Is it ok to judge historical figures and events by 21st century moral standards?

...

Yes and no.
Yes in the context that we wouldn't tolerate poeple still doing certain things people used to do because of our own current standards.
No because at the same time in a historical those things would have been acceptable back then and condemning them doesn't undo them.

We wouldn't put pikes up people's backsides and parade them around like Vlad the impaler used to but we still accept he did that shit.

Not particularly. All past societies even 400 years ago would be so alien in morality that pretty much everyone would be a giant dickhead. Average citizens who went to church and sought salvation would also go to public executions and tortures like a Sunday picnic. Romans had slaves but trusted them with their lives and property, and the slaves felt love for their masters.

Context is key. Ghengis khan condemning people to death was not heinous for the time. Ghengis Khan ordering the massacre of a million Muslim inhabitants of Baghdad certainly was.

yes in certain areas, no on meme SJW/cultural marxist standards

You can admire someone for being more progressive than their time and hate if they're excessively shitty (as in notably so) as well. But in general, no. 21st century people mostly don't measure up to extreme 21st century moral standards as is.

>Judging historical figures in moral standards

Why? It doesn't change the decisions they made or the impact of those decisions?

You're doing it wrong if you're looking to label people of the past and it makes me question your intentions if that is your purpose for historical study.

I only judge their standards of living to our own if I encounter someone who says they wish they were born essentially any time before WWII. Comparisons to other time periods are only useful if they're next to each other, which is why we can objectively say for example the end of a unified Roman Empire in Europe was a negative thing. Same with the Mongol invasions and decolonisation. You want to maintain a certain detachment but not so much that you're blinded to real objectively negative effects certain events have on the people living through it.

>It doesn't change the decisions

Yes it certainly could. Determining the intent can change how we perceive policy making. Did Alexander conquer the Persian Empire in an act of self defense, pursuit of eudaimonia, bringing Hellenism to the East, greed? Looking at their nature can allow better interpretation

No. Hitler was right.

Except it doesn't. Whether Alexander the great conquered Persia for self defense or greed, he still conquered the Persian empire.

Looking at it morally or ethically does nothing of serious value but insert your own ideaologies into past events anachronistically, when it's almost completely unfalsifiable.

Sure you can study history and make interpretations based on the context with which it happened but try to insert 21st century morals into it is misguided at best and purposely disingenuous at worst.

Nope.

yes

Morality never really changes. Slaughtering innocents with disgust people of the past just as much as it does in the present. Only thing that really changes is technology that makes upholding said morality easier/possible. Most moral problems come from "desperate times/ desperate measures" mentality but as long as people keep vigilant, learn form past mistakes, and seek alternative solutions to those "desperate times" before it happens. The "learn for past mistakes" part not only justifies examining the past through modern scrutiny, but makes it necessary so we don't fall into the same pitfalls as they did.

I don't see why not historical figures are humans like us.

The belief they aren't is what lead modern day people to do the same bullshit they did. People will look back at us in history with the War on Terror and Trump election and say "they are past people, they shouldn't be held to the standards of us intelligent present people" as they go to war for no reason and vote another asshole into the presidency (if there is such thing as an election in the future).

>is it ok
SPOOKY

We are the ones who are extremely immoral based on a 17th century moral standard.

In the past few centuries we legalized sodomy, committed regicide, legalized the murder of children, and tried to defy God in every way imaginable. We are the monsters, not our ancestors.

>committed regicide
more fall of monarchies were peaceful and England apologized for their king-slaying

only Russia and France are regicidal assholes

The belief that we shouldn't judge historical figures or events is the same as using the argument from tradition ("It was done before in the past, so it cannot be wrong, who are we to judge ?) We can judge what the ancestors did. Not in peremptory way, but we can at least tell if something was wrong and make a choice about whether we want to reproduce that. That is what civilization is all about : preventing certain bad things to happen so that we can live under a level of violence and injustice that remains manageable.

From a strictly historical point of view it's not okay.

>like two months later
>still libs fearmongering on the history board

The problem with "everyone was like that back then" arguments is that it is invariably bullshit. Take slavery for example. Yes, most people may have been pro-slavery X years ago. But the fact that abolitionists existed too proves that people did have the capacity to oppose the practice, in which case it would be ridiculous to completely disculpate the anti-abolitionists.

>not using historical materialism
wew lad

Yes. You just have to apply it fairly.


No demanding Japan apologize for Nanking without also apologizing for the strategic bombing campaign.

No defending Churchill without mentioning the famines he caused.

>if somebody throws a punch at you and you punch them back, you're both equally guilty

The apologies should go to the civilians who were targeted.

There are no perpetrators left to apologize. If we insist Japans' current leadership were in the wrong for targeting civilians and should apologize, we should say the same for all current leadership.


Should Japan issue apologies for their actions during the war? Or only for starting the war?

>le "morality is not multifaceted" meme

Yes as long as you can understand their rational. Like the guy that killed the tenplars:

>They were heavilly compensated and couldnt deliver
>he had a large debt to them
>human life didnt matter until recently

Then you look at people at Gjengis khan and assume that they actually were a little stupid, applying mountain savagery to cities and being a father.

Except the US didn't target civilians.

They targeted industry, in a campaign that saved untold lives by defanging the Japanese war machine.

As it turns out, there's no way to conduct meaningful attacks on industry without harming civilians. The US spent billions on the norden bombsite in an effort to do exactly that, and it just didn't work.

>Except the US didn't target civilians.

They did.

>They targeted industry, in a campaign that saved untold lives by defanging the Japanese war machine.

They targeted cities with industry in them, with the intention of burning down the houses of workers.

>As it turns out, there's no way to conduct meaningful attacks on industry without harming civilians. The US spent billions on the norden bombsite in an effort to do exactly that, and it just didn't work.

These isn't

In WWII, they weren't trying. They were trying to bomb the houses of workers, and they were succeeding. American terrorism against Imperial Japan worked, they surrendered rather than face more civilian deaths.

I think its okay to judge history with modern moral standards but its important to keep in mind what those people actually cared about.

Gender equality, for example, in the past, it didnt matter. Women's suffrage doesnt matter when nobody has suffrage. Men never dominated women because everyone was doninated by the very few elite.

No. But that doesn't stop anyone from doing it anyways.

I don't think it's unreasonable to regard historical figures as despicable, commendable or anything in-between, but it might be a good idea to try and see the value of moral standards besides your own, so you might understand how their actions could be seen as reasonable and why they felt they were justified, before you judge.

What? the Roman's and Greeks literally allowed the "exposure/ killing of new born babies who were physically unfit/deformed or they couldn't afford another(girl) child. This perspective did not change much in the 17 century. All we do is induce the miscarriage of fetuses. I really wish /pol/ would stop being so dramatic about abortion. On top of that, at least the death penalty is illegal in most place unlike certain 17th century civilizations.

>John Green hates Medieval Europe
>Nothing but praise for the middle east and Mongols

No. Comparing the morality of historical people's culture to your own is akin to ethnocentrism. People 200-1000s of years ago were basically living in a completely different culture no matter where they were.

Wew lad this is some serious bullshit

>yes

>Morality never really changes. Slaughtering innocents with disgust people of the past just as much as it does in the present. Only thing that really changes is technology that makes upholding said morality easier/possible. Most moral problems come from "desperate times/ desperate measures" mentality but as long as people keep vigilant, learn form past mistakes, and seek alternative solutions to those "desperate times" before it happens. The "learn for past mistakes" part not only justifies examining the past through modern scrutiny, but makes it necessary so we don't fall into the same pitfalls as they did.

good thing technology makes retaliation against drones and nanotechnology more difficult, so that the old scarecrow "what goes around comes is round" is vanishing with powerless victims being no more dangerous than chickens in kfc slaughterhouses

>The problem with "everyone was like that back then" arguments is that it is invariably bullshit. Take slavery for example. Yes, most people may have been pro-slavery X years ago. But the fact that abolitionists existed too proves that people did have the capacity to oppose the practice, in which case it would be ridiculous to completely disculpate the anti-abolitionists.

which rewards are awaiting in the afterlife those who comply to objective ahistorical morality instead of doing what is rewarded by their earthly society?

If you are looking at historical figures and events as a historian would, then absolutely not. Using modern/contemporary moral standards is call "presentism" and is to be absolutely avoided in historical study.

>We wouldn't put pikes up people's backsides and parade them around like Vlad the impaler used to but we still accept he did that shit.

Most people would have found this pretty gruesome even for 16-17th century standards

>Looking at their nature can allow better interpretation

Yes but this is only effective if done in their context, trying to figure out Alexander's motivations based on 21st century morality isn't going to help you figure out why a guy who had no notion of 21st century morality made a decision.

Though I guess when it comes to the guy you're replying to your post is valid, ignoring their contemporary moral standards is a little silly.

>The problem with "everyone was like that back then" arguments is that it is invariably bullshit.

There's a difference between "everyone was like that back then" to "that was the accepted standard". It's the baseline, the measuring stick from which people will inevitably deviate on occasion.

Perhaps in the future pedophilia will be totally normal and people will look sideways at our bizarre taboo on pedophilia, and you can say "yeah well some pedophiles at the time got it!" That doesn't really change the standard morality of our society.

>Men never dominated women because everyone was doninated by the very few elite.
You're getting it wrong. Social structures, or the patriarchy, if you may, was reproduced through those few elites.

Not really in my opinion

If you came back from the dead in 500 years and found out people looked back on your life and disregarded you as an evil moralist because you didn't believe there were 25 different genders you'd feel pretty pissed

oh i dunno man, maybe?

No. History supposed to be read in neutral, 3rd perspective and not like those Heroes vs Villains comic books. The biggest mistake that most people are they tend to view history in Black and White, Good vs Evil. This will lead to bias, the worst sin in History subject.

>I don't see why not historical figures are humans like us.

thats exactly why not

if history is anything objective, reliable, scientific in some sense, then the subjects must be aproached objectively, idealy with no bias, no personal coment or moralisation, simply a record of things that happened, and perhaps a discussion on why and how

same thing goes for archeology, or paleontology, or forensics etc...

now this is never truly the case, history is endemicaly burdened by biases and ideology, even the records themselves let alone the interpretations and constant revisions, but one of the most absurd is moralisation

firstly its absurd because to hold a moral oppinion on something that already happened acomplishes nothing and changes nothing, the notion that some side in some war was 'wrong' to do this or that or that some cultural practice was 'immoral' or that this or that was 'justified' only reflects the moral biases of the one who points it out, and adds nothing of value to the discussion

secondly its inevitably made from a certain ideological position, and is basicaly a biased value judgment, and as such it inevitably pushes towards some sort of distortion, overemphasizing or underemphasizing some aspect, often implicit or 'meta', and inevitably using the historical event or fact as a proxy for some current year issue, which usualy leads to revisionism and fabrication

thirdly its absurd because history is about things that happen, that this involves conscius human agents makes no difference, in fact even those conscious human agents and their behavior and their logic and morals and culture etc... are all things that happen, same as mountains rising or rivers moving across a landscape or birds migrating, there literaly is no moral dimension to them whatsoever, there is no value judgment to be made, theres nothing ethical about it, shit happens, human organisms behave individualy and collectively as they do, history is a record of this, thats it

yes, as long as you don't fall prey to confirmation bias and twist the facts to suit your preconceived notions

It accomplishes us learning of the agents of whatever tragedy was involved, even though there is going to be bias there is some facts that we can observe and even the biases can be compared with our own, and even agents beyond human control then can be controlled in the present with good foresight (since history can show us the actions that came before the event) and technology.

These fuckers are not fictional characters, they are people like us, and think like us, so it will be easier to understand what we will do in a situation they find themselves in (whether not we actually accept it).

What annoys me more is when people like Genghis Khan and others get attributed to creating flourishing trade when that was never their intent, just a side effect, and to even make that possible he had to destroy and kill so many, but that is often forgvien.

It's "ok" as long as you don't let it blind you from understanding and learning from the past. Too often people leap from "past morals don't necessarily make sense in today's society" to "all of history was a hellish dark age that we must move away from completely". The belief that only modern thought matters and we must blindly pursue "progress" means we're just going to blunder into crises that we should've learned not to repeat from history.

Is it OK to judge current events by Bronze Age concepts of morality?

define 'okay'

thats precisely why moralising it is wrong, just technicaly wrong, you gave the precise reason why its wrong

>These fuckers are not fictional characters, they are people like us, and think like us, so it will be easier to understand what we will do in a situation they find themselves in (whether not we actually accept it).

those are accouts of humans, and yes in a certain sense they are 'like us', and understandig them is part of understanding ourselves and current events or situations, but the problem is simply that this has no moral dimension, its like a autopsy or a medical trial, and the things it shows us are actualy frightening and problematic, and applying moral biases to them is both a way to avoid and obfuscate this, especialy insofar as it tells us about ourselves and others as human beings, and a way to missunderstand the whole story, to completely miss the point

on that logic one can't apply morality to people in present time as well

Why not simply say "yes by my special snowflake standards"?

in a profound sense that is true, perhaps a certain ethic, or ethical logic, but not morality

this is part of the problem, you could say its part of the 'human problem'

then shall we apply history to ethical logic?

Generally speaking I would say no.

However for those that have raised WW2 I wold point out that it only happened just over 70 years ago, not in 500 BC. It's fine to judge the actions of Hitler or Stalin or indeed Churchill by today's moral standards.

its doubtful that this can be avoided, any worthwhile system of ethics references the past one way or another

"I don't know diary. But do you? Let's go to the thought bubble."

"But was Nazi Germany really so bad? They had [etc. etc. etc.]"