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 Amer

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).