Sowell Dreams Of Military Coup

[John Kilduff]

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I'm not saying we shouldn't judge: we should judge that slavery is wrong. Yet we cannot hold people of ages past fully to standards that weren't even invented yet, or were just beginning to change, can we? That's why I'm saying there is a difference between being evil and being unenlightened.

Also, I'm not saying that entirely excuses everything, either. I'm saying we cannot well judge the extent to which they should be blamed for acting in a manner consistent with the practices of the time.

The example of soldiers deserting, or mutinies, is general: the point about Washington executing them after the mutiny had been put down, I had not gone back and read elsewhere in the thread: yet even so, it was not uncommon for militaries to make examples out of soldiers.

I'm also not even addressing the argument about contemporary liberals - I'm just saying that applying today's standards to the past isn't a really fully fair way of judging the moral character of those people. That doesn't mean those people aren't to blame at all, or that certain things weren't also wrong in the past: we just have a hard time guessing to what extent those people might have been acting immorally taking into account the standards of the age.

Do you not suppose that there might be any things you or I do, or accept, that people of the future will be shocked at, and think wrong - yet you think little about today? Times change and standards change. Maybe some day people will think we were all grossly and horribly immoral for eating animals in the 21st century. Does that make you and I evil persons, and of terrible moral character?

Once upon a time a great many people thought it was fine to burn witches at the stake. Were they all evil - or were they just misguided - or were they just unenlightened - or some combination of the above? Once upon a time, conquering armies routinely pillaged towns, raped the women, killed all the men, and burnt the towns after stealing all they could - after perhaps taking slaves. That was fairly standard, par for the course - did people then think it was morally wrong?

I think you may not realize just how much standards have changed over the ages, and what was once accepted is now shunned. If we were to apply today's standards in judging morals, probably every fighter in Attila the Hun's armies would be deemed immoral and or irremedial character. But is that really so? People generally believe what they have been taught, and accept the status quo as normal. That doesn't make their actions OK from our perspective, but it does mean that they perhaps weren't as bad as we think they were.

I don't see how you can apply future moral standards to the present, in judging the character of a person. Can you imagine any way to do this without a time-machine? I think not, because we don't know in advance what those future moral standards will be. We can't foresee the future hundreds oif years from now. We cannot judge the present based on the future - it is a cosmological impossibility. So if we cannot do that, then how can we apply present moral standards to the past, in judging the character of a person? The accepted moral standards may have been bad back then (and I believe they were) but that doesn't necessarily mean the people were really bad.

Thanks for reading and thanks for responding to my post.

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Again, this is nothing but coarse moral relativism. To claim that "slavery is wrong", only to follow that by claiming that standard doesn't or shouldn't apply to the past due to historical context is to contradict the previous claim that slavery is wrong, QED.

If the claim is that we need to hold Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, etc. to some other standard where we consider "the social context of the age", then slavery isn't wrong. Under this paradigm, when asked what to make of slavery, we surely can't say it's wrong. We're forced only to answer "it depends".

I don't believe "it depends". Holding humans as slaves, or murdering and beating soldiers for refusing to fight was as wrong 200 years ago as it is today. To say otherwise is to reject the notion that the behavior is wrong in the first place.

"Moral standards" aren't 'invented'. To claim that we need to "understand the standards of the age" is to imply that morality is somehow mutable. Again, this is nothing more than abject moral relativism, something I thought the right-wing in America was trying to combat, but apparently embraces.

So of course it's fair to hold Washington, Jefferson, et al accountable for their accounts. To say otherwise is to claim that somehow slavery and murder could ever be legitimate. The conduct of General Washington murdering his own soldiers, or of Jefferson owning slaves is clearly and wholly immoral. We need not take into account historical context, because there's no "context" that can change that fact.

To claim that "I think you may not realize just how much standards have changed over the ages, and what was once accepted is now shunned" is nothing more than a return to your old days as MMMMMM, where you hand-wavingly assert no one quite understands history. Yes, I completely understand that what was once accepted as legitimate is now viewed as barbaric, hence the entire [censored] point of this thread. To claim that morals have somehow become degraded over time -- to claim that rap music, condoms in schools, and Eminem threaten our morality is to imply we were once so pious that there was actually something to threaten.

We've went from slave owning, to slaughtering of American indians, to the atrocities of the Civil War, to Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws, to incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese, to Tuskegee, to using Agent Orange in Vietnam. But yeah, it's liberal tolerance of gay people and drug users that demands a military coup to save us from moral degeneracy.

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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?

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?

If so, then it follows that, on average, people today are better people than people of long ago; that there used to be a higher percentage of bad people in the population; that there is a higher percentage of good people in the population today. That must be the case if we make no allowance for changing moral standards.

I don't believe that, though. I think good people and bad people probably exist or occur at about the same rate today as long ago - it's just that standards have changed.

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If the claim is that we need to hold Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, etc. to some other standard where we consider "the social context of the age", then slavery isn't wrong. Under this paradigm, when asked what to make of slavery, we surely can't say it's wrong. We're forced only to answer "it depends".

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No, 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? 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? 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. 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.

So I believe that slaveholders in ages past were doing a bad thing, but the harshness of our judgment on them should be mitigated by both what they themselves believed about what they were doing, and by the accepted standards and customs of the time.

Thanks again for reading and for responding to my post.

[DVaut1]

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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.