IseWolf22 said:
I'll agree with you that we shouldn't look to the past to dismiss trends today (see my previous post). But I also think that when we are assessing things historically, (founding fathers, colonialism, etc.) we need to acknowledge that morals and standards of those times were VERY different.
Most of human history, if you met a new tribe you didnt know, and they were smaller/weaker than yours, you'd murder all of their men and take their women for your own. Almost all areas of the world practiced some form of slavery. Romans enslaved entire peoples, killing all men of fighting age and rounding up every single other person in the community for slaves.
Agree.
Animals are opportunistic and often do things simply because they can.
But at every step of modern human history - say, from the early Roman Republic, on - you had people that knew it was wrong to take advantage of or abuse the weak, poor, or powerless; you had those that knew it but did it anyway because they were powerful enough to get away with it or profit from it; and you had problem-deniers.
For too much of that history there was a profit motive, and/or a lack of negative consequences for doing so, so those behaviors perpetuated, fortunately with diminishing frequency over the last 2,500 years as human ethics evolved.
To bring this back to sports, just like with Lebron/Jordan comparing across eras makes for good debate but comparing individual actors to their peer groups seems most fitting.
To use your example of founding fathers, even when accounting for ethical relativism then and now, you had FF that knew (or grew to knew) it was wrong to own slaves and became actively anti-slavery (Alex Hamilton, Franklin, John Jay, Adams, others); those who knew it was wrong and did it anyway (Jefferson, Washington, others); and those who were totally on the wrong side of history.
We can acknowledge ethical relativism while at the same time acknowledging that even in very different times, people often clearly knew right from wrong and whether they let their ethics or power/profit motive/convenience guide them says something about their character.
