Sowell Dreams Of Military Coup

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I'm not sure I follow you in all this, but let me pose a question or two:

1) Do you agree with me that we today have generally better moral standards on major matters such as slavery, than did most people or societies of ages past?

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I don't know; I don't doubt there are many contemporary people who would gladly enslave other humans if given the option. Nor do I doubt there are many people who would murder others indiscriminately if given the power.

So I don't know if we have better moral standards or not, but I certainly know that the right wing complaint about contemporary moral degeneracy in the US doesn't hold water when we honestly examine America's past. Our leaders are certainly no more degenerate than the American leaders who were murdering and enslaving people centuries ago, so I find it awfully specious to blame liberals for moral decay. This implies Americans adhered to some kind of vigorous moral standards to being with.

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2) Does that actually make us better people than those people of ages past? Does that make those people of ages past actually worse people than us?

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Again, I don't know if we're collectively 'better' or more moral than ages past, but I reject the claim we're worse, particularly since the evidence of our depravity cited by Bork and Sowell constitute nothing more than nonsense about how we take too much pleasure in pornography, violent movies, profanity-laced music, etc.

Now, I think there's a case to be made that pornography degrades women, that violent movies desensitize us, and that profanity-laced music can make us overly boorish -- and I would suggest that liberals actually make this case often -- but I missed where this made us measurably worse than our forefathers, who enslaved people, murdered and subjugated Indians, waged war with each other, prevented blacks and whites from getting married, dropped nuclear weapons on civilians, etc. I don't know if we've become better people, but it sure doesn’t seem possible that we have become worse.

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I still think it was wrong then, but that many legitimately didn't believe it was wrong (or that it was terribly wrong). Well, they were wrong in that belief, but that's what many believed.

Example: Is it wrong to practice human sacrifice against unwilling victims?

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Obviously. Of course it is.

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Today we believe it is unequivocally wrong. Yet the Aztecs of Mexico didn't believe so, and slaughtered tens of thousands on the altar every year. They believed it to be a necessary part of their relationship with God, or their religion, so to speak.

Today we can say the human sacrifices of the Aztecs were deeply misguided, and terribly and needlessly cruel. But did that make the Aztec priests, and warriors, and commoners who supported this, evil people, knowingly engaged in a deeply evil act? Do you really think so?

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Does it make them "evil" people? Are they "inherently" evil? I can't judge character like that. But their behavior was certainly evil and hideously immoral.

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If you hold to your theory that morals must be judged independently of context of the age or time, your answer must be yes, that nearly the entire Aztec civilization was evil, and that all of the Aztec priests were of despicable moral character.

Since I don't buy that scenario, I believe that we can judge an act evil, but that doesn't always mean that the actor was evil.

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Well, I don't think I called Jefferson, or Franklin, or Washington "evil" people, so this is a bit of a strawman. If I did, or implied that I believe that, then I remove my claim that you introduced a strawman and submit that it's not an accurate description of my beliefs. I think we both agree their behaviors were unquestionably disgusting. As for whether or not they were "evil" people at heart, I'm not fit to judge due to an obvious lack of evidence. I refute the notion, however, that somehow their "Judeo-Christian values" constitute the cornerstone of Western morality. We now reject much of what they believed in, and you concede that. So I find the claims kickabuck made are fallacious on their face. If the Founding Fathers ostensibly inculcated our society with so-called “Judeo-Christian” morality, they themselves were often blatant violators of this morality, and certainly their descendants (note again the civil wars, slaughter of indigenous people, subjugation of racial minorities, etc.) haven’t exactly been great stewards and protectors of this morality.

Therefore, I’m more or less forced to believe that the “Judeo-Christian” values which apparently form the “cornerstone” of our morality were dutifully ignored/never existed, because our behavior for centuries has been in gross violation of them, or – if it’s the case that they have motivated and influenced America’s behavior for the last couple of centuries, it’s probably a good thing we’ve distanced ourselves from them.

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I think we can have strong moral standards yet still understand that what society has generally thought to be good or bad or "OK", has evolved and changed over time throughout the ages.

As Jesus said on the cross: "Forgive them my Father, for they know not what they do." He understood that his tormentors were doing an evil thing but that they were doing so out of ignorance. We can today know something was very bad, but that doesn't mean the people of the time considered it to be nearly as bad as we believe it is today. That doesn't change the fact that they did a bad thing, but it does mitigate how harshly they should be judged.

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I don't really know what you mean; if the claim is that Jefferson was somehow ignorant of the pain and suffering holding someone in bondage inevitably caused, or that Washington was ignorant of the unimaginable cruelty that he was responsible for when he forced his weeping soldiers to execute two of the leaders of the mutiny, then I reject that. Even if they were ignorant, these are absolute moral injustices whether or not they were aware of it or not. I don't give a free pass for 'ignorance' or, put differently, unfeeling and callous inhumanity. In sum, lacking a conscience doesn't excuse enslaving and killing people in any way, shape or form.