Can we Pass Moral Judgement on the Past?

[Icaria909]

Just some background information. I will be soon graduating with an undergraduate degree in history and I was talking to a friend who will soon be graduating in political science. We were discussing a podcast from an historian of Mongol history who argued that it is wrong that modern historians have NOT passed moral judgement on the Mongols' terror and military tactics that left millions dead or scarred.

She felt strongly that is important for people to pass moral judgments on historical figures and events. She asserted that indicting figures from the past is a form of historical retribution; a way of properly giving voices back to the victims of past transgressions. To speak of the thousands of Chinese women who were raped during the Mongol invasions of China and not pass moral judgment on the instigators of this violence is to further the injustice committed against these victims. Any attempt at being neutral or non-judgmental in history is portraying history from the perspective of the conqueror and therefore already a form bias. She also pointed out that most people are willing to pass moral judgments on members of the "recent" past but do not hold the same standard for people of the "distant" past. For example, most people do not hesitate to condemn Nazi actions duringthe holocaust as morally reprehensible, yet are unwilling to pass those same kinds of judgments on the leaders of the Mongol Empire.

I am not entirely sure where I stand on this issue. In my methods courses my professors stressed the need to maintain as much emotional distance from our subjects as possible. To color my interpretations of history with emotion and moral judgments barres me from being able to examine the inherent complexity that is present history. It is not the job of an historian to condemn past figures using modern notions of "right and wrong;" that is the job of the philosophers. I recognize that all interpretations that I make are created partially by my own values and world-view and thus contain biases; yet that does not diminish the value in constantly striving to be as objective as possible in my treatment of the past.

I am torn. I recognize the importance of restraining myself from passing moral judgments on the past to come to a more meaningful understanding of history. On the other hand, I can also see that the study and debate of history has a greater significance than just understanding the past. It also informs our understanding of the problems that continue to manifest themselves in the present because of actions taken in the past.

So where do you stand on the issue? Can we or should we pass moral judgment on figures and events of the past?

 

[Lord Baal]

LightSpectra or Plotinus would likely be better people to contribute to this conversation than myself, but I'll have a go. Bear in mind that, from a philosophical point of view, I am very likely getting the actual definitions and names of these terms incorrect. This is just my (admittedly terrible) memory talking, and as I am at work I can't exactly research this response in enough detail to ensure I'm not making simple mistakes.

The way I once had it explained to me (funnily enough, I believe by LightSpectra) was that there are two ways to pass moral judgements; absolutely, and contextually. Three, if you count moral relativism, but that has fortunately fallen out of favour with the internet masses as of late.

Absolute morality is the act of taking an existing viewpoint - it doesn't actually matter what that viewpoint is, whether it's a Catholic viewpoint, as in my conversation with LS, the viewpoint of some other religion, or simply a viewpoint on morality you yourself have developed - and applying it to everything, both past and present, regardless of the culture to which you are applying it.

To use an extreme example, simply to illustrate the point, if your viewpoint is that homosexuality is a sin, then we would be justified in nuking San Francisco to oblivion for its terrible, terrible crimes against heterosexuality. You would also believe that groups such as the classical Athenians and Spartans were evil, sinful people, due to their homosexual practices.

Contextual morality would be looking at moral issues as they pertain to the time and place in which they occurred. This is harder, as you obviously can't look at the morality of an action through your own ideological prism; you must, instead, look at whether an action was moral or immoral in the context that it occurred. That is, the time, place and culture in which it occurred.

Using the same examples above, we see how homosexuality is no longer that big an issue in modern-day San Francisco, since homosexuality, while not exactly mainstream today, is fast becoming an acceptable lifestyle. Many people, myself included, actually consider discrimination against homosexuality to be immoral, rather than the reverse. Fifty years ago, of course, with the predominant global - or at least, Western - culture being considerably harsher on homosexuals, the morality of homosexual behaviour would have been much harder to defend. 1960s San Francisco might have earnt itself a nuking.

Classical Greece, on the other hand, was a culture in which certain homosexual behaviour was tolerated, but other behaviour was not. So, in other words, to quote a friend of mine from my first job in a highly-unsanitary fast food restaurant, you're only gay if you take it, not if you give it. The actions of some homosexual people in that society would be defensible, if not completely acceptable by common social mores, whereas other behaviour would be just as shocking as San Francisco to 1960s middle America.

Getting away from my baffling choice of homosexuality as a position in which to engage in an online moral debate for some reason, we can apply these two methods of passing moral judgement to the Mongols.

From an absolute standpoint it would be difficult to find a modern-day system of morality which did not find the actions of the Mongols extremely objectionable. Rape, slaughter, the sacking of cities and enslavement of their populations is the sort of thing even Gaddafi tended to frown upon. Unless you're Slobodan Milosevic, you would condemn the actions of the Mongol hordes from an absolute moral standpoint. Nazi atrocities are equally difficult to defend, except for the occasional genocidal maniac.

The contextual moral viewpoint would be different, however. The actions of the Mongols, in the context in which they were made, may not have been so bad (bear in mind, this area of history is far from my specialty, so while I know what the Mongols did, I do not know how much worse it was than what was going on around them). I know there are persistent arguments to this day about whether Oliver Cromwell's actions in Ireland were actually any worse than what was happening elsewhere in Europe at the time. If they were, he's a monster, if they weren't, he's just a product of his time, no more or less moraly repugnant than the rest of society.

Nazi atrocities, on the other hand, were demonstrably a very, very great deal worse than what was going on around them. While Winston Churchill was racist, FDR rounded up the Japanese and threw them in camps, and Stalin just flat-out killed everyone who looked at him sideways, the deliberate, concentrated, prolonged attempt to murder an entire ethnic group, combined with naked military aggression and the horrible mistreatment of both conquered peoples and its own citizenry mark out Nazi Germany as being far above and beyond the norms of its time in terms of the immorality of its actions. Stalin may have deliberately starved millions of people, but even he never tried to wipe out an entire ethnic group. In the context of their time and place, the Nazis are, if not the absolute top-dogs in the evil department, at least way, way the hell up there.

The third method of passing moral judgement, relativism, goes even further than contextualism in that it posits that we can only define the morality of an action from the viewpoint of the person committing the act. In other words, rape is only immoral if the rapist thinks he's doing the wrong thing. The Holocaust isn't evil if you genuinely think those Jews deserved it. I don't think I need to point out to you, or anyone else, the extreme stupidity - and danger - of such a line of thought.

Regarding my own, personal viewpoint; I'm a contextual moralist. What the Mongols did was shocking and horrific, but doesn't deserve nearly as much reproach as the actions of the Nazis, due to the different context in which it occurred. Again, of course, I offer the proviso that I do not know much about the particular context in which these Mongol actions occurred. I'm far more comfortable saying that the actions of the Serbian government in the lead-up to WWI were immoral, for instance, based on the context in which they occurred.

 

[Masada]

Sure, we judge the past all the time. I look back at what I did yesterday and cringe.

The important part is not to let the moral component get in the way of good scholarship. For example, I know a scholar of the New Order in Indonesia who hates the whole thing but he still turns out good scholarly work. He's quite upfront in his works that he thinks that Suharto was a butcher par excellence but he's still willing to examine the situation with a fair and open mind. Granted, his papers often given him cause to confirm his moral opposition to the New Order but w/e. One of his paper's looked at the aftermath of the 1965 killings and looked at how nobody had been charged for what amounted to the cold-blooded murder of about a million people (something that still hasn't been rectified). He also took the time to trace the pre and post-Reformatsi careers of some people who have openly admitted to being participants in the killings and found that they were doing as well (if not better) than people who hadn't been participants. His conclusion was basically that being a mass murderer wasn't necessarily a career killing move in Indonesia.

 

[Lone Wolf]

The important part is not to let the moral component get in the way of good scholarship.

I second it. Undesirable moralism is when your desire to pass judgement prevents you from analysing actual reasons for the events, falling into "to understand means to forgive" fallacy.

 

[Plotinus]

To use an extreme example, simply to illustrate the point, if your viewpoint is that homosexuality is a sin, then we would be justified in nuking San Francisco to oblivion for its terrible, terrible crimes against heterosexuality. You would also believe that groups such as the classical Athenians and Spartans were evil, sinful people, due to their homosexual practices.

Come on, that's a caricature. Someone who thinks that homosexuality is a sin doesn't necessarily think that that justifies killing all gay people. I think that voting Conservative is morally pretty dodgy but I wouldn't nuke Witney, at least not because of that.

Otherwise I think you're pretty much on target.

The OP's question isn't a historical one, and it really has no answer, at least no clearly determinable one. I think this is partly because it has different answers depending on what you're trying to do. If your task is, as a pure historian, to describe what happened and explain why, then passing moral judgement in any terms isn't really what you ought to be doing. And if you want to know why, just read historical texts of the past where authors did that in terms that are hopeless outdated by our standards.

If, however, you're speaking as a human being rather than purely as a historian, I don't see why one shouldn't pass moral judgement on historical figures or societies.

 

[Lord Baal]

Come on, that's a caricature. Someone who thinks that homosexuality is a sin doesn't necessarily think that that justifies killing all gay people. I think that voting Conservative is morally pretty dodgy but I wouldn't nuke Witney, at least not because of that.

I did say it was an extreme example for a reason.

 

[Flying Pig]

While we cannot really judge anyone except by the standards of their own time, reporting history in a totally dispassionate manner often seems wrong. I'm reminded of John Keegan's remark that The Official History of the First World War managed 'to record the greatest tragedy in human history without a trace of emotion whatsoever'.

 

[H4run]

Sure, we judge the past all the time. I look back at what I did yesterday and cringe.

The important part is not to let the moral component get in the way of good scholarship. For example, I know a scholar of the New Order in Indonesia who hates the whole thing but he still turns out good scholarly work. He's quite upfront in his works that he thinks that Suharto was a butcher par excellence but he's still willing to examine the situation with a fair and open mind. Granted, his papers often given him cause to confirm his moral opposition to the New Order but w/e. One of his paper's looked at the aftermath of the 1965 killings and looked at how nobody had been charged for what amounted to the cold-blooded murder of about a million people (something that still hasn't been rectified). He also took the time to trace the pre and post-Reformatsi careers of some people who have openly admitted to being participants in the killings and found that they were doing as well (if not better) than people who hadn't been participants. His conclusion was basically that being a mass murderer wasn't necessarily a career killing move in Indonesia.

did you mean Gunawan Muhammad? if there were any Indonesian that have a valid opinion about the carnage that been carry by zombies and bastard in 1960's it will be Pramoedya Ananta Toer but he never forgive, he is a direct victim of that carnage, though when he becoming old his anger becoming unfocus and he start to blame larger population this also I not agree with him. While peoples like Gus Dur or Gunawan Muhammad, are peoples who live inside the warmness of tyranny fur than force someone like Pramoedya to forgive his torturer and butcher without any justice been establish, even the history still been manipulated in most Indonesian student curriculum. That is rude.

The case of Indonesian carnage is not yet over, peoples really don't understand what forgiving mean, forgiving mean when the justice is already been settle and criminal already break down to their knees and the guillotine is put up to ready, at that time the victim decide to forgive the criminal and spare them from the punishment. This is forgiving.

If the justice never been settle, and the criminal never been put to justice, while the victim regarding to this condition decide to "just forgive him" is not really forgiving, but it is an apology for not able to fight for justice, it just self manipulating psychology.

To put how forgiving the Indonesian citizen is I have better example, how they nearly totally forgive the Japanese occupation and Dutch occupation. But to forgive doesn't mean one must also forget history.

That is my opinion Masada.

 

[innonimatu]

So long as the historian at least tries to separate his moral judgements from his picture of past events I see nothing wrong in passing judgement. And I'm not even asking that a history paper or work should not contain moral opinions, only that those should be clearly identified.

In any case it won't make much difference when it is about events long past such as the mongol conquests. Modern mongols are not going about conquering and slaughtering people. It's very understandable that people get more worked up about they nazis: there are still some self-proclaimed such scumbags around.

 

[Lord Baal]

While we cannot really judge anyone except by the standards of their own time, reporting history in a totally dispassionate manner often seems wrong. I'm reminded of John Keegan's remark that The Official History of the First World War managed 'to record the greatest tragedy in human history without a trace of emotion whatsoever'.

Kind of reminds me of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa. Many of the victims didn't speak English or Afrikaans, so translators were called in, proceeding to coldly and unemotionally describe how "they" were raped, beaten, tortured and otherwise abused during Apartheid. The government's response to complaints about this, having the translators impersonate the victims, was even more ridiculous.

 

[Masada]

@haroon: I'm of much the same opinion, myself.

did you mean Gunawan Muhammad?

I wish. But not, my friend is an academic.

 

[H4run]

I see, I get explode just thinking it is him, he really get into my nerve by his "Ghandi" attitude.

 

[Masada]

I like him. Although I haven't decided if that's mostly limited to his literary style.

For the record, I love P.A. Toer. Bumi Manusia is fantastic. I actually cried at the end. Oh, Annelies my heart weeps for thee.

 

[H4run]

I don't like Gunawan Muhammad also Gus Dur.

It broke my heart when reading "rumah kaca" when the Chinese girl die. Pram romance fiction always make the romance stories ruin up and fail, remind me of Jin Yong in chinese literature.

 

[Masada]

The death of the Ang San Mei also broke my heart

Gadis Pantai (The Girl From the Coast) is fantastic and I strongly recommend it to everyone one.

 

[sophie]

Sure, we judge the past all the time. I look back at what I did yesterday and cringe.

The important part is not to let the moral component get in the way of good scholarship. For example, I know a scholar of the New Order in Indonesia who hates the whole thing but he still turns out good scholarly work. He's quite upfront in his works that he thinks that Suharto was a butcher par excellence but he's still willing to examine the situation with a fair and open mind. Granted, his papers often given him cause to confirm his moral opposition to the New Order but w/e. One of his paper's looked at the aftermath of the 1965 killings and looked at how nobody had been charged for what amounted to the cold-blooded murder of about a million people (something that still hasn't been rectified). He also took the time to trace the pre and post-Reformatsi careers of some people who have openly admitted to being participants in the killings and found that they were doing as well (if not better) than people who hadn't been participants. His conclusion was basically that being a mass murderer wasn't necessarily a career killing move in Indonesia.

This encapsulates pretty closely how I feel.

Sure we can pass moral judgment, and to cover say, WWII or the Thirty Years' War without saying what the Nazis and Swedes did, respectively was abominable would be a gross oversight, but I don't think history should be a moralizing tool, mostly because I think the popularly held notion that "those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it", is, for the most part, a load of bull[excrement].

 

[Flying Pig]

This encapsulates pretty closely how I feel.

Sure we can pass moral judgment, and to cover say, WWII or the Thirty Years' War without saying what the Nazis and Swedes did, respectively was abominable would be a gross oversight, but I don't think history should be a moralizing tool, mostly because I think the popularly held notion that "those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it", is, for the most part, a load of bull[excrement].

In both cases, but especially the latter, we have to record that what just about everybody did was abominable.

 

[Tahuti]

The very term 'moral judgment' is a misunderstanding. Morality is not what ought to be, but what is. It is possible for individuals to have a personal view of right and wrong, but it is does not carry any objective true-false value all of society should heed to. Scientifically, a morality that is both true and exists independent of public morality (that which is commonly accepted, notwithstanding our opinions) is plainly false.

 

[Flying Pig]

Oh, now that is interesting. Vox populi, vox dei taken at its most literal.

 

[H4run]

The very term 'moral judgment' is a misunderstanding. Morality is not what ought to be, but what is. It is possible for individuals to have a personal view of right and wrong, but it is does not carry any objective true-false value all of society should heed to. Scientifically, a morality that is both true and exists independent of public morality (that which is commonly accepted, notwithstanding our opinions) is plainly false.

If I read your point correctly. Then how about rape, genocide, killing infant, or taking someone belonging in force because of greed to having it? These things happen quite a lots and frequent in history.

If morality is totally a subjective term, there are no universality in the terms of morality that can be apply to the masses or as it state above as relative morality (it just base on consensus and tradition).

So there are no need to question or fight human exploitation against other human because our understanding of "exploiting itself" is quite relative.

Btw this is extreme example.

We all can say that the sabiha in Syria that slitting infant throat in Syria is something immoral, it is not something that build up by consensus, it is something universally truth and accepted.