The following response was provoked when, on remarking that certain practices of the past were not the result of special malignancy, but rather the result of unexamined habit, someone else responded to me that it wasn’t necessary to make excuses; the practice existed and was bad. Which was technically true, but so was my comment. Thus there was between us a pitting of moral instincts, moral understanding vs moral judgment. Their attitude struck me as license to make harsh, anachronistic judgments. But my objector saw it as necessary for sustaining present moral judgement (although the people in question were theoretical people of the past). They saw my perspective as license to make excuses for bad behavior of the past that any decent person should reject and condemn. So here is my response.

I judge this to be a particular feature of our age, that we are especially judgmental and self-righteous when it comes to making opinions of other times. And it was a particular feature of other ages, that they made such judgements of the people of other places, but tended to venerate the contributions of the past. Because their cultural moral judgements were especially locationally bound and ours are especially time bound (because neither of us are willing to travel much, except as snotty tourist contextualizing all we see in terms of our own local superiority), it is not clear that either is fundamentally superior or wise. Both are improved in the acuuracy of their judgment by perspective.

It is a mistake to decide that I do not (and need not) have the moral imagination to conceive of any reason for you believing or doing something other than a condition of special moral reprehensibility on your part. It is also an oversight not to at least entertain the possibility that the conditions which produced an opinion or course of action (especially one that was commonly or widely held) are not relevant to our moral assessment of an individual or class of individuals. Right and wrong aren’t determined by popular opinion or the time on a clock. But it is worth understanding our own assumptions and the assumptions of others when we go around assigning blame based on the disconnect between the two. We’re they here, the people of the past would likely be just as quick to condemn us for much of our differences.

The retrospective assumption we possess is that everything we at this moment think or believe or conclude as our standard is relevant in judging all previous systems and products that led to our present system and product.

This assumption is very anachronistic, because it considers certain moral assumptions of our own age as obvious, closed issues, and not as genuine questions that provoked a range of what seemed, at the time, reasonable answers.

The ability to judge people of another time or place is often most reliant upon the difference in the amount we feel it is reasonable to assume our own position. In other words, how we define reasonable moral expectations. Even if we conclude that we have, in fact, reached the best conclusions, it is useful when observing others and making judgements about them, to consider whether their own conclusions seemed reasonable enough to them, based on their own experience and theories.

If studying history (or even truly studying the present) teaches us anything, it’s that some moral conclusions that we take as obvious are in no way obvious except to such people as ourselves, those sharing our background and experience and history, and were not the conclusions reached by a vast number of people of other times, places, and culture. In fact, in many cases our own beliefs are in the historical and cultural minority, and only achieved the traction they did as a result of our own culture’s success in the world.

Votes of confidence based on such factors of success have often been made in favor of many civilizations of differing values and beliefs. And thier currency was vulnerable to the depreciation of their cultural cache, when and if their wealth and power faded. The gods of Egypt did not long survive the fall of the Egyptian kingdom. In fact one of the few rare examples one can observe that bucks that trend is the Jewish religion (and also to a degree Christianity). Curiously, neither of these faiths seemed to be served by cultural success, according to their own history, but rather were degraded by it.

I suppose the question we must is, how much can we impugn individual people, view them as specially good or specially bad, better or worse than us (and I think this attitude in us is really the important moral question), for believing and assuming what everyone else at the time assumed and believed, for taking for granted the things that seemed reasonable to everyone at the time? How can you judge people for failing to recognize what was in no way apparent to them as a matter for judgment, but rather firm and settled convention?

That’s actually a very hard question. It demands of us that we ponder our own position and how people of other times might judge or criticize us for the things we take for granted. There are things in our lives and society that they would likely be horrified by, and not less horrified because we do not even observe them as objects of concern, founded as they are in pervasive, fundamental moral assumptions of our age. What assumptions might future generations have reached as conclusions of their experience (and possibly as a result of our present and future failures) that will cause them to judge and despise us as an especially corrupt and degraded people?

How much can we blame people for what everybody knows? How much can we blame the few for what everybody knew? How much can we blame them for not knowing what nobody knew? How much worse does it make them than us? How much better does it make us than them? How much traction can we truly get from the argument, “Well, it’s obvious that…” when it wasn’t obvious to most people at the time and is only obvious to us now as the result of a very complex historical and cultural and philosophical process that has produced our current assumptions? When our own arrival at those assumptions was historically conditional upon the process of development that led to them and included as necessary steps all the intervening (if less complete, by our perspective) stages? And what stages or even massive changes and corrections might yet be in our future that would render our own assumptions despicable and ignorant to future consideration?

Of course we do not want to increase our understanding and sympathy so much that we are no longer able to make moral judgements about what we should do and how to better our world and our lot. But there is, I believe, a difference between making analyzing moral beliefs and theories, and moral judgements about people.

Moral judgements about people are limited in their validity and effectiveness (since their object is appropriate action) by their proximity to one’s own life. Thus the injunction against removing the plank from your own eye before removing the speck from your neighbors. An amusing way of putting it, since it also captures the inherent problem of perspective. A speck in your own eye will have a far more massive effect on your own vision because of its proximity to you, even if it is no bigger in actuality than that which sullies your neighbor’s eye. This idiom enjoins us to view the significance of the speck appropriately and respond with moral action appropriate to the problem it presents, while acknowledging that both parties may have something in their eyes. A position of easy moral judgment of others’ blindness is easy to maintain if you ascribe to an ideological blindness based on perspective.

This understanding of individual people does not preclude judgements about what actions or situations were right or wrong or what we might do to improve them, but it does give us the ability to have some sympathy for the people who made such errors, the conditions that caused them, and can help to provide real wisdom about the way in which such decisions and actions can be reached, what produces them, and so help to inform our provide self-criticism of our own actions. And this is the great benefit of such an approach. Not that it makes moral judgements about others impossible, but that it makes them wise and informed with regard to our own actions and prevents us from finding a false security in our own assumptions that we are unwilling to grant to others. It forces us to grant the same understanding to others that we grant to ourselves and commits us to the same judgment of ourselves as we mete out to others.

In my opinion my original explanation or excuse (however you view it) was relevant, because the preceding discussion was about how assumptions about the intentions of different people and assumptions about the meaning of certain outcomes could lead you to make erroneous moral judgements and inadvertently promote rather than prevent injustice.

In my mind, what people of a given time assumed and how it caused them to act was actually very relevant. Both the people of now and the people then likely have reasons for thinking and acting how they did, as well as sets of unexamined assumptions that might be misdirecting their moral judgements. I think what bothered me most was the apparent function of the objection being to place ourselves, in our point in time, on the side of the angels, and aligning the people of all past times with the forces of hell, rather than any real effort to actually understand their perspectives, our own, or what perspective either of us should have.

The refusal to even listen to explanations in the service of current judgmental expediency (which is really primarily about status rather than action, since it’s just an attitude about our own superior relation to goodness and has nothing to do with any immediate practical questions of action or any real people we know or are dealing with; it’s about passing judgement on trans-temporal abstractions and achieving some sort of cosmic justice by shaming them or congratulating ourselves) is hardly a road to either personal or cultural moral enlightenment.

Now, I admit that I have made similar statements myself. And I understand their usefulness. I’ve used them especially with my children, when they offer reams of explanations for their actions, usually trying to justify or explain them in some way that will get them out of trouble. And sometimes I have said that I don’t want to hear explanations, I just want the room cleaned up or the shouting to stop, or that some hard moral line was crossed like hitting your sister or screaming at your mom, and that has to be dealt with regardless of whatever produced the situation. The conditions that produces the infraction are irrelevant. The difference, I suppose, is that such explanations are set aside for the demand of the moment, because there is an immediate question of response and action that must be met.

Even from my own experience I’ve learned, though, that being unwilling to listen does sometimes cause my judgement to go astray. Often there is more to the story that would have changed how I dealt with the situation. It doesn’t change the fact that a wrong was done, but both for moral evaluation as well as for moral correction (knowing how to best address and fix the problem), it’s actually very useful to understand it. If you don’t understand the circumstances that produced a bad situation, you’re unlikely to be able to determine how to remedy it. And if your discussion is centered around potentially harmful attempts to remedy a bad situation, such understanding can be especially necessary.

Of course not everyone will see things the same. Some people will see certain issues as very simple, and have little interest in the moral complexity of the conditions that produced them, and prefer to see such matter as simple acts of evil done by people acting in bad faith. Because they assume similar knowledge and assumptions and conditions on the part of the people they see as having erred, it is easy enough to reach such a conclusion.

There are a lot of arguments made these days that center around skipping or even forbidding as immoral and offensive, complexity in service of moral expediency. Justice must be rendered, the need is immediate. So there is no room for analysis or questioning or argumentation. To do so is to put yourself on the side of the unrighteous. And there is terrible social pressure to show yourself as being in the side of the righteous. Explanations and arguments are a kind of excuse, a sign of fragility. And you need to dispose of your fragility and embrace the moral consensus.