Ask them if they’d rather see their children die or be taken away to live as slaves and the answers would be quite different. Most parents would rather die than see their children die, yet most parents whose children die go on living and in time even have moments of not-unhappiness.
Unlike You With the Face you’re too intelligent and well read not to have heard of ‘fallacy of the excluded middle’. To say the Holocaust was objectively evil is to say that that there is a point at which moral relativity is bullshit, not that all moral relativity is bullshit. How many fundamentalists would argue that gay sex is evil and transcends moral relativity?
Then there’s cultural relativity as well. Let’s take the other of Abraham Lincoln’s “twin relics of barbarism”- Mormon polygamy. If somebody were to say “Joseph Smith was the prophet of God who revealed to him that the American Indians were descendants of Israelites and there were beautiful large cities and chariots in the Americas 3,000 years ago. For about 50 years God also instructed the truly righteous who could afford it to take plural wives, but then in 1890 he rescinded it.”
You and I and pretty much everybody we know or hang with is going to, if they are in a polite and non-argumentative mood, smile and nod and say “Interesting” while thinking “Joseph Smith was little more than a sideshow huckster and not one piece of archaeological, linguistic, genetic or scientific evidence supports his absurd and largely plagiarized claims and and to the contrary every objective study of said evidence absolutely refutes his claims, and polygamy started because Smith was horny and the only way he could get his wife and his flock to accept his shagging every woman who cast a shadow on him was to clothe it in a bogus divine revelation, and it’s no coincidence that “God’s decision to rescind” the Principle came when the Federal government was arresting Mormon leaders and padlocking church property left right and center.” This is the opinion of most Americans in fact, even those who are of an evangelical stripe and thus not the least bit controversial.
In Utah and Arizona there are large towns and cities where the majority of the people who choose to believe Joseph Smith was the prophet of God. Is this because all of the stupid people wound up in Utah and Arizona? No, in fact many devout Mormons are highly intelligent and well educated professionals; their ranks include some of the richest businessmen and some of the best surgeons in the world. They would also roll their eyes and make a cuckoo motion along with you if a Scientologist began telling you both about thetans and L. Ron Hubbard’s great insights and probably even tell you “L. Ron Hubbard was a 5th rate sci-fi fantasy novelist who openly bragged about how he was going to found a cult”. I see the acceptance of slavery as more connected to this kind of cognitive dissonance.
To some degree moral relativity absolutely exists. Anybody who says it doesn’t is probably a member of one of the many One True Religions. To us, slavery is evil.
Here we get into the Great Debate territory of “What is objectively evil?”, or "Was it as wrong for Julius Caesar and Aristotle and Alexander the Great and the pharaohs and African chieftains and Celtic queens to own slaves as it was for Jefferson Davis? Was the fact that Major Robert Anderson (Union commander who surrendered Fort Sumter) owned slaves equal to or lesser than the fact that P.G.T. Beauregard (Anderson’s former friend and artillery student and commander of the Confederate artillery bombardment) owned slaves? Were slaveowners who were good to their slaves (and they did exist) less evil than those who beat and sexually abused their slaves or is this on par with saying “Leslie Van Houten is the moral superior of Susan Atkins but both should have been electrocuted 40 years ago so who the fuck cares?”
What of Sherman, who despised blacks and referred to them continually as niggers and rolled his eyes at the paperwork caused by his General Jefferson C. Davis (no relation) cutting the bridge at Ebeneezer Creek, or for that matter his taking a war of complete terrorism and destruction to a civilian population which was condemned in newspapers throughout the north and Europe (“I’d shoot every reporter in the land if I could and they’d have dispatches from hell come morning”) an equal to or lesser than evil than slavery? Or since it served a greater good- Union victory- was the damage done by his men- much of it to slaves and near all of it on the interior to civilians- alright? Then we move into things like the atomic bomb- true: more than 100,000 Japanese died within days and many times that number suffered irreversible damage/also true: it probably saved tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. To what extent does exitus acta probat prove true?
That murdering innocent and defenseless men, women and children solely because of their ethnicity is objectively evil (if anything is) is evidenced by the fact that even the Nazis knew it was evil; they tried like hell to cover up the evidence (hard to do when you document kills in triplicate) and while the war was still going on they lied to both the Jews and to the German people (the Jews are being taken into protective custody for now and after the war will be relocated to Madagascar", or the fact that Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt was filmed in German for Germans is evidence of this- they KNEW it was mass murder.
Southerners did not attempt to hide slavery any more than Mormons attempted to hide polygamy (once they built Great Salt Lake City- until then it’s true they did). They- as a society (there were certainly many exceptions on the individual level) did not view it as an evil. That we do see it as an objective evil is a testament to how far we’ve come, and again we should look around and see what will we be judged for and how valid is it.
All of which gets even further from the fact we can all agree on which is what the whole damned thread is about anyway: McDonnell is a douchebag in need of disposal.
