Why are we judging historical figures under modern morals?

[Elegiac]

People do this because it's easy. It takes effort to acquire context.

You can understand context but still understand someone was a bad person, or wrong.

[Deletedaccount1]

No, because there are certain objective moral values that stay the same.

Certain actions cannot be defended under the excuse that it was normal at the time. Murder, theft and rape are obvious ones, there hasn't been a stable civilization in history that has considered these actions to be prima facie moral (there are some exceptions). Humans have certain ethical intuitions, an intuitive awareness of values.

The fact that a priori moral knowledge exists is evidence of this.

[Hammerfest]

You can understand context but still understand someone was a bad person, or wrong.

I'm not talking about that. I'm simply referring to the thread title question ("Why are we judging historical figures under modern morals?")

Ignoratio elenchi. Big time.

[Spectral]

You can understand context but still understand someone was a bad person, or wrong.

That's fine, but if we summarize history as "nearly everyone ever was awful", this isn't going to be a particularly constructive view. It seems mostly like a tendency towards a Puritanical hatred of humanity, but hey, modern reconstructions of original sin ("we're all born into a racist system and are all racists") aren't exactly rare.

[Shadowferal]

Looking at Spartan society; must have been hell if you were born a Helot.

[Sharein]

Because people want money for things that happened 400 years ago.

[Revik]

I don't think it is fair to judge historical figures of old and using today's moral standards. You have to take things in context even today which is something you have to do for any murder trial. Actions can be justified depending on the circumstances.

One of the big things RIGHT NOW is that white people cannot understand the plight of other disadvantaged minorities, therefore, it is not right for whites to judge. Is this not the same thing? How can we judge people from centuries ago when we cannot even make judgement calls on people of today?

/thread

[sethman75]

I will take a stab and say the 30% of people that voted yes are Hillary supporters and Brexit remainers.

Total mindless sheep

[Damajin]

You keep arguing against something I've never said. Culture is important, tradition is important; without culture and tradition, our society is just a bunch of people living on some territory. But culture evolves, traditions evolve; as progress takes place, so does the society, so does the culture and so do the traditions. Saying, "Here is a set of traditions, we should base the progress on them", doesn't make logical sense. It is like saying, "We believe in ether. Let's try to build relativity theory based on ether, try to fit our observation into it somehow - rather than reject ether in favor of a theory better describing reality." You can do that, but it will be terribly inefficient. If a certain tradition or a cultural element is obsolete and doesn't let the society realize its full potential, then that tradition/element should be rejected and replaced by a better one. Which is what's been happening throughout the history: people didn't stick to the primal traditions, they've evolved. Our traditions today have almost nothing in common with other traditions 500 years ago, and 500 years later we will look back at our current traditions and wonder how we could have be so barbaric.

I feel like a lot of arguments in this thread are more about semantics than actual meaning though.

That’s the problem, you’re not saying the things you’d need to say in order to properly participate in the thread. You’re operating on the water is wet level with these kinds of statements honestly and more often than not getting things drastically wrong.

Culture evolves, tradition evolves isn’t a blanket uniform state of affairs. There are essentially tiers of traditions and parts of culture that range from bedrock, institutional level to the transitory fad level. You’re addressing the fads as though that’s indicative of the entirety of things and frankly that’s not only wrong but that’s not even what this entire discussion is about as they’re surface level and the opposite of what a tradition truly is: timeless.

That’s what I’m dealing with here, the timeless and unchanging bedrock of traditions. You want to apply your ‘logical sense’ to that because you’re imposing the same temporary status of fads to institutional traditions and it misses the boat entirely. “This is what we do because we’ve always done it this way and we’ll always do it this way as it expresses who we are as a people” is a perfectly legitimate statement for traditionalists to make, it’s a shortform version of the philosophical tenets that have been discussed in this thread and that many intelligent people breaking down the history, forms and functions of traditions in society have noted. You might disagree with that but since you’re not even applying your standards correctly or in a multifaceted level of awareness it really doesn’t matter if you disagree.

As I noted previously in this thread concerns of efficiency mean jack shit in the world of traditions and general societal expressions. Take that shit to the factory where it belongs, human society has never and will never operate in such a manner.

Society and life for those people practicing and remaking the forms of traditions and creating culture is not about maximizing potential. You want to be the burning spearpoint pushing through all boundaries that’s something different than anything being discussed here. People have always stuck to the primal traditions, that’s where you’re wrong. What has happened is the form of their appearance has evolved, not their basic nature. Tools change, people stay the same. Our traditions today are the same, peoples’ application of them is moderated and subdued as humanity itself is subdued. THAT is where the major evolution has appeared: human behavior, not their traditions.

The one avenue of danger for people and their traditions is not having them replaced or destroyed, but forgotten. This is why the traditionalist insists on the things they do and why they look at the tabula rasa effect of pop culture as the major enemy to be fought.

The argument in this thread is definitely about meaning and also about the missing gaps that lead to the extreme errors in approach that people have taken here.