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All things should judged within their specific context lest history forget Martin Luther King Jr for unthinkable crime of roasting living creatures and feeding

All things should judged within their specific context lest history forget Martin Luther King Jr for unthinkable crime of roasting living creatures and feeding them to his young children.

partycoder 8y ago
Sun Tzu lived thousands of years before Washington, yet he was more civilized. A true general would not need to conduct a war of attrition with scorched-earth tactics against tribes in the bronze age. Not only Natives had inferior weaponry, they also were not familiar with writing, mapmaking and did not having navigation tools like the compass... limiting any form of military planning. Washington had a wide spectrum of options and he chose to be immoral.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  How would a true general take care of a disperse force that relied on small scale attacks and hit and run tactics?
  - partycoder 8y ago
    He had many options, he wasn't forced to use a scorched-earth tactic. But he did, and because he did we can say that not only he acted in an immoral way, but set a precedent and a bad example for others to follow.
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
      Yes, I asked what an option was.
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    Respecting their neutrality at the start of the war, so they do not become an enemy.
baddox 8y ago
It’s hard to compare the example of George Washington with the bizarre apparently hypothetical example you provided, but what about the treatment of Native Americans by European immigrants would have been judged differently then than now? I’m confident that a huge portion of people at that time would have made the same judgments as we do now, although I would admittedly need to research it further. For the more common example of slavery of Africans in the United States, the argument that “they can’t be judged by current standards” doesn’t hold water, since many prominent people at that time wrote obviously ludicrous attempts to justify their actions, which means they clearly had the moral intuition that their actions required justification. Not to mention the fact that there were prominent abolitionists at the time. Clearly there was nothing unique about “that time” that made it impossible to decide whether slavery was good or bad. I’m generally very skeptical of the idea that historical people deserve a pass for major moral issues (particularly ones that clearly involve direct violence against humans).

All things should judged within their specific context lest history forget Martin Luther King Jr for unthinkable crime of roasting living creatures and feeding them to his young children.

partycoder 8y ago

Sun Tzu lived thousands of years before Washington, yet he was more civilized. A true general would not need to conduct a war of attrition with scorched-earth tactics against tribes in the bronze age. Not only Natives had inferior weaponry, they also were not familiar with writing, mapmaking and did not having navigation tools like the compass... limiting any form of military planning. Washington had a wide spectrum of options and he chose to be immoral.

oh_sigh 8y ago
How would a true general take care of a disperse force that relied on small scale attacks and hit and run tactics?
- partycoder 8y ago
  He had many options, he wasn't forced to use a scorched-earth tactic. But he did, and because he did we can say that not only he acted in an immoral way, but set a precedent and a bad example for others to follow.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    Yes, I asked what an option was.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  Respecting their neutrality at the start of the war, so they do not become an enemy.

baddox 8y ago

It’s hard to compare the example of George Washington with the bizarre apparently hypothetical example you provided, but what about the treatment of Native Americans by European immigrants would have been judged differently then than now? I’m confident that a huge portion of people at that time would have made the same judgments as we do now, although I would admittedly need to research it further. For the more common example of slavery of Africans in the United States, the argument that “they can’t be judged by current standards” doesn’t hold water, since many prominent people at that time wrote obviously ludicrous attempts to justify their actions, which means they clearly had the moral intuition that their actions required justification. Not to mention the fact that there were prominent abolitionists at the time. Clearly there was nothing unique about “that time” that made it impossible to decide whether slavery was good or bad. I’m generally very skeptical of the idea that historical people deserve a pass for major moral issues (particularly ones that clearly involve direct violence against humans).