Should we judge past eras for frailties?

15 Sep, 2019 - 00:09 0 Views
Should we judge past eras for frailties? The late President Cde Robert Mugabe

The Sunday News

Michael Mhlanga

When I graduated into the funeral going age, I learnt that it is around the fire at night, where only men sit and pass the calabash with any liquid that keeps the night young. 

It is where philosophy is shared. 

It is the rookie who refills or is scandalously sent to the wealthy uncle to ask for more money to replenish the 20-litre bucket. At this ring of men around the fire, this is where discourse of culture, history and sociology is unpacked, usually by the broke uncle who tells everyone that he is educated than them and happens to be important at that funeral. The discussion at that ring is priceless, I got to learn. 

And there are usually fights at those rings, it’s common, but it does not mean enmity, men will be intoxicated, they always resolve the debate impasses because the cause of the clash is commonly a small issue, sometimes we hardly remember it the next morning.

It’s not the point of the article. I want to put you into the funeral perspective we are in, mourning the former President of Zimbabwe, and indubitable political and intellectual icon. We all were at his funeral one way or the other. We all sat at that popular ring around the fire, mostly symbolically when we discussed him, his life and events unfolding. It is at one ring around the fire where a discussion about a lot of things about social change influenced by him emerged. I thought it’s opportune to question if we can judge him and his generation about their moral failings.

At a funeral everybody thinks they know what’s right and wrong. But will things that seem moral today be deemed completely immoral later? “Women should leave reasoning to men. And they are not fit for serious employment” Happily not sentiments one hears very often these days. 

But there was a time when such views were far more conventional. These are the opinions of the 18th Century Prussian, Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers in history. 

So how should we think about Kant in the light of his judgements about women? Assessing attitudes and behaviour in the past presents us with a puzzle. What we might regard as offensive today — sexist, or racist, or homophobic for example — might have once been orthodox.

A moral relativist would say that our values today can’t be compared with the values from another era. What was right for them was right for them. What is right for us is right for us. 

The philosopher Miranda Fricker is not a moral relativist, but she thinks the test for blameworthiness is whether the person could have known any different. 

“The proper standards by which to judge people are the best standards that were available to them at the time”. It’s unfair to blame people for failing to be moral pioneers, she says. She also says “The attitude of blame presupposes that the person was in a position to have done better.”

But if we can’t blame people for abhorrent views, does that also mean we can’t hold them responsible for these views? Influenced by ancient philosophy, the 20th Century British philosopher, Bernard Williams, tried to tease apart a distinction between blame and responsibility. He did so by writing about what he called “moral luck”. Take the following example. Imagine that while a bus driver is on the road, a child suddenly runs out in front of him. Through tragic bad luck the child is hit by the vehicle and dies. The man is blameless, for the accident has happened through no fault of his. In this sense he has nothing to reproach himself for, and has done nothing wrong. And yet, writes Williams, surely this man is now enmeshed in a set of moral responsibilities that, for example, a bystander, who is equally blameless, is not.

It makes a moral difference that it was him at the wheel. As the driver, he might have an obligation to meet the parents or attend the funeral; obligations not incurred by a bystander. This is one kind of moral luck, or moral unluck. Another kind of bad moral luck is being born at a time when you’d need to be a moral genius to see that a certain view or practice is wrong, because all around you are people who accept that the practice is alright, argues Miranda Fricker.

These issues of blame and responsibility are relevant for reflecting on how we make amends for historic moral mistakes. For years the Australian government refused an apology to its indigenous peoples; in particular for the practice of forcibly removing children from their families. It seems utterly shocking now, but it involved thousands of children and continued for decades. It was the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who finally made the formal apology on behalf of the state in 2008, against the wishes of a significant minority of the Australian people. Here is an example where, arguably, the current state might be blameless, yet somehow responsible.

Similar controversies still arise over whether the UK and USA should apologise for their role in slavery, and whether people like Alan Turing should be posthumously pardoned. Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who among other things helped crack the Enigma Code in World War II, was one of many people charged with gross indecency in 1952, under laws criminalising homosexuality. He killed himself two years later. Influentially, Miranda Fricker writes that: “It seems to me to be a measure of civilisation that our institutions have full accountability, in much the way that individuals do.” An apology is an incredibly important act that our institutions should increasingly become capable of — people who have been wronged by the state are owed an apology by the state, even if the individuals in government are different from those at the time.

It may well be that the young or middle-aged people of today will, in future decades, look back at views they once held and feel horrified and ashamed. 

And just as we judge Kant’s century, and identify its moral defects, so it is inevitable that the people of the 23rd Century will detect flaws in ours, the 21st.

What might these flaws be? Our treatment of the environment? Our tolerance of poverty? What else might our descendants condemn us for? If enough of us know the answer to that today, we really have no excuse but to act on it today.

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