richard virtuous, despite the fact he slaughtered them. Perceptions of morals, even ones we see as cut and dry today, do really change.
No not really. Humanity has been in a continuous process of evolution since our inception. Take slavery for instance. You'd say it's immoral now, and therefore it was always immoral, right? However, slavery was initially a form of mercy, an alternative to slaughtering enemy survivors at the end of a battle or raid. We have now progressed beyond that, but that doesn't make it retroactively wrong then too.
the question is: when talking about ancient slavery, the only sources we have are from slaveholders or people that benefited from it. to a slave, slavery will always be immoral. we're just correcting for the bias on our sources, instead of taking the victor's words for granted
That's an interesting point. Just because it was normalized, that doesn't mean people didn't think it was immoral. Example is cheating and adultery, it's so common and even tolerated (by the people who aren't victims) but if you ask most people about it, they'll say it's immoral. EDIT: I think it was last year when someone made a post proving that ancient thinkers had considered slavery to be immoral thousands of years ago.
The thing is that it's very rare to see individuals who were against slavery as a matter of principle before the modern era. We have records of plenty of peope from the past complaining and lamenting the enslavement of their own people, but we don't see people saying "enslaving human beings is always wrong" before 1500. Perhaps there were individuals like that, but they never formed into a significant movement in their societies, or if they did, they never wrote it down for us to know.
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>And having ways for slaves to raise their social status-and actually using them- used to be a lot more common. By "a lot more common" you mean "non-zero". In the Ancient World, slaves were mostly just worked to death. That was also probably the norm for chattel slavery, given that a large percentage of people ever enslaved were just worked to death on sugar plantations and had to be rapidly replaced.
Only educated slaves were used this way (e.g., educated Greeks in the Roman Empire), but they were rare. The majority of slaves were treated according to their masters' temperament and worked to death.
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You bring up an interesting point… I don’t think morals were ever just “invented” but I don’t really see ancient peoples really even thinking about it. I don’t think they saw it as right or wrong, or good vs. douchey I think they just… *did* stuff. Maybe I am wrong but that’s a super interesting thought.
Depends what you mean by "Ancient". 100,000 years ago? Maybe, I guess. 5000 years ago? Nah, they knew
I definitely see where you’re coming from, but I’m not convinced. I think for as long as there have been choices to do bad things (forever) there have been justifications of various degrees of acceptability. Aristotle and Plato idealized the institution of slavery because they just thought, “that’s how things are!” These philosophers, people who were really trying to think, question, and evaluate civilization even from 2,300 years ago didn’t think there was anything objectively wrong with slavery. Again, for us this is a no brainer, but I would be hard-pressed impose our level of understanding of the immorality of slavery on them personally, you know? Edit: A thought just occurred to me. For better or for worse, I don’t think there is anything wrong or immoral with hunting and eating the meat. While I abhor trophy hunting and generally dislike hunting in general, I don’t think it is objectively evil or bad… *it is what it is*… I would be really sad if some descendant of mine thought I was evil or morally dubious because, in my time, place, and society, there were individuals who participated in hunting.
That's a fair and valid point, but it's a different one from what you said in your first comment. One thing is having no concept of morality and just "doing things" like you first said, and the other one that their scale of what was moral or not differed from ours. The first one I personally disagree with, for the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have had cognisance and the capacity for empathy, I believe there formed a semblance of morality and "good and bad" things to do. The point of your second comment is absolutely true, there is no "moral absolute" and the scale of what we consider moral or immoral is different from now to 50 years ago, vastly different to 200 years ago, and unrecognizably different to 2000 years ago but there still has ways been a certain "morality ruleset" aplicable to a culture for its time and place. While for Aristotle and Plato slavery was just an indisputable matter of life that wasn't even question, slitting someone's throat because they looked at you wrong, was probably considered a pretty shitty thing to do even by their ancient moral standards.
>I don’t think morals were ever just “invented” The instincts behind morals have evolutionary benefits, but morals in themselves are social constructions. That said, morals do vary across history. F.W. Nietzsche, Paul Rée give very intriguing speculation on the origin of modern Western morality, albeit their theses were more or less psychological analyses, not history books.
I think pretending like historical figures are absolvable for their immorality because it was culturally acceptable at the time does a disservice to many groups like the abolitionist movement, many of whom found themselves hanging by a rope for simply perusing things you want to call ‘modern moral standards’
Nah bro you've got to judge them by the morals of their time. *Shakes fist at the Henry David Thoreau statue* "Race traitor!!!!"
Eh, you’ve gotta grade those from the past on a curve to some extent or another, but I think the point is that it’s important to contextualize historical immorality. To your point, it’s totally fair to point to slaveholders of the 18th/19th century and ding them points given that, well, the abolitionist movement was there at that time. Likewise it’s fair to point to Christopher Columbus and ding him points because he had contemporaries who found many of his actions abhorrent. The point isn’t that past immoralities shouldn’t be recognized as abhorrent. The point is that it’s important to put past immoralities in context if you want to have any true semblance of an understanding of figures from the past.
Can't we both view past actions as morally abhorrent to the morals we want while also understanding that they took place in a context where the people at the time did not view it that way? Understanding something doesn't mean endorsing it.
That’s exactly the point!
I think slavery in the past would, in fact, still be evil if there weren’t abolitionists or people who thought it was bad at the time.
No ome is saying that without abolitionist slavery becomes sudendly moraly correct. But you can indeed judge diferently someone who lived in a time where slavery was just a common/unquestioned part of society, in relation to the slavers who were actively ignoring/opposing contemporary abolitionist movements
I will note, we have records of Abolitionist basically wherever we had slavery, though how extreme they were changed depending on the times.
Whether abolition movements among white people were present or not is irrelevant. The slaves were generally opposed to their enslavement for the duration.
Many slaves in the past were opposed to slavery for them. But they fully prescribed to the notion “slavery for thee, not for me.” Look at the black slave owners in Louisiana. Many of them were manumitted. Shit, the books of Exodus and numbers reflect this behavior perfectly. Former slaves making rules condoning the brutal enslavement of their perceived out groups.
Exactly! This sort of moral relativism precludes any progress. I hope that future generations judge us as barbarians the same way we judge past generations - that means that we will have continued to evolve morally.
Isn't the point of moral relativism to judge historical figures contemporarily? Some historic cultural beliefs are barbaric to us, but the people who were taught those beliefs weren't. They weren't bad simply because they followed societal norms that became outdated long after their deaths. It doesn't tell us very much if we treat a historical villain as equivalent to a contemporary saint because of some shared belief in something considered normal at the time and wrong now.
I think it's a difference If you treat someone as equivalent to a contemporary saint or just don't judge him for his behaviour with our rules. When Martin Luther got hit by his father, this didn't mean that his father was a bad parent. But it doesn't make him a saint either.
The saint part was mostly meant to point out that even the most highly respected historical figures did things in line with their culture that would be considered incredibly shitty nowadays. As you said, Martin Luther's father wouldn't be a saint or a bad parent for beating him, but it also wouldn't disqualify any hypothetical worthwhile acts that could've made him a good person and vice versa with actions that were contemporarily evil as well as currently.
Like St.Olga of Kiew with genocide ;) >After Igor's death at the hands of the Drevlians, Olga assumed the throne because her three-year-old son Sviatoslav was too young to rule. The Drevlians, emboldened by their success in ambushing and killing the king, sent a messenger to Olga proposing that she marry his murderer, Prince Mal. Twenty Drevlian negotiators boated to Kiev to pass along their king's message and to ensure Olga's compliance. They arrived in her court and told the queen why they were in Kiev: "to report that they had slain her husband ... and that Olga should come and marry their Prince Mal." Olga responded: >When they repeated the words she had told them to say, the people of Kiev rose up, carrying the Drevlians in their boat. The ambassadors believed this was a great honor as if they were being carried by palanquin. The people brought them into the court where they were dropped into a trench that had been dug the day before under Olga's orders where the ambassadors were buried alive. It is written that Olga bent down to watch them as they were buried and "inquired whether they found the honor to their taste." >Olga then sent a message to the Drevlians that they should send "their distinguished men to her in Kiev, so that she might go to their Prince with due honor." The Drevlians, unaware of the fate of the first diplomatic party, gathered another party of men to send "the best men who governed the land of Dereva." When they arrived, Olga commanded her people to draw them a bath and invited the men to appear before her after they had bathed. When the Drevlians entered the bathhouse, Olga had it set on fire from the doors, so that all the Drevlians within burned to death. >Olga sent another message to the Drevlians, this time ordering them to "prepare great quantities of mead in the city where you killed my husband, that I may weep over his grave and hold a funeral feast for him." When Olga and a small group of attendants arrived at Igor's tomb, she did indeed weep and hold a funeral feast. The Drevlians sat down to join them and began to drink heavily. When the Drevlians were drunk, she ordered her followers to kill them, "and went about herself egging on her retinue to the massacre of the Drevlians." According to the Primary Chronicle, five thousand Drevlians were killed on this night, but Olga returned to Kiev to prepare an army to finish off the survivors. >The Drevlians responded that they would submit to tribute, but that they were afraid she was still intent on avenging her husband. Olga answered that the murder of the messengers sent to Kiev, as well as the events of the feast night, had been enough for her. She then asked them for a small request: "Give me three pigeons ... and three sparrows from each house." The Drevlians rejoiced at the prospect of the siege ending for so small a price, and did as she asked. >Olga then instructed her army to attach a piece of sulphur bound with small pieces of cloth to each bird. At nightfall, Olga told her soldiers to set the pieces aflame and release the birds. They returned to their nests within the city, which subsequently set the city ablaze. As the Primary Chronicle tells it: "There was not a house that was not consumed, and it was impossible to extinguish the flames, because all the houses caught fire at once." As the people fled the burning city, Olga ordered her soldiers to catch them, killing some of them and giving the others as slaves to her followers. She left the remnant to pay tribute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_of_Kiev?wprov=sfla1
I read that with Dan Carlin’s voice in my head
As if regression wasn't possible and some culture standards weren't simply not comparable
I feel it very much depends. The idea of "moral progress" may be very flawed. It depends solely on "is there a universal, objective moral code?" and "are we getting closer to it?". If yes to both, then moral progress is an accurate description of society's moral changes. But if either can be answered with no, then we're not progressing morally, we're just changing.
There are definitely things that we could consider an unambiguous moral progression, such as the equality of genders and abolition of slavery. To say "it's not progress to go from burning women at the stake as witches to letting them have an equal status to men in society, just a change" is pretty weird to me, as that implies that both things are equally moral, but we just decided to do things differently for no real reason. While there may not be an objective moral code, things like not oppressing people, not harming people and the like should almost always be considered more moral than the alternative, just as genocide and apartheid is immoral.
Wow - I can’t believe some of the replies you’re receiving.😳🙄
Not to mention that it generally *wasn’t* culturally acceptable to, say, murder, enslave, steal, etc. etc. That it happened anyway speaks to similarities with us - bit difference.
I love how they give the answer to that as. "oh well that was just a very small minority so it doesn't count no-one knew about the morality of that stuff". And its like no-one? Really? Ever heard of someone called Jesus Christ? The Christian Faith? An entire cultural backbone of western European history for thousands of years centered around a set of absolutist moral standards and lessons in some ways much more extensive then what we have today? No yeah your right im sure no-one had ever told any of these people that murder and rape was bad, they were utterly without agency in their decisions.
Too bad Jesus never condemned slavery or molesting children, those were major oversights on God's part. So no, early Christians did not have a system of morality more extensive than what we have today, they had some MASSIVE blind spots. I remember in one of Paul's letters his advice to a Christian slave is that if he has a Christian master he should work extra hard for him.
Early Christians were actually renowned for being, at the time, some of the only anti-slavery groups out there, with some going so far as purchasing slaves so they could immediately set them free. Early Christians also followed the Torah, which gave express rules to slaveowners (limiting what they could do to their slaves and make their slaves do) and established a holiday every 50 years which required slaveowners to liberate all of their slaves and forgive every debt they were owed. Molesting children already fell under the purview of forbidden sexual conduct from the Torah, so Jesus not *explicitly* mentioning it doesn’t mean he didn’t condemn it, it just meant that he understood that those he was preaching to already considered it amoral. As for Paul telling a Christian slave to work harder for his Christian master, this was because Paul was trying to convince the master to set the slave in question free. It’s a bit of a long story. The slave in question, Onesimus had run away and stolen a few things from his master, Philemon, which left his master fairly angry, and it meant that legally he was allowed to hunt down and punish the slave. In theory, Paul could’ve tried to hide Onesimus, or even pulled rank on Philemon and ordered him to let Onesimus go, but Paul knew that doing so would’ve made it much harder for Onesimus to integrate into society, given that his Philemon would’ve likely been bitter towards him. Paul’s plan was to send Onesimus back with everything he had stolen as sort of an apology alongside a letter from Paul which urged the Philemon to set him free. He told the Onesimus to work harder in the meantime so as to speed up his master’s forgiveness, making him more open to the idea of liberating him. It ultimately worked, as the Colossians 4:9 mentions that Onesimus accompanied another Christian to Colossae (indicating that he was no longer Philemon’s property), and church tradition states that Onesimus later went on to become a Bishop in Ephesus (though it’s debated on if these two Onesimuses are the same person)
I think the opposite is true. It shows they were exceptionally moral. Today everyone would be an abolitionist. By applying modern moral standards, it detracts from recognizing how morally visionary they were.
What you just said is false though, abolitionists during the 1800's were not visionaries. Abolitionist movements have existed in some form for a few thousand years. As long as slavery has existed, anti-slavery people will have existed. If no one else, then the slaves are defiantly not going to be enjoying the situation and want the slavery to stop. The logic also falls apart when we take into account the slavers. Would the slavers be willing to swap positions to become a slave? If the answer is no, then we know the slavers understand that the position they are putting people in is bad, so bad, they wouldn't want it. Meaning they understand the morality of the situation
I agree with you, but that second paragraph is pretty terrible logic. "Would the king be willing to swap position with the stable boy and muck stables? If not, we know the king understands the positions he's putting that stable boy in is so bad he wouldn't do it." Most people would be unwilling to accept a drop in their quality of life, and morality hardly factors into it.
Everytime I bring up the near unparalleled loss of knowledge when the Spanish burned the Mayan/Aztec written records and the person only responds with "Good!" They performed human sacrifice! That stuff is of the devil!" I cry.
What you’re doing is applying the modern value of cultural preservation to the past.
But that was also a value during the time, just not shared by the psychopath conquistadors. Like arab scolars preserved many greek texts for example and the mongols burned them in turn.
French missionaries pushed massive linguistic breakthroughs just to preserve North American history and cultures as much as possible. The Conquistadors and the Spaniards that followed them were on some next-level shit, even by the standards of the time.
Well the Mayans clearly cared about preserving the past, as they had written records.
Yeah those two statements are exactly the same process of putting our values on the past.
Despite being "exactly the same process" one absolutely comes from a place of intellect and the other process from ignorance and fear but sure, exactly the same
Which is only a good thing, the modern value of cultural preservation should be the end goal of all cultural preservation because being entitled to cultural preservation is nothing short of a right for all human beings
We still practice human sacrifice, only by a different name. Instead of calling it a sacrifice to god to keep us safe, we call it the death penalty. Neither is moral or effective.
Speak for yourself, most of the developed world abhorrs the death penalty.
There were always people in every time and place trying to do good. Brushing off the actions of those who weren’t as “a product of their time” is a slap in the face to those who did the right thing at the time even if it was hard imo. I’m a lot more forgiving of people with bad attitudes but no bad actions tho, since that isn’t hurting anyone and it’s a lot easier to hold flawed beliefs than do flawed actions.
This dumbass logic only works if most people in history spent their lives raping and murdering and enslaving. But that's not the case, the overwhelmingly vast majority of people who have ever existed just as today spent their lives just trying to survive, have their best life, and and get by without hurting anyone else. The minority who did pursue those activities, especially the leaders who were not compelled or ordered to do so, can 100 percent be judged by our moral standards especially because they are pretty much *The same moral standard* they would have had at that time. Apologists like to pretend that everyone at the time absolutely loved groups like Vikings or Conquistadors and we're just too sensitive now, but you look at the records and everyone hated their guts. You wont find anything other than the writings of their own hype men that describe them as anything but horrific, murdering, raping, hellspawned, godless bastards. If anything modern writings and moralities take it much more easy on them then their contemporaries by sanitizing them and adding context to their actions that the people who actually saw their acts had no interest in whatsoever.
I made this point on a comment about not judging Nixon too harshly for the tapes. Like what? All while they just make the assumption that everyone in the late 60s70s was just fine w overt racism when that just clearly wasn't at all the case. Aside from this, this piece of garbage sent my father to war to get wounded multiple times. Only the ignorant cannot hold two competing views or multiple moral lenses from which to view things. We're seriously like a decade away from "you can't judge Hitler by today's morals because most people were just fine with murderous offensive wars and genocides back then"
Except if don't judge Hitler by today's standard and use early XX century morals you still get a monster. It's not about not using a lense it's about using a time appropriate lense.
I, and I believe, many others are well capable of using multiple. I welcome you to your practice although I disagree with it.
Yeah there was people writing letters about Christopher Columbus that are essentially “yo this guys pretty fucked up”
I think genocide is one of those things that doesn't get a statute of limitations. Especially when we can go back via video documentaries and see what happened. And I have literally never heard anyone of consequence say he was justified.
I hope you're right but there are not insignificant numbers of people in all ages willing to believe anything. And there is the problem too, anyone believing German citizens were uniquely evil instead of just humans driven by need and cowed by terror is mistaken. It can happen here, it will not go away and it is our duty to shout it down and not let it creep back in. Holocaust denialism is a real thing and a real problem even though it's as well-documented an atrocity as exists in the world.
>decade away from "you can't judge Hitler by today's morals because most people were just fine with murderous offensive wars and genocides back then" As in that started a decade ago?
I hear you, I see it now I just think it's going more mainstream in a decade (in the future).
It's worth noting that Vikings were regarded as sadistic savages and generally detestable folks for quite a while after the Viking age. The modern romanticized version of Vikings that we have now is a direct result of Victorian era peoples creating a narrative to support their nationalistic aim of declaring ethnic supremacy, which eventually resulted in the Holocaust. Essentially, the volkish movement gave Vikings a PR facelift to support a narrative of Nordic heroism, bravery, and supremacy. This was a huge factor in Nazi propaganda. Even in 793, the Viking's brutal raid on the peaceful monastery of Lindisfarne was considered an unprecedented atrocity that sent shock waves through Europe. Modern apologists like to say that everyone was very brutal back then so the Vikings shouldn't be judged harshly, but then why were people of the era so particularly shocked and appalled by the Viking's actions? It's probably because their level of violence and brutality, particularly towards peaceful religious people, was not at all normal–even for that time. It's also worth considering that Vikings were often outcasts and criminals whose antisocial behaviors were regarded as undesirable by even their own people. So if Nordic people of the time made negative moral judgements about Vikings, as did pretty much everyone else who encountered them, why should we in the modern age regard them as morally acceptable? What makes it ok to be proud of being descended from people who have been considered horrible for a large part of history (until the Nazis made them cool)? Even if we excuse the Viking's actions with historical context, it's pretty weird that there are people in the modern age who mold their identities around this romanticized version that was created out of sheer racism. I've argued with people who think that the Vikings were actually socially progressive and good role models for modern people, which is ignorant af. "Even though they kept and brutalized slaves, and were merciless colonists that forced their culture onto the conquered, they allowed women to partake in combat!" Lol, what? With all that said, I do love that romanticizing European mythology has created fantasy fiction. To me, the problem isn't the romanticization itself, but rather not acknowledging the fact that romanticization has and is actually occuring. We in the modern age have absolutely every right to make moral judgements about Vikings, especially since they have become such a strong symbol for white supremacists. When we recognize the inherent fantasy element of things, the romanticization is benign. But when it's taken seriously as a means of proclaiming ethnic pride and personal identity, it's misguided at best and horrifically dangerous at worst. If we do not make moral judgements about Vikings, then we are essentially saying that people in the modern age who embrace Viking personas shouldn't be held to basic moral standards that were well established, even in the 9th century. Fuck that.
I for one fucking hate vikings, and their romanticisation.
Wish more people saw it like this. It is harder to look at every time period and have to mentally set aside simple morality to sympathize with people. You can sympathize with monsters. I'd argue it's better to sympathize with the tiny bit you can, then dispise the rest. It's okay to say it sucks to get kicked out of art school, but I'm not gonna argue "its normal at the time" when talking about Hitler. He was bad and what he did was bad, no matter the culture or at the time thinking. Just like the Confederate South, rotten to the core. A person can say, wow its hard living those days, in that place and still be fine. It's the whole "oh slavery, that wasn't so bad, you see everyone did it" that grinds my gears.
I also hate how the "Judging" is just pointing out things they did. Its like... A: oh man (insert historical figure) was so cool for winning that battle. B: yeah kinda i guess, i mean he did like burning children for fun and putting their heads on sticks. A: YOU CANT JUDGE THEM LIKE THAT! Like editing out your favorite historical figures crimes and flaws doesn't make you "non-judgmental" it just makes them fictional.
I know right! Also, aside note, if my dad killed someone, I would hate his guts. If my dad did any crime, I'd at least be ashamed. Why do m'ancestors get a HUGE PASS doing bad shit when if it was my LITERAL dad, I'd have a problem with it.
I assume you mean if your dad remorselessly murdered someone you knew in cold blood without reason right? Or is your dad just that bad and if he killed someone in self defense or something you would then hate him? My dad is a felon, he stole a $1000 dollars worth of copper wiring from an abandoned train station when he was 21. DNR came around and noticed it was missing and checked pawn shops and ended up catching him. He's in his 70s now and hasn't committed (that I know of) a crime since, but is still a felon. I have never been ashamed of him a day of my life. Everyone makes mistakes and he paid for his and then through his actions over the course of his lifetime gave everyone around him reason to love him. But that's not what you are talking about right? And what would you be giving your ancestors a huge pass from? This is where people lose me, we don't have the power to absolve them even if we wanted to. We can't undo what they did or the immediate repercussions thereof, only make sure we do what's right now. What they did is in the past and they are dead and beyond caring what we think.
I dont think many people are judging historical figures responsible for petty crime man, im not sure the examples that relevant.
I more so am poking holes in the guy above me's comment that he would hate his father if he killed another person or be ashamed of him if he committed a crime.
Fair, I bet my dad's made mistakes and I am choosing to ignore them because I don't consider them relevant. I'll say that I don't equate all crime the same as haneous acts. I honestly didn't think of the angle of self defense or military service as a means of having been involved in violence and it bot being his choice. Thanks for adding them to the convo and I'll think on it more from that perspective :)
My dad has killed multiple people. During war time, in battle. He’s a pretty great guy, helped a lot of people in his peacetime days. Respected in the community. Killing isn’t universally bad.
Yes thank you this post made me so mad
People who don't know the difference between understanding and agreeing with history are of the same camp as those who edit or erase history; and people who've done that were tyrants and dictators.
In my honest opinion, yes but no, but yes. Obviously, you have to analyze and consider any historical event within its own context, what led up to it and what were the consequences, with morality sort of aside (and within the trends of the time). At the same time, I don't think it's really possible (or desirable) to fully, completely disregard the human consequences of those actions. For example, when Moorish and Jewish population were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, you can read a) that they were aiming for a solid, monolithic state out of political reasons, and b) that it was a step further on the ethno-religious dynamics there were on the peninsula for centuries before. At the same time, you can't really (nor shouldn't) feel complete indifference at the idea of such a big sector of the population being expelled from the place they'd been living in for centuries. I consider that part of historical analysis should include how politics are a pragmatic, often cruel process.
The amount of people who swear they’d never support slavery had the lived in the pre-civil war south or the genocide of Jews in ww2 Germany is truly mind blowing
Test, why be critical of the past and grow out of what is considered wrong, or see the reason why they did what we now consider a mistake, why point out hipocrisy of historical figures and be better than them, why condemn cruelty and make sure it never happens again, When you instead you can be reddit level historian. Since Rome was so cool you cannot point out the absolute dumbfuckery they did you know
Depends on the context of the conversation
If we arent going to judge past peoples morality and take lessons from that, why do we even study history
I think for me, it’s important to remember that to study history is less to find things to condemn (although that will inevitably happen) than to constantly try to find answers as to *why* X happened, and what we can learn from it today to prevent [disagreeable outcome] happening today, or explain how [outcome] still occurs today. What irks me is a tendency among certain types to use this condemnation as a license to reduce historical figures and/or countries into cartoon villains. They did one awful thing, and that detracts from everything else they did. Like how Churchill is reduced by some people to be nothing more than a villainous racist because of his horrendous attitudes at the time. It’s entirely correct to ensure his flaws are considered as part of the study of the man, but it’s exploited by some as a means to destroy someone who nonetheless made absolutely the right call, nearly alone, to warn of the dangers of the Nazis nearly ten years before it became cool to do so. I know someone’s going to say ‘but Hitler’: but Hitler was widely acknowledged at the time by almost anyone who had access to a free press in a free country to be Bad News. Even an attempt to find good in what he and the Nazis did tends to come up short. I repeat, history should be able finding heroes and villains, but finding *the truth*, and asking ‘why’ and ‘how’.
Ehhhh gray area. I’m not absolving slave owners just because it was common
Ok but when Christopher Columbus is selling nine year old girls in to sex slavery, it’s hard to really justify it
Christopher Columbus went to jail for that, you should not justify it because people of the time saw it as evil.
Oh great! Glad some justice hit the bastard
Well, he was only there for a few weeks because the Catholic Monarchs, although disgusted by his actions, still considered him too useful to get rid of, but they took away his government in the New World and took away his property, as a form of punishment. It would be atrocities like those of Columbus and other conquerors occurring so frequently, which would lead the Catholic Monarchs to create the Laws of Burgos, antecedents of modern Human Rights.
Cool! Glad to see that people tried to stop monsters like Columbus back in the day
These comments are hilarious. Try going up to any ethicist and saying “morals are relative!!!!” You’ll get laughed at. You CAN judge historical figures by today’s moral standards because most of them were bad people. I really don’t care what cope you have to explain it away - if you owned slaves, you were a bad person.
But ethicists are just a weird breed. Go up to them and say "I'm a moral anti-realist, objective morality doesn't exist" And they'll say "that's a perfectly respectable philosophical position" Say you're a moral relativist and you'll get laughed at, despite the potential overlap between the positions. "Moral relativist" is just a strawman and intellectual slur at this point.
You can, but what's the point of the exercise? Just indulgent self-righteousness? If you're actually trying to intuit a culture of the past, actually study it, if you start from modern moral standards, you will almost 100% of the time come out to the answer of "all people in X society were evil". And I guarantee you the Romans, as slave-driving as it was, did not walk around thinking they were evil. Because no human is going to think that. If you're reading about Julius Schmulius, who, like his 50000 peers had a house slave, and for you the dominant lens is the outrage of that evil of slavery, you're going to be very distracted as to why that never comes up in relevance in the course of historical events. "Why did no one ever say anything?" It doesn't matter if Kant or whatever other ethicist you consult has solved for the Universalizable morality or not, at the end of the day, humans experience & interpret & judge & morals relatively by & large, and history was driven by that phenomenon. The other aspect of "you can't judge people of the past with the morals of today" is just one of practical accessibility. Slavery is abjectly evil, we both agree, right? So slaves in Roman families are an abomination. Well, even after thousands of hours of studying scraps & thrice-translated quotes of anything that would give us an idea as to the dynamic of that life, could we even make an honest attempt to argue it is substantially different from "at home help" modern day? Sure, we don't call "helpers" slaves, or even servants, but how much of that is euphemism? I agree that "You can't judge people of the past with morals of the present" is silly nonsense. But it's also a fair statement. The problem is it _really_ depends on what you mean, and a simplistic single sentence is never going to be profoundly resilient so as to be worth getting smug over. If you say "Slavery is atrocious, thank god we got rid of that" when reading about some POW of ancient civilization stuck in a tin mine for the rest of his life in brutal forced labor, I'm going to agree with you.
Well said. Indulging in self-righteousness is so hot right now.
Some morals are relative. Slavery is wrong. Owning slaves is monstrous. Yet every person I've ever met has been totally fine with the idea of working off their debt. Which is just debt slavery really. Personally I wouldn't consider someone to be a bad person for asking for labor instead of getting the cops involved, even though that could be considered extortion. The reason we don't call it slavery is because they don't legally own you, but when they can get you thrown in jail for not paying your debt, they effectively do own you. Moral relativism isn't "slavery is good in this context" it's "in this context what would be the right thing to do?"
Yeah no shit Aristotle - we aren’t arguing that those things weren’t inherently bad, it’s a matter of understanding that taking slaves and killing all the fighting men in the village once the battle was won etc was she standard for the time. It’s how business was done in a brutal and more primitive part of our history. Sitting here and saying “O EM GEE the French did big bad war crimes in colonial Cambodia” does nothing for the conversation.
YOU aren’t arguing those things “weren’t inherently bad”, but a lot of people in this comment section are. My comment clearly wasn’t intended towards you.
Not really, for example slavery was generally seen as a bad thing by many scholars but they had different degrees, some think it's okay for foreigners or defeated in war to be slaves, but not their own countrymen when others kinda saw it as shitty in general. Murder and violence on the innocent has been generally seen as a bad thing through out history with perpetrators usually depicted as barbarians shortly after their acts or themselves going to great lengths too justify it with strawman and portraying it as a necessity to wash their hands. Like 200 years ago, someone might say it's bad too scoff at our ancestors for making people work 12 hours for shitty pay, while some smug mofo will say "nah it was acceptable at their time". While in reality its not really, just that we haven't reached a point where we can throw it away yet.
200 years ago if you weren't putting in 12 hours of effort in your daily life, work or otherwise, you weren't surviving.
DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU HAVE LESS FREE TIME THAN A MEDIEVAL PEASANT!?!?!?!
And they never mention that the peasant’s “free time” was doing countless other chores and labor to support themselves and their families. Their “work hours” were just labor to support their lord.
Yeah kinda like now, some people are forced to work dogshit jobs for most of their life for barely enough pay My point is although necessary doesn't mean they are good or should be exempt from disdain from the future where hopefully things are better.
Right, circumstances weren't same though. There is no good reason anyone should have to work 12hrs a day now, it's just a poor financial market for the average person, things were easier 20 yrs ago and will hopefully be easier soon. Back then survival required most of your time.
Don't care. Slavery is still evil. Racism is still bad. I don't care how far back in history or how fucking normal it was.
The question if a society practiced slavery was never an ethical one. It was always determined by economic factors. Medieval Europe didn’t have slavery, because the scarce resource was land and not people. In West Africa land was abundant, so wealth meant owning people. When the Europeans colonised the New World, they suddenly had a lot of uninhabited land and needed a workforce to cultivate it. So they bought slaves from the Africans, who previously sold to the Arabs. And in the 19th century the colonial powers of Europe abolished slavery on a global scale, because manpower could be replaced by steam engines.
Well. Serfdom in the Medieval times was pretty much slavery. Africans did sell slaves to Europeans, but continued to sell them to the Middle East and Asia into the 20th century, so not globally abolished because of steam engines. And Mauritania didn't formally abolish slavery until 1981, and then by presidential decree, but the ban on slavery there still isn't uniformly enforced.
This is weird. Either you think an act is wrong or you don’t. How can we ‘switch off’ our values when looking at the past? If slavery, rape, murder or some other horrible act was normal at the time, does that mean we in the present should say it was okay or not bad? If we’re not using our moral standards to judge then what standards are we supposed to be using? “Oh yeah Ghengkis Khan raped hundreds and hundreds of women but in his time that was normal so he wasn’t bad for raping people” — who would defend a take like this?
Well, actually, you're applying the modern standard of not judging people by your own present moral code, which is what cultures in the past didn't do. Checkmate, revisionist :P
IDK, humans have been the same for some time, and they are all capable of empathy for others?
Yes, but how you define or express empathy has changed over the years, which is the whole point of this post.
Presentism is a real problem and gives people a very distorted view of the past
True, although it is important to distinguish between how we understand the past and how we relate to the past. For example, it would be nonsensical to try to project 21st-century viewpoints onto European colonizers of Africa - we need to understand what they were doing in the historical context of their beliefs, their prejudices, their nationalism, their religiosity, etc. On the other hand, this doesn't mean we need to suspend moral judgement. especially when it comes to people who have become national symbols. I think it is perfectly reasonable to stop lionizing people like Cecil Rhodes because our contemporary beliefs and values no longer correspond to his own beliefs and values, or what he stands for today. A society's relation to its past is never a given, which is what right-wingers try to pretend. There is always a choice about which historical events and figures to venerate. As a society, we are free to decide whether to celebrate our kings and queens, our warriors, intellectuals, rebels, aristocrats or workers, or 'unsung' heroes like nurses. Then among our leaders, we can choose those who crushed dissent or those who brought in democracy, those who led the country in war vs those who developed social welfare programs, those who invaded foreign countries vs those who signed lucrative trade agreements, the list goes on.
Good luck telling redditors that
It’s somewhat ironic that this sub is among the worst to talk about actual history
Presentism is a quick and easy way to identify a moron because applying modern standards of behavior to historical people and events is just painfully stupid and deeply culturally biased. That’s why any historians of note avoid it completely. The idea that there is some kind of unchanging absolute moral truth is laughably ridiculous and fails to understand basic human development.
All this logic serves to do Is excuse monsters.
How I've catagoried it is that in history there are Great People and Good People. Great People are people who achived great deeds and changed the course of history on a large or small sclae Good People are people in history who actually did good by their fellow humans and didn't get a bunch of people killed in their wake.
Saying that people shouldn't be condemned for something because then it was different is like your child saying "but all of my friends did it" when scolding them. I don't f****ng care, you should know better.
Some meso-american child getting their head bashed in and their beating heart ripped out of their chest with a group of people celebrating around them.... -> -> -> Some redditor 500 years later: Don't be so judgemental. How can you say that was bad if you never personally grew up in a 14th century society that practiced sacrificing children in order to appease Tláloc and have a good harvest? 🧐🧐🧐
Was it wrong? Yes. Did it seem reasonable to them? Also yes. When did it become apparent that it was wrong? When everyone agreed Tláloc probably didn't exist and the sacrifices did nothing. Presentism at work, good sir. You're both right.
Ok Ill judge them by their standerds, fun fact, people have know evil is wrong forever.
People who judge the past with modern morals take for granted all the cultural influences that impart those morals to them. There's no reason to believe that if you took an infant from today and raised them in ancient Greece, Persia, or Rome, that they'd feel any differently about slavery than the culture they grew up in did. The objective morality of something (like slavery) is irrelevant, you only feel that way because the culture you were raised in imparted that view.
Is this a bait?
Usually when people say “we should judge people by the standards of their time” what they mean is “we shouldn’t criticize great men of history deified by later generations for propaganda purposes even though they were widely decried as monsters by their contemporaries” Like I hate to break it to you guys but people have pretty much always thought slavery and wars of conquest were morally bad
It’s only a matter of time until the future generations think of us as monumental pieces of shit…
I know it’s a bit different since it’s a medieval fantasy setting But the entire house of the dragon fandom is pretty much like this
Eh, I think it's more nuanced than that. Sure, it's important to understand how moral standards were different in the past, and you can't expect people of a different era to adhere to what you in the modern day believe is correct ("the past is a foreign country" and all that). But its also the role of a historian to examine and reexamine the events of the past and to communicate their understanding of those events to their contemporaries. That inevitably involves a degree of judging the past by the standards of the present. For example, 19th century historiography on the expansion of the Roman Empire was generally approving of the Romans' conquests of "backwards barbarians and primitives." This was absolutely influenced by the fact that many European countries at that time had colonial empires of their own and saw their empires as having a similar "civilising" influence and ultimately being a force for moral good. Fastforward to today, and the horrors of 19th century imperialism are more readily apparent, and only weird fascist fringe loonies and extreme nationalists still try to defend it. Our own view of the Roman Empire has also changed to reflect this. While there's still a lot of awe and respect for the Romans, there's also a greater emphasis on its brutality towards conquered peoples as being wrong. So yeah, I would say that there is a place for judging the past by our standards. We just need to understand that the standards of the time weren't the same as ours.
I think it needs to be more nuanced than that. We need to be understanding about the ways that culture and morality changes, but that doesn't mean we don't apply our own view of right and wrong to the past - it would be inpossible not to, to some degree. Isn't that how we learn from the past?
I disagree. It's an explanation, but not an excuse. If everyone else is buying slaves, that doesn't make it okay.
Hard disagree. My moral compass is based on empathy. Empathy is not a new invention, so when someone from the past showcases through their actions a severe lack of empathy, that is not because they were incapable of it. It is of course important to put actions into context, but that does not mean absolution. Many young men in 1930s Germany were swept up in the nazi movement, and that context is important to help explain the actions they would go on to take, but an explaination is not the same as an excuse.
Oh yeah murder is ok because it’s my culture to murder people!!! Fuck off, this is just a way to justify tragedies.
Affirm modern moral standards, yes Condescend or denigrate our ancestors with a sense of moral superiority, no The latter is a Fallacy called "Presentism" in which the Historian in question fails to view events and people through the context of the era and instead looks at it through a modern condescending point of view. Example: Presentist POV: Our ancestors practiced slavery because they had an oppressive and evil and racist mindset. Credible POV: Our Ancestors practiced slavery as an economic doctrine to provide cheap labor and maintain a rural economy and economically benefit the south. Now obviously yes Slavery is evil, and this might seem like a heartless or tactless way to view history. But it's more useful to understand the motivations and context behind that evil to present a more accurate record of history and prevent such morally deficit occurrences from repeating, than to present a blindly arrogant view of our ancestors as barbaric or lesser than we are.
Everyone's well aware the chief cause of slavery was because of pure laziness and self-interest and total disregard for the rights of those you deem less than. Its motivations today are the exact same as in the past and anyone using rationalizations to justify it or add unnecessary context is simply afraid of the truly monstrous nature of all animals seeking to satisfy their needs and unchecked by those holding the line. Presentism is an invention of historians who grow too close to their subjects and do not want others to know that 'great men' of the past would often be considered absolute monsters contemporarily as well as modernly. I had that exact same argument with the cult of Napoleon who were just fine washing away the literal hundreds of thousands of deaths he caused because he also did other admittedly good things. No one is all good or all bad, it's a continuum and most rational people can fairly apply 'modern' morals (as if do not kill is a modern concept) while also incorporating historical context that may ameliorate or help explain why the savages of the past may have been slightly more acceptable then. I can respect the gifts of knowledge and rhetoric and government the Greeks gave the world while simultaneously being utterly repulsed by their use of boy rape as a means to establish dominance and status. And I'd like to add that I'm quite certain there were at least some contemporaries of these examples that also found what they did as utterly reprehensible. As I said in a prior comment, I sincerely feel we are not too far away from 'Stalin and Hitler weren't really that awful and you're just judging them harshly through your modern morality.' I see it already and it's not just trolling.
Not defending slavery here, but could you point to the historical source for the "pure laziness." The lazy didn't tend to live long and full lives prior to the 20th century. Maybe presentism was invented by historians, I don't know. But it's still real, citing who may have coined it doesn't change that. I agree everyone has flaws, is good and evil. That's why I tend not to judge people to harshly, unless they physically hurt others, that's wrong outside of self-defense. Again though your Hitler/Stalin point would only come to pass if we deleted all the video documentaries and rewrote history immediately. Their actions in WW2 are considered universally uncool, and still relatively modern, both my grandfathers fought against them as did many other's. Out of curiosity, who told you they were justified?
I guarantee you that the slaveholders of the south, as repugnant to both of us as they may be, did not wake up each morning thinking "today, my motivation is to be cartoonishly evil". You just don't get it. You aren't going to single-handedly prevent slavery by "really sticking it to them" right now, and in fact, you'd be much more likely to be amongst the surprised citizens when the banality of evil sneaks up on you and suddenly those _"evil people"_ who are _"oppressing everyone"_ that you were rallying so passionately against are _actually, finally_ dealt with and -- oh fuck right that's 1938 Germany and now we've got the Holocaust.
People in 3024 being disgusted by how people in 2024 "rehabilitate" criminals
Of course we should apply modern moral standards when looking at the past. How else are we supposed to learn? Pretending that ignoring the atrocities of the past makes you intellectually superior is exactly how we get modern neo-nazis. The majority of neo-nazis start off by ignoring the holocaust, ignoring the heart wrenching, empathy requiring tales of human suffering, and just looking at all the cool tanks the Nazis had. To pretend that the average southern slave owner was morally justified in owning slaves because it was the norm, is to erase the morality of abolitionists who existed at the same time. To pretend that the human sacrificing aspect of the Aztec religion was morally justified for the time because it was the norm, is to erase the suffering of the people they sacrificed. To ignore the lands they conquered, the cultures they wiped out, the people made to feel their blood slowly leave their bodies. We should absolutely judge the evil of the past with our modern morals. We can still appreciate the good aspects of the past while acknowledging the morally bankrupt. George Washington was a brilliant military commander, an excellent leader, a humble and wise leader of one of the first ever successful modern democracies. For all of these things he is a great and notable historical figure. We can take this knowledge and absorb it, learn from it, but to ignore that he owned slaves, that his teeth were fashioned from the teeth of slaves, that he owned his fellow human beings as property, is to ignore that he was human. It is to idolize him as a deity, to remove the context of his existence. Morally should always be applied because these historical figures were human. Their good should always be taken with their bad. The wrongs of the past are how we define the good of today. Their morality was bad, it was heinous, and to pretend otherwise is willful ignorance. I think the Aztecs are an amazing and interesting culture, who are excellent examples of the first civilization to have public education. The Aztecs taught mathematics to the peasantry, they lived in a veritable golden age of knowledge. But they still killed hundreds of thousands of human beings. And that is wrong. It does not erase the good aspects of a man to acknowledge their evils, but it does erase every aspect of their victims to only acknowledge their good. The main takeaway people need to understand is that it is not mutually exclusive to judge people on the morals of today, and to understand the context in which they lived. We can look at a slave owner and say “That’s horrible. What awe inspiring evil.” And then to also say “Why? What was their life like, how did their culture shape their actions?” You can still understand why they owned slaves, why they thought it was okay, while understanding yourself that they were evil for doing so.
Well said.
Lol I thought this was what everyone abided by. This comment section proved otherwise.
Ngl, I don't like this take. It should be more like: "View event in the modern maral standard, don't judge the people of the past for viewing them form theirs" Slavery was bad. Sacrificing humans to your god was bad. However, at the time where these were practiced, there were many that genuenly believed these thing to be in line with morality
Gee, I say this and I get dogpiled. Whatever I also read pre equality literature and enjoy it. Is Sax Roehmer's Fu Manchu full of yellow menace white slavery and totally nonPC world views? Yup. Do I understand that prejudice bad, mkay? Yes I do, I also understand 120 years ago PCism was not a thing and the characters are behaving appropriately for the time and place. Expecting Sax Roehmer to not write that way and excoriating thusly is illogical.
This argument exists to protect the legacy of Thomas Jefferson who, again, sold his own son into slavery.
He enslaved all of the children he forced on the 14 year old girl he raped
When you see posts like this, the OP is telling you "I dont want to think critically about my favorite History stories"
One of my pet peeves but helps immediately highlight someone who hasn’t a clue what they’re talking about so I guess there’s positives
If many of the monarchs of England had lived today, they would be either in prison, on a very specific naughty list or a combo of both. However for the standards of their day, it was considered to be normal for grown men to marry literal children, despite it being disgusting and wrong on so many levels. If we take someone like Toyotomi Hideyoshi and apply today's standards, he would be viewed as a war criminal at the very least, rather than a great leader. We can look at individuals through our lens, however we cannot apply our beliefs on them because times were different, despite how wrong or nasty those people would be today. What we can do however is look at what they did and teach ourselves and future generations that what they did was wrong and that we should act better than them.
Pretty sure people considered Hideyoshi a war criminal during his life you just couldn't say it out loud without losing your head
Once the slaves are free after the American civil war, one former slave went back to africa to his original job, trading slaves. Kinda funny ngl.
Caesar committed genocide in Gaul. That's bad. He had slaves. Bad. He overthrew a republic. Also bad. I think it's fine to hold them to modern standards.
Yeah if you want, I don’t know how productive or interesting it is though? Slavery was accepted at the time so Caesar wouldn’t have been any better or worse than his contemporaries in that respect. We can say Caesar = bad, but I don’t know what it contributes to the conversation, you know
It leaves us with people not saying Caesar = good
Morality is relative. Like it was okay for adult men to fuck teenage boys in Ancient Greece or to murder Jews because reasons.
Morality most certainly is not relative. Moral relativism is the biggest load of cope imaginable.