by anonymous908213 | 2025-11-30 16:38:06+00:00
I'm on the side of "some kings deserve credit", but I think:

>Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth".

is a rather weak argument. Moral advances actually are "made from whole cloth". Morality is objective[1] and can be reasoned from first principles. For example, murder. Murder is not wrong because Yahweh says so. Murder is wrong because the murderer stands to gain virtually nothing, while the murdered loses everything. This discrepancy in gain vs. loss results in a massively net negative impact to society and is therefore objectively bad. However, there are other scenarios where killing someone results in a net positive (or at least less negative than the alternative) to society, for example self-defense against a criminal would-be murderer, and these cases we understand to not be murder.

People have been capable of complex reasoning for as long as we have history. Our predecessors had less information than us available to them, but they still had the same capacity for intelligence and there are plenty of examples of impressive reasoning performed by people thousands of years ago.

So talking about, say, slavery, particularly the exceptionally vile race-based slavery practiced by Americans... it did not take a zeitgeist to understand it was bad. Plenty of people were capable of reasoning about the absolute hypocrisy of the slave-owning founding fathers proclaiming all men born equal from the day America proclaimed its independence. The zeitgeist that ended slavery in America was enough people feeling compelled to take action rather than let the status quo be; even if you understand slavery is bad, it's easier to simply selfishly benefit from it, or even if you don't benefit from it, doing nothing is yet still awfully more appealing than fighting and dying in a civil war over it.

Under that lens, I will absolutely judge historical figures. The slave-owning founding fathers, for instance, are scum who should not be revered. They especially had the education and the experience of perceived tyranny, yet maintained and benefitted from a system they were perfectly capable of reasoning to be worse than the one they revolted against. In fact, they manufactured their own zeitgeist from scratch. If they had wanted to, they certainly could have made the abolition of slavery part of it.

[1] Stating "morality is objective" can come across as arrogant (it may be read as "my moral perspective is the objectively correct one"), so I want to elaborate a bit in a digression. Morality is objective, but not necessarily easy. There are many complex situations, reasoning is actually often quite challenging, and lack of information can confound attempts at reasoning. There are many cases where if you asked me if something was moral, my answer would be "I don't know" rather than baselessly asserting one way as objectively correct. However, many cases like the morality of race-based slavery are trivially easy to reason about, and we have a rich historical record of writing produced by people hundreds of years ago preserved showing they were capable of conducting this reasoning with the information available to them long before the zeitgeist that compelled action to end it.