[cyberax]

> which it couldn't be.

And why? Perhaps a good king could have worked at creating institutions rather than "uniting Europe" or other such nonsense?

If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better. With kings and other nobles, the "good things" also tend to be historical accidents. Something that was typically done to gain more power and influence but accidentally ended up being a positive influence.

Regarding Charlemagne, right in the Wikipedia:

> Charlemagne's reign was one of near-constant warfare, participating in annual campaigns, many led personally.

> Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected.

Then why do we worry about slavery, colonialism, racism, and so on?

[anonymous908213]

> If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better.

If you study modern politics, then you'll notice how preciously few people are focused on making the lives of regular people better. I don't actually believe, if you were to do a deep dive on all of the kings of the past few hundred years and not just the most famous ones, that the ratio would be meaningfully worse. I do suspect fame will negatively correlate with "goodness", since people who do their job quietly are less notable than people who cause a commotion.

[card_zero]

Fair point, it would have been physically possible to suddenly implement the electronic age in the 800s. So it could have been, technically, but this is a lot to expect from people steeped in their times.

I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents. If the idea is "I should have been born into better circumstances" - well, the meaning of "should" there is very complicated, in how it relates to blame and justice. More generally, we worry about the past bad deeds by modern standards just to assert what our standards are.

[amanaplanacanal]

Reparations can make sense sometimes. If you can identify the individual descendants who still have the resources stolen from others, returning it to the victim's descendants seems like a good thing. Stolen goods don't lose their stink just because the original thief dies.

A recent example would be art looted by the Nazis being returned to the families it was looted from.

As time passes this becomes more and more difficult, of course.

[cyberax]

Nope. I'm not talking about technical advances.

How about abolishing slavery? A representative government? Right to a fair trial?

> I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents.

The idea is that some things are just bad and can't be excused by mere history. It doesn't mean that we should automatically pay reparations, but it DOES mean that pretty much all historical leaders should be considered tainted.

Charlemagne is not a great king that united France and made sure education prospered. He was a warmonger who accidentally ended up improving education. And so on.

[card_zero]

Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth". So it's a valid defense to say that they didn't know any better. What purpose does considering them tainted serve? They're bad by modern standards, yes, and good by historical standards, and we ourselves are bad by future standards.

So what is this even about, something to do with level of respect? Throwing the statue of Big Charlie into the Seine, maybe, because he belongs to the past when everybody's morality was, in the light of our present wisdom, rotten?

I rather think it's good to praise the most enlightened assholes of the past. Sort of like sticking terrible toddler paintings to the fridge.

Re-reading: you might be questioning how much credit is due to the king himself, and to what extent he's a figurehead. But if the good ideas are due to the culture really, it's still the figurehead who represents the culture, and "the culture" would make a very abstract and confusing statue.

Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.

[cyberax]

> Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.

I think that we should celebrate people who advanced the society _on_ _purpose_ and not accidentally. Intentionality matters.

Such people were rarely in positions of power, and I'm not aware of any "good kings". Partly because effecting changes is never easy and partly because "good kings" could never grow when surrounded by rotten institutions.

But there have always been a lot of good people! Yet most are unknown to the public. For example, Thomas Paine or John Locke in the US history. There were even more fascinating stories, like this one about Beccaria: https://www.exurbe.com/on-crimes-and-punishments-and-beccari...

Edit: when talking dismissively about "good kings" I mean the ones that held absolute power. Not the modern European monarchs that are either figureheads or hold very little direct power.

[card_zero]

OK, but what does advancing society on purpose look like, in the 800s? This is before the invention of the concept of progress. People could only aspire to be good in a way that equated loosely to "holy", which for Charlemagne seems to have included "scholastic", and I think that's as reasonably close to intentionally advancing society as you're going to get, at that time. You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.

Beccaria is interesting, it's true. Nothing wrong with digging up the underrated and overlooked, if you can find them.

[cyberax]

I suggest reading the blog article about Beccaria. This is a great example.

> You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.

You're not making a good argument about why we should venerate mass murderers. It basically boils down to "sometimes it results in good things".

[anonymous908213]

I'm on the side of "some kings deserve credit", but I think:

>Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth".

is a rather weak argument. Moral advances actually are "made from whole cloth". Morality is objective[1] and can be reasoned from first principles. For example, murder. Murder is not wrong because Yahweh says so. Murder is wrong because the murderer stands to gain virtually nothing, while the murdered loses everything. This discrepancy in gain vs. loss results in a massively net negative impact to society and is therefore objectively bad. However, there are other scenarios where killing someone results in a net positive (or at least less negative than the alternative) to society, for example self-defense against a criminal would-be murderer, and these cases we understand to not be murder.

People have been capable of complex reasoning for as long as we have history. Our predecessors had less information than us available to them, but they still had the same capacity for intelligence and there are plenty of examples of impressive reasoning performed by people thousands of years ago.

So talking about, say, slavery, particularly the exceptionally vile race-based slavery practiced by Americans... it did not take a zeitgeist to understand it was bad. Plenty of people were capable of reasoning about the absolute hypocrisy of the slave-owning founding fathers proclaiming all men born equal from the day America proclaimed its independence. The zeitgeist that ended slavery in America was enough people feeling compelled to take action rather than let the status quo be; even if you understand slavery is bad, it's easier to simply selfishly benefit from it, or even if you don't benefit from it, doing nothing is yet still awfully more appealing than fighting and dying in a civil war over it.

Under that lens, I will absolutely judge historical figures. The slave-owning founding fathers, for instance, are scum who should not be revered. They especially had the education and the experience of perceived tyranny, yet maintained and benefitted from a system they were perfectly capable of reasoning to be worse than the one they revolted against. In fact, they manufactured their own zeitgeist from scratch. If they had wanted to, they certainly could have made the abolition of slavery part of it.

[1] Stating "morality is objective" can come across as arrogant (it may be read as "my moral perspective is the objectively correct one"), so I want to elaborate a bit in a digression. Morality is objective, but not necessarily easy. There are many complex situations, reasoning is actually often quite challenging, and lack of information can confound attempts at reasoning. There are many cases where if you asked me if something was moral, my answer would be "I don't know" rather than baselessly asserting one way as objectively correct. However, many cases like the morality of race-based slavery are trivially easy to reason about, and we have a rich historical record of writing produced by people hundreds of years ago preserved showing they were capable of conducting this reasoning with the information available to them long before the zeitgeist that compelled action to end it.

[card_zero]

I'm totally down with the arrogant "morality is objective" viewpoint. However, I don't think it can be reasoned from first principles: I think "from first principles" gives a bad smell to almost any reasoning. I see knowledge as web-like in structure, not hierarchical, and I see moral ideas as belonging to a separate realm where they're supported by other moral ideas. (Consider that "gain" entails values, which are moral.) Some of these ideas are basal urges, but that doesn't make them superior. So, I can't agree with making historical figures at fault for their failure to arrive at a present-day state of morality by figuring everything out from first principles, because I do think it's something the culture does, gradually, as a group effort, with individuals considered "bad" only for failing to be up to speed by the standard of the time.

Incidentally, if they are to be blamed for failing to arrive at future morality by using the first-principle building blocks you suppose it to be made from, then so are we, and so are all future people, since morality is open-ended and there's always more to learn. We're all terribly guilty for not belonging to the infinitely far future, apparently.

Well, I suppose you can say "that whole society, in that place at that time, went down a morally wrong-headed path". I'm not very knowledgeable about Aztecs, for instance, but I believe they had some nasty traditions, as well as a cyclic world-view. Yet there must have been good Aztecs. (Even objectively, we have to consider things in context.)

[anonymous908213]

If we were to leap 300 years into the future, I don't think it'd be very surprising what they look down on us for, presuming they've advanced in a logic-oriented direction and not, say, a relapse into purely religious doctrine, which is by no means a given to occur. We will certainly be condemned, at minimum, for our utterly inhumane treatment of animals, for our relentless exhaustion and destruction of natural resources, for our abuse of the scientific method to proclaim things as factual with studies that can't actually be replicated, and for much more.

Perhaps it would be surprising to some people who haven't thought much about it that we will likely be viewed poorly for wasting non-replenishable helium, necessary for advanced medical technology, on party balloons. But I don't think there is anything we do that we can't currently reason about being considered immoral for. I have absolutely zero doubt that George Washington would not be surprised to leap to 2025 and see someone condemning him for his slave ownership. There is nothing about living in the 1700s that would prevent him from reasoning that what he did was immoral, and indeed, many people in the 1700s did reason that.

Cultural adoption of morality moves significantly slower than reason about morality. This is because cultural adoption requires action. Humans will behave immorally even if they know their actions are immoral, for their own benefit. To counteract this requires coordinated group effort, which is an extremely slow process because, for example, convincing people that it's worth them risking death in a bloody war to stop other people from owning slaves, when they are not themselves ever at risk of being treated as a slave, is a very challenging task. That one participates in selfish, immoral actions for one's own benefit because one's society does not yet coerce one through collective threat of violence to behave morally does not absolve one of one's actions, which can already be reasoned through even if the collective will to enforce it does not yet exist.

Cultural adoption can also diverge from reason about morality completely, of course. This is because selfish people with power can use their power to enforce immoral values like absolute service to themselves, for their own benefit. If a society does not collectively overcome powerful individuals acting selfishly, then the culture's apparent morality will be warped in the service of what benefits a specific individual at the greater expense of society. However, even in such a state, people can and do reason about morality. Human history is a long, long tale of people defying immoral abuse of authority.