Moral Judgments on People from Past Epochs and Different Cultures

      I struggle with this one. Condemning Aristotle for his views on slavery and women, Robert E. Lee for his defense of slavery, or Dante and Aquinas for their thinking that those whom they had to understand as ‘heretics’ belong in a lower circle of Hell; or even my grandparents for their uncritical acceptance of a division of family labor between man and woman that most find unacceptable today – I find it easy to condemn the beliefs of Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, and Lee on these points, but more difficult condemning the people. Perhaps what bothers me most is the man who penned the Declaration of Independence – “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal” – was a slaveholder himself (with a bad conscience) and supported a constitution that made slavery quasi-legal and afforded political protections for it. I could today only visit the monument to him in Washington D.C. with very ambivalent feelings – as opposed to the reverence I felt in its presence when there as a school child. 

      Of course, it is a Christian commonplace to condemn the sin, but not the sinner (we are all sinners); that we have our lives in a community of sin; that our culture is meaning-blind to other things we will be condemned for by future generations; that we cannot say how we might have acted had been born into those other worlds, and so on. These valid and familiar arguments do some work but don’t completely remove my discomfort with it. I would like to reflect on this by reflecting on a passage from Gaita’s A Common Humanity:

 

 Cultures are partly defined and distinguished by what is unthinkable in them – unthinkable not in the sense that no one ever thinks them, but in the sense that they are beyond argument; they are ‘indefensible’ because any serious attempt to defend them would show one to lack the judgment necessary for the proper exercise of reason on the matters in question. Or, in the case of moral matters, because it is wicked even to contemplate them. It is, for example, unthinkable that we should eat our dead or can them for pet food in order to reduce the slaughter of animals. Any argument that led to such a conclusion would have found its reductio ad absurdum. It is also in the same sense unthinkable that we should consider murder as a means for political advancement. We have not considered this an option in political life and rejected it on moral grounds. It is not up for serious consideration. That distinguishes us fundamentally from some other cultures, in which political murder is practiced or – more importantly for the point I am making – considered an option amongst others and then rejected for fear of its consequences. What is unthinkable is different for different cultures and changes from time to time (181).

 

I think it is fair to say that for the cultures Aristotle, Jefferson, and Lee inhabited, to see slavery as a moral evil or Africans as fully the equals of the causations was, if not impossible, then possible only after a difficult revolution that would have destroyed their identity as well as their roots in their respective communities. I am sure not even Jefferson could do it, and it polluted him. I am not sure about the culture of antiquity, where slavery (which was not really racially based) might have been so ingrained that to imagine a world without it may have disqualified a person who imagined it as unhinged; if this is so, then however sick I get when I read Aristotle’s view of slavery, it is the views and the cultural views I condemn. He is not without some blame. He was a great intellect. One feels he should have seen through the cultural acceptance of slavery rather than adapting his own philosophy to accommodate it – to the detriment of his philosophy. Indeed, that Plato’s moral thought, while not explicitly defending abolition, plants the seeds for it because it is incompatible with it, is a key to the greater wisdom of Plato over his student – though for Aristotle precisely this feature of Plato meant that for him (and the culture) Plato was a crank ‘trying to defend a thesis at any cost’ – namely, the thesis that the evil-doer is absolutely more to the pitied as wretched than his victims because he, in contrast to them, has poisoned his very soul.

        But in the American south more enlightened and indeed moral views did enter Jefferson’s and Lee’s world, and indeed their own persons. They struggled with their cultures views, the views of their own lived experience, and the moral views that condemned the practice and would not allow them to translate what they knew in their head fully to their heart and into their actions. Lee, in any case, had to deform his Christianity to make it compatible with slavery and racism; he had a slave whipped; he was unrepentant; he had to rationalize his decision to defend the slave power rather than the constitution, to which he had sworn an oath. I think Jefferson would have never sided with the Confederacy and welcomed the emancipation he should have helped bring about. Jefferson did not offer any defense of his actions except the fear that emancipation might result in a bloodbath. Both were aware that slavery was evil, though Lee more superficially.  I am not sure either really believed blacks were morally fully our equals. Still I judge them both less harshly than I would one of my contemporaries (all things being equal) for whom the idea of human dignity is a powerful cultural Ideal if not a reality and who grow up in a society without slavery or even the worst, overt forms of segregation.

     I also struggle with those decision-makers in WWII who authorized the terror bombing of German and Japanese civilians, and dropping the Bomb on two defenseless cities. It is hard to judge people on the one hand when you cannot be in their situation; it is impossible to excuse such actions for fear that the past be glorified in the service of some ideology.

       I know a woman whose lived experience and cultural inputs ingrained in her the belief that her worth as a human being was a function of her power to sexually attract men, which in turn was a function of the degree to which she corresponded to the very physical Ideal or model of a female body – roughly the body of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl, with somewhat bigger breasts. Now she knows this ideal is de-meaning and de-valuing of women as human beings – a form of woman-hating. But the program is just as strong in her as ever. I know that given the climate catastrophe unfolding and the horrific conditions animals suffer under through the power of industrial meat, I should not eat meat. Yet I find it extremely difficult to give up the occasional hamburger. The slaveholders Jefferson and Lee were in a similar condition, but with more on the line.

        I guess what I am saying is that it is more important than ever to condemn slavery and racism; and we are all responsible for our views before our maker, so to speak, though in a human way. We are limited; we are fallible; we are indeed sinners. ‘There for the grace of God go you or I’ – a good cliché. Indeed, to have been born into the Jefferson or Lee families seems more a misfortune than those beggars and homeless people we usually apply the cliché to, if one thinks of one’s immortal soul. Aristotle is further away from us, more like trying to condemn the Chinese emperor for the practice of having concubines. Unthinkable for ‘us,’ not for ‘them’. So much good or bad is simply a gift or a curse of culture. (Of course, our deepest sympathy belongs to the victims of slavery and racism, and not the slave holders and racists. But this has been a reflection on my attitude to the latter.)

     I do know this: though I did not own any slaves, though I am guilty only of the evils I have done, my relationship to the ancestors of those whose ancestors were dehumanized by my ancestors is importantly defined by this history. It would be wrong of me to be indifferent. It would be wrong to imagine I were a little Absolute disconnected from the world and its history. We belong to each other; we cannot be free of one another – and should not strive to be.  History defines our moral starting points, the meaning of our relations with one another. You can’t ignore it or falsify it without blotting out reality in preference to a virtual reality.

      And I know this: my hesitancy to condemn Aristotle or Jefferson or Truman for dropping the Bomb on defenseless cities may in no way serve as a justification or relativization of evil done. Apologies for past sinners may not ever rationalize a fake, imaginary sentimental picture of the past to legitimize current regimes and their agendas. I despise the way history has been misused in my country.