[Ressuder]

I find it curious how some people seem to not believe in moral relativism. Do they not recognise that by doing so they are saying that they themselves are "evil" and immoral?

If you look at the contemporaries of the British Empire they do not stand out as exceptional either good or bad morally. Meanwhile, if you compare the Nazis to their contemporaries they do however stand out (though not nearly as some people might think).

To me it seems rather cruel and unfair to label someone or something as "immoral" if they are acting within the limits of accepted and expected behaviour in their environment.

[RodericDay]

This is an ultra-conservative mindset. By only judging people according to what their contemporaries were doing, you basically relieve pressure from questioning the mores of our own day, since we rest easy knowing we will be judged according to what was "normal" for us.

I find it ethically very dubious. Certainly many people committing atrocities have been "going along with the flow" of their own local environments.

[Ressuder]

That's absolutely untrue. It does no such thing. All it means that as long as you're acting within the norms of our times you're morally neutral. Who has ever aspired to that? "Are you a moral person?" -> "Well, you know. At least I'm not immoral. I just barely pass the bar lowest bar for that". The future will look back at people who pushed beyond that, just like we do today, even if even those people will be (at best) morally neutral on many other issues.

Bartolomé de las Casas, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi etc, all of these people are looked back upon with great respect because of their morality - but the truth is that none of them would seem like morally great people today. They stand out because they pushed further on certain issues compared to their contemporaries, not because their thoughts and actions would stand out compared to ours (other than that they would seem very backwards and immoral concerning a lot of things).

[keyboardwarrior]

I think the mindset is valid but the people behind it are inconsistent, if your locale is being around indignous african people. Then killing and enslaving them kinda goes against the whole "act local" thing.

Thereby making them immoral by their own standards. You cannot export your sense of locality to somewhere else, i dont think thats how it works.