[ExI] overlooking

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Friday, July 10, 2020, 02:43:47 PM PDT, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: 
> On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2020 1:48 PM
>> …Hasn't the whole argument that times were different been overused?
>> Again, I've pointed out that there were antislavery movements in the
>> Colonies and in Britain around before the US formed. …Regards,  Dan
> 
> Hi Dan, 
>  
> Do you know what we are doing wrong today?  Things will be very different
> 100 yrs from now.  Think about what are we doing now which will then might
> be considered so heinous that anyone in cryonic suspension who defended
> this practice will have her head removed from the dewar and hurled
> contemptuously into the trash incinerator.

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>> …Hasn't the whole argument that times were different been overused?
>> Again, I've pointed out that there were antislavery movements in the
>> Colonies and in Britain around before the US formed. …Regards,  Dan
> 
> Hi Dan, 
>  
> Do you know what we are doing wrong today?  Things will be very different
> 100 yrs from now.  Think about what are we doing now which will then might
> be considered so heinous that anyone in cryonic suspension who defended
> this practice will have her head removed from the dewar and hurled
> contemptuously into the trash incinerator.

A few things are problematic with your approach.

1) You are making an appeal to negative consequences (in Latin, an argumentum ad consequentiam) here... One shouldn't judge X as bad because you yourself might be judged by someone else as bad, so this means X isn't bad. You do see how the logic doesn't work here, I trust. Also, not judging doesn't get you off the hook from others judging you, now or in the future.


2) No one is talking about killing Jefferson, Washington, or any other Founder, so there's that. It's about evaluating them in terms of freedom -- in fact, the freedom many of them so earnestly talked about.

3) One can look at the standards of their times. That was part of my point: not only were their abolitionists before and when the Founders were around, Jefferson and some of the Founders themselves voiced anti-slavery opinions. And slavery was outlawed in several of the states during his and their lifetimes. So your comment might work better if, say, Jefferson were an Ancient Greek around the time of Pericles when almost no one spoke out against slavery and slavery was pretty much the norm in any society they knew of.

Ramifying this point: Someone here said they were ahead of the curve. In fact, they weren't. In Jefferson's case, it's worse because he was anti-slavery and then seems to have found that birthing slaves was quite profitable so he shut up about the evils of slavery. (And, once more, tailoring one's views to avoid losing material wealth is not some new vice only pointed out in 2020 CE. It's something Jefferson and his contemporaries would've seen as a vice of hypocrisy, which is something that was recognized as far back as Ancient Times. And there wasn't a hiatus during the 18th century with it not being seen as a vice.)

4) James Wood (the literary critic -- not the actor James Woods) wrote about the problem of judging people in their historical context in his essay "Sir Thomas More: A Man For One Season." A salient point is that people don't get credit for merely going along with the standards of their times (as if any time has one standard to start with). They get credit when they're better than their times. (Wood sees Sir Thomas More as not merely only as good as his time, but in fact worse than the standards of his time.)

This segues into a problem with historical relativism taken here: if you're going to forgive misdeeds and faults based on it, then why praise that person for any good qualities or achievements? After all, they're just a product of their times, which had different standards. This is a seriously problem with taking historical relativism too far. (And how far to take it? Well, to me, Jefferson isn't so distant from our time and even held fairly current views, even being anti-slavery before 1792. It seems, again, Jefferson would be hoisted on his own -- not just a modern libertarian's -- petard, no?)

5) Which brings up another issue. If one is looking at historical context as explaining away certain (or all?) faults of heroes, why stop there? Why not all other sorts of relativism? Why do have a problem with, say, riots and vandalism? After all, maybe the rioters and vandals, given their context, believe by their moral standards, that their activities are correct. Yet you have no problem here judging them, right?

Regards,

Dan
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