Philosophical Inquiries: An Introduction to Problems of Philosophy

By Whose Standards?

132 retrospective Condemnation How far do our ethical and evaluative standards reach across the divides of space and time? Can we appropriately judge people remote from our own setting by the criteria we would apply locally, in our own spatiotemporal proximity? This discussion will argue against “presentism” and “localism”— the idea that we should judge others by our own standards and that our norms project all-embracingly across the reaches of time and place. One of the many problematic aspects of the “political correctness” that has become so fashionable in this turn of the century is the tendency to condemn and disparage various individuals or groups from earlier eras for having values, opinions, and customs that our own times do not approve. The myriad available examples include: • Condemning the Founding Fathers for their acceptance of slavery • Condemning the politicians of the 1890–1920 era for their resistance to women’s suffrage 10 By Whose standards? rescher phil inq text.indd 132 3/1/10 3:15 PM BY Whose stanDarDs? 133 • Condemning the industrialists of the nineteenth century for their willingness to employ child labor Everyone will agree that people should not be inappropriately exploited , but is indentured service inappropriate exploitation? Everyone will agree that all serious stakeholders should have a say in public affairs, but are those who, like women and children, owe the state neither taxes nor military service serious stakeholders? Everyone will agree that children should not be exploited, but is offering them a chance to contribute to their family through gainful employment exploitation? There is always a gap between high-level principles and concrete conditions that leaves room for further questions. And in this regard, a case can be made for rejecting the practice of assessing the actions and agents of the past by our own standards. For adjudging their ethical standing and moral status as good or bad, benign or evil, in the light of our current standards is something highly problematic from the angle of rationality and questionable from that of justice. norms and Belief How, after all, could we reasonably expect people of distant times and places to adopt our practices and conform to our standards? The condemnation of eighteenth-century agents for failing to act on twenty-first-century ethical norms makes about as much sense as reproving eighteenth-century generals for failing to employ twentyfirst -century strategies or judging medieval cartographers by twentieth -century norms. In this regard, one cannot but heed the parallelism between the cognitive and the evaluative situation. Clearly, we cannot reproach the physicists of the eighteenth century for not employing twentiethcentury standards and practices, nor even lay fault at the door of the physician of a decade ago for not conforming to the norms that subsequent discovery has made standard at the present. Of course they could and did see matters differently because they viewed them from a different angle of vision—one that is different from ours because ours was simply not available to them. A look at the intellectual landscape of these times shows all too clearly that many of us are deeply enmeshed in a normative egocenrescher phil inq text.indd 133 3/1/10 3:15 PM 134 BY Whose stanDarDs? trism that leads us to view those of earlier times, who do not share the “enlightened” standards of our day, as being if not willfully evil then at least ethically blind. As many see it, the benighted folk of the past must simply have realized that it is wrong to exclude women from the vote, Asians from the immigration quota, Jews from the social clubs, homosexuals from military service, and the like. How can they have failed to see that inequality is unfair and ipso facto wicked? And of course if those discriminatory practices were no more than unreasoned prejudice this view would be entirely correct. But that is assuredly not how it was. Be it right or wrong, those “wicked malefactors ” of the past had, or thought they had, perfectly good reasons for their discriminatory practices—reasons that to them seemed every bit as good as our excluding child abusers from schoolmasters’ posts or alcoholics from bus driving. For the most part, at least, they acted not out of an unthinking antagonism to these groups, but out of a conviction that allowing them entry into those prohibited categories would be significantly harmful to legitimate social interests. On the whole...