[Chris2048]

> witch burning was remarkably common in much of Europe

Is that a moral issue, or one of knowledge / technologies?

You can only go on the best information you have, and many theistic beliefs are currently acceptable in the modern world despite being no less plausible than a belief in witches.

[shadowprofile77]

A common mistake of modern humans is to presuppose that people from earlier times were somehow less capable of thinking than we are today. No evidence suggests that this was the case. They could be just as rational, they just knew less upon which to base their notions of reason. Even in a 16th century context, it was not hard to see that a lot of supposedly real witch burning was repressive control politics masquerading behind imposed superstitious strictures of morality around women, just taken to murderous degrees.

More basically: if your morality means decisions to justify or reject the torture and killing of another person, then you'd better set some damn high criteria for whether your information is complete enough.

Even medieval humans understood a surprising amount of this. A Book I highly recommend that demonstrates as much: "The Faithful executioner: Life and death, Honor and Shame in the turbulent 16th century" by Joel F. Harrington. It records a lifetime of personal observations through diary entries from a public executioner in the Germanic city of Bamburg during these times. and gives wonderful insights into how well even those charged with the job of killing could reason about the dirty ambiguity of what they were doing.