Thank you, Heather Bennett, for a very important question.
When we ask whether we should hold historical figures to the standard of modern morality, there is perhaps an implicit premise that the societies of the past and our own society have different moral standards. This may assume that moral standards are sensitive to different cultures at different times. It may also assume that moral standards are sensitive to a particular consensus at a particular time.
Yet, these assumptions don’t seem immediately true. It seems odd to suggest that, if tomorrow, we all decided that skinning cats for fun was morally permissible, then skinning cats for fun would be morally permissible. Put another way, even if no one thought that a drowning boy was worth saving, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t save him. Similarly, there have been cultures that have practiced cannibalism, ritualized rape, and slavery, but that doesn’t mean that it was ever morally permissible to do so. A cultural consensus does not immediately equal moral permissibility.
This means that moral standards are not necessarily sensitive to cultural consensus. So, though there was, at many points in human history, a cultural consensus on the permissibility of some form of slavery, this does not mean that slavery was ever morally permissible. When we think of moral standards, we usually think of moral standards that persist through time and across cultures.
But perhaps the question is about whether we can blame historical figures for their participation in morally wrong practices. After all, it is much harder to not be a slaveholder in a society that not only permits it but also makes it a necessary component of economic success. Think about a contemporary criminal trial where you have two people who killed someone: one of the killers is a hitman; the other, an abused housewife. The killing is equally wrong in both cases, but there are different levels of blame. The difference in blame can be understood by appealing to the necessity of the choice: no one really blames the housewife, because she had no other reasonable options. Can something similar be said for historical figures?
Let’s take the example of slavery: Can we blame historical figures for owning slaves in a society where it was commonplace?
First, this suggests that for many historical figures, there were no alternatives; that they were effectively forced to adopt morally wrong practices as their own. However, this situation was historically rare. In the case of slavery, the practice was only “necessary” as a means to accumulate excessive wealth and as a means to national expansion. In other words, slavery was a necessary means to non-necessary ends, and so the adoption of the practice was itself non-necessary.
Second, at least in the modern age, it would be wrong to suggest that people just didn’t understand that slavery was wrong. In fact, in Great Britain, the impermissibility of slavery had been upheld in courts as early as 1102 and again in 1569 and 1700. In France, Louis X, in 1315, published a decree that said that any slave who set foot on French soil was free. In the US, Thomas Jefferson, despite himself being a slaveholder, included strong anti-slavery language in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. So, regarding slavery, there are certainly many cases which prove that historical figures understood the moral wrong-ness of their own actions.
Unlike the abused housewife, then, we can understand these historical figures as having made a free choice, and therefore a choice for which they ought to be held responsible.
What do you think? Should historical figures be held to today’s moral standards? Let us know in the comments.
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Image: Black Lives Matter protestors pushing the statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour (07/06/2020). Edward Colston (1636-1721) was an English merchant and Tory Member of Parliament; he was involved in the slave trade.
I have a Masters degree in Philosophy from the University of South Carolina where I wrote a thesis on Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy under Konstantin Pollok. I am currently doing a PhD at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) in the project “Universal Moral Laws” under Pauline Kleingeld. I am interested in Kant’s legal and political philosophy as well as contemporary jurisprudence and republicanism. Predictably, then, my favorite philosophical work is Kant’s Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. This work contains, in my mind, some of most important ideas for the possibility of universal and objective moral laws.