Since a lot of this discussion always focuses on slavery (for obvious reasons), I think a key issue is the question of who people viewed as “human”. Who they thought that laws of human morality applied to.
Who is more ethical and moral and righteous? Someone who treats all his fellow humans with justice, charity, friendliness, helpfulness and honesty at all times, but for whom “fellow humans” means “white men”, or someone who is just a generally dishonest douchebag, frequently acting selfishly in small or big things, always placing his own needs above all others… but he does treat all other humans approximately equally, and isn’t going around enslaving people?
Honestly, it’s tough. On the one hand (assuming that the first one is practicing slavery and oppressing women), the crimes of the first are FAR larger than the crimes of the second. On the other hand, I can’t shake the feeling that the first one is a “good person” who just has one big blind spot. And blind spots can be fixed. It’s easier to convince a generally decent person that gays or blacks or women really are his equal than it is to turn an all-around-worthless-asshole into an actually good person.
(Or am I being too easy on these fictional historical figures? Is there not some extent to which someone should realize that blacks and women are truly fully human? I mean, some people were abolitionists and feminists back then. Some people certainly were able to overcome the prejudices of their time. It’s certainly a failing not to have done so. But it’s very hard for me to pass judgment on someone whose life experience and cultural baggage was so vastly different from the pluralistic liberal society we live in today.)
If nothing else, if we view everyone whose views and actions were abhorrently racist/sexist/homophobic as evil, we then come to the conclusion that EVERYONE was evil up until about 1950 or so. And then we end up in one of those situations where the concept has just lost all meaning, if it’s applied to everyone.
It also consigns all us 2017 pluralistic liberals to the dustbin of EEEVVVILLL once, come 2100, we’ve recognized that raising, killing, and eating animals is an abomination beyond the pale.
Or whatever other thing they later decide we had totally wrong.
I wonder how much morality as the OP asks is not a matter of eternal / universal versus situational as it’s more like math? It’s all out there, it just hasn’t all been discovered. Yet.
For those people saying morality is absolute, how can you know that? People are saying, for instance, “Slavery is wrong”, but a lot of slaveholders would have said, “Slavery is right.” I understand people are saying they’re wrong, but how can you know they’re wrong? They’d just as equally say you’re wrong. So what makes your position superior to them?
Things that are morally wrong but the people at the time didn’t have the knowledge or social development to understand it
Things that just weren’t morally wrong, perhaps even a positive good at the time
In category 1, I’d put murder, rape, and slavery.
In category 2, I’d put some types of sexual harassment and assault, racism, sexism in general, homophobia. Having seen a lot of social changes in just my 43 years, there’s a lot that I know now that I just didn’t know then.
In category 3, I’d put eugenics, many causes of war(many cultures felt it improved the quality of manhood), religious tyranny, absolute monarchy, some kinds of child abuse, and sex with physically mature but underage people.
Oh, and how about a bonus category: 4) Things we think are good now but will be considered evil in the future, or things we think are evil now, but throughout most of history have been considered good, and will be considered good again because we’re wrong about it being evil.
I think you also have to distinguish between rationalizations vs. deeply held beliefs. Slavery is one of those things that never seems to have been glorified so much as viewed as a necessary evil. Ancient economies were built heavily on slave labor, and not many people really wanted to be slaves. And it’s not like the US, where there was a permanent slave class and a permanent free class. In ancient times, whether or not you were a slave or free had a lot to do with whether you were conqueror or conquered. You could be high on the hog in one generation and slaves in the next.
I can’t think of anything that has always been considered morally reprehensible. Except certain kinds of music. Aside from that, one of the things I found a bit disconcerting as I was growing up, was that there seemed to be a time in the past somewhere,in which all kinds of things that everyone says now are “bad,” were not so. That includes murder, rape, child molestation, you name it.
I’m not saying that for anything you can name, that there was universal support for it in the past, only that I have seen ancient stories that say positive things about anything you can name. The Christian Bible is infamous for the stories it contains where slavery was okay, where rape was approved, where having sex and bearing the children of strangers was cool, where lying was praised, and on and on. Genocide, you name it. And there are stories from other cultures that do the same thing.
I don’t think it’s necessarily so that human culture has changed that dramatically, I think it has more to do with the evolution of government. That is, since many older records we have, only exist because the autocratic government of that time and place had the records created, and lots of powerful people wanted their own moral failures and indulgences to be declared holy or at least morally acceptable because they WERE in charge. We have very few records of what the majority of common people thought or felt about things.
I don’t think that’s the right question. Of course morals are personal. But for me, my morality is absolute. If someone said “Murder and rape are wrong, unless everyone else is doing it, then knock yourself out,” we wouldn’t consider them to have morals at all.
If someone has different morals than me, they still have morals, even if I don’t agree with them. But if they vary based on popularity, they’re not morals at all, but something else. Certainly though, one’s morals can change over time as we gain experience and learn to examine the philosophy behind our morality.
Slavery was wrong even when it was legal, accepted and common. It probably wasn’t considered wrong to the slavers though. But that doesn’t matter to me, because I judge people according to my morality, not theirs. I’m sure Charles Manson thought he was doing the right thing, too. But to me and all other right thinking people, he was dead wrong.
Cool or not, how could I reasonably expect otherwise? Are we talking about “Judgment Day” judging, or everyday gossip-type judging? Either way, it seems to me that the act of judging, outside of a court of law, implies that the judge is using their own standards, as opposed to anyone else’s.
Ideally, a legal judge is using some impartial rules from a law book and widely accepted legal precedent, but I think that is just an ideal, and most judges probably use their own, uh, judgement to a fair degree. They certainly don’t issue verdicts according to the defendant’s personal morality.
Except even slavemasters didn’t think the slaves liked slavery. The whole scientific justification for slavery didn’t happen until the middle of the 18th Century, when slavery was under attack, yet more profitable than ever. And so earlier slavemasters like Jefferson and Washington held slaves even though they knew slavery was wrong, but the new modern breed had to find justifications for slavery. And even earlier than Jefferson and Washington there was the belief that it was OK to enslave people who weren’t Christians, and so Africans and Native Americans could be enslaved. Of course that justification had to be abandoned when the slaves converted to Christianity.
For most of slavery’s existence, slavery was justified as might makes right. We conquered you and took you prisoner and now you’re a slave. If you didn’t want to be a slave you should have won the war, or died fighting.
Of course there’s no such thing as absolute morality, morality exists in human brains as a way for humans to cooperate. Two slaveholders will still agree that it would be wrong to steal a slave from another slavemaster, because otherwise a slaveholding society wouldn’t be able to exist, it would collapse into anarchy. To really get going on exploiting your fellow man you have to cooperate with other fellow men, because if you don’t how are you all going to win that war where you enslaved those other guys?
How do you convince a bunch of soldiers to work together to fight a war and enslave their neighbors, if the soldiers are all sociopaths who lie, cheat and betray each other? You somehow have to trick the soldiers into treating their fellow soldiers as family. The society that does the best job doing this conquers the others. But of course there are always those who exploit the system from within and let their brother soldiers do all the dangerous work while they hang out in the rear with the gear. Or run away when the battle starts. Of course it’s rational to run away from a battle. But if your side all runs away the other side wins the battle, and then marches to your village and kills and enslaves everyone they can find.
So maybe don’t run away. The better you are at tricking your soldiers into not running away the better your soldier are at killing and enslaving their neighbors. And you do that by teaching them it would be morally wrong to run away and abandon their brother soldiers. The fact that they’d be ashamed to have their brother soldiers think of them as cowards has nothing to do with the fact that they’re not ashamed to rob, kill, rape, and enslave the people from the neighboring group.
And “morality is for weaklings” is kind of funny. Yeah, exactly. Morality is for weaklings, like all human beings. And it’s doubly funny for Ubermenschen to complain about how the weaklings and cowards are cheating by cooperating. If they’d only stop cooperating it would be so much easier for us superior beings to dominate them! Can’t they see they’re doing it wrong? How dare they use immoral tactics like morality!
Was slavery always so evil? I mean when the alternatives were killing POWs or executing prisoners instead of having them work off their time as indentured servants.
That’s a good point because slavery was a diverse practice. Arguably, we still practice slavery we just don’t call it slavery. But we did use Axis POWs as slave labor. Indentured servitude was also not necessarily an evil practice.
But permanent, lifelong, generational slavery has always been wrong. Even the Old Testament can’t endorse it unless the slave pledges himself to his master voluntarily.
The same way you know it’s wrong to rape or murder someone. Do I want to be a slave? No. Do people in general like being slaves? No. Is there any sort of punitive purpose in slavery that might override these issues? No.
These people didn’t think slavery was wrong because they didn’t view black people as fully human. (Or, at least, they convinced themselves of such.) We know they are. Therefore, slavery is wrong.
And that parenthetical is a big part of why there is an absolute morality. If there wasn’t, then you could convince yourself that something like rape or murder wasn’t really wrong. If you want to do something, you are in the best position to convince yourself that it’s okay. People do it all the time. Having absolute morals means you can see where the line is and stop that.
Now, the fact that I believe there is an absolute morality doesn’t mean that I think we know 100% what it is. But that doesn’t mean that I ignore what we do know for sure. And slavery being wrong is one of those things.
If it weren’t wrong, then why did it die out except in certain hidden situations? Sure, there was a war in the US. But there were other places where it was just shown to be morally wrong. The idea that slavery is not wrong was disproven, same as the idea that the Sun goes around the Earth.
There are things in the past that are understandable under the circumstances. You are the produce of your environment. But if I argued it wasn’t wrong, then I would be inherently arguing that it’s okay to have slavery again.
Yup - insofar as anything transcends time periods and cultures, it’s because we allowed it to do so, or agreed that it should, or accepted that we couldn’t easily change it, or felt like we probably shouldn’t
Most likely because it was useful to leave it be- not because it was in some way fundamentally different from everything else.
I suspect there are some things that have been consistently viewed as wrong throughout history.
Say, a man lives next door to his brother. One day they are out in the forest hunting together, and they find a pit full of gold. So they work together to excavate the pit, and dig out all the gold, which takes them many weeks. At the end of those weeks, one of them sneaks up behind the other brother and cuts his throat, buries the body in the pit, takes all the gold home, and lies about what happened to his brother.
Is there any society in human history in which that would be viewed as a neutral or admirable act?
Also, the theory that slaveholders didn’t view their slaves as fully human is just false. False, false, false. They thought they were inferior people, but they thought they were people.
This is all getting cause and effect backwards. Slaveowners didn’t start out believing that blacks were inferior and therefore it was justifiable to enslave them. Rather, they enslaved them and then tried to come up with justifications for enslaving them. As I said earlier, the original justification for enslaving Africans was that it was wrong to enslave Christians, but OK to enslave non-Christians. So we can enslave Muslim or pagan Africans no problem. Then those slaves converted to Christianity. Back in the day that meant the slave had to be freed, which actually happened. At first. Then that rationale was dropped, and by the time of the American Revolution the justification was simply that we enslaved them, we need their work, we can’t free them without disaster. Sure, slavery is wrong, but what can you do? Slavery is going to have to be abolished at some point as incompatible with the principles of the enlightenment, and the freed slaves dealt with somehow, but that’s not happening today. It was only later that scientific racism developed as the justification for slavery, and slavery declared as fully consistent with enlightenment principles because the slaves were an inferior breed of people.
In other words, racism didn’t justify slavery. Instead, slavery justified racism.
But the pertinent question is, were they given the choice of not working? Slavery isn’t just unpaid labor.
That wiki article says officers couldn’t be compelled to work, implying that enlisted prisoners could be. I’d say “forced to work against one’s will” is a pretty fair definition of slavery, taking the broad view and not the more specific “chattel” variety.
Of course that definition makes many types of prison labor slavery, which is probably why it was specifically exempted from the Thirteen Amendment. However, that makes some people uncomfortable.